How do the school superintendents survive when 92% of the people disagree with what the schools are teaching our children?

How can this be?

How can an overwhelming majority believe we should not be encouraging our teenagers to be sexually active, and yet their schools are doing just that?

If there is anyone who doesn’t believe that the mothers and fathers have lost control of the schools, they should ponder this for a while.

If we don’t believe that our government has become too powerful and we need to bring the control back to the local level, this should awaken us.

It’s been obvious for a long time that the citizens of Massachusetts are concerned about many things that are happening in our state, but they don’t know how to change them. There are no leaders to turn to, so most people have given up and many have become cynics.

If a brave soul does raise his head, he is beaten down immediately by "political correctness" and the overpowering media that totally controls all of the information that is given to us.

Consider that the New York Times controls the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram. More than 130 of the newspapers ringing Boston are owned by Fidelity Investments. Five daily papers in the state are owned by the owners of the Wall Street Journal. Which causes the question, "Where do you get your news?"

"Political correctness" is a result of this concentration of power. We could have asked the question in our poll in a different way that would have gotten a totally different answer. We might have said, "Should we teach ‘abstinence’ to teenagers?" We would probably have gotten a negative response because as everyone knows, abstinence is not "in." It’s a creation of the "crazies on the right." And yet if we desire that a teenager does not engage in sexual activities, he is "abstaining" and practicing "abstinence." But no one is allowed to use that word.

All of the attention that we see being put on charter schools and vouchers is just a back-door way for the mothers and fathers to regain control over the schools. Yet no one seems to understand that. And who is going to tell you?

The loss of control by parents came in the 1960s when they allowed the teachers to unionize and take control of the schools. What can a parent possibly do when all the teachers go on strike and thumb their noses at the children?

This will continue to be a serious problem until we stop trying to cure it with Band Aids. It’s time to realize that unions are needed to represent the workers in some areas, but not in the schools. All the unions have done is to put the poorer teachers in charge and driven out the excellent ones.

As long as the unions exist, we will continue to get many more things like sex ed.

A part of our problem are the Unitarian and UCC-Congregational churches which have such power in our state. Although the members of the Unitarian Church have a pretty good knowledge of what their church believes, most of the UCC members have no such understanding. The members at the Unitarian churches are mostly humanists who are highly vocal in their belief that there is no God and humans are capable of solving all their own problems because all humans are basically good. However, the members of the UCC-Congregational Churches believe that they belong to a traditional, Christian Church. And in many cases, that is what is being taught in their local church. But that is not always the case. 

(An example where they are not being taught the traditional beliefs is the Village Church on the square in Wellesley where the Rev. Martin B. Copenhaver denied last spring that an opera which was going to be presented by his church was an attempt to change the Bible. When the opera was presented, the libretto said, "The story [of creation] is changed from one of subservience to our being in ‘partnership’ with creator-God…" Why did Rev. Copenhaver feel a compulsion to lie about what he was about?)

The UCC is saying and doing things in the names of its members with which many of them would totally disagree. It’s past time for those members to find out what’s happening. They have every right to believe anything they want but they should not misrepresent it. In business, that is known as "consumer fraud."

The New Bedford Standard Times had a headline last year, "The long, sorry history of Christian bigotry continues unabated."

That story started like this, "There’s no bigot like a Christian bigot….When it comes to bigotry, Christians have the copyright."

This year the paper is frightened again by Christians. Listen to their newest cause for alarm:

"There was a story in a Boston newspaper last summer about a group of Southern Baptist college students who came north to spread the Southern Baptist gospel to Massachusetts, including Catholic-steeped Boston. They had guts, give them that.

"From their pictures in the newspaper they were all nice-looking, clean-cut kids, all wearing big smiles. What they did was go around ringing doorbells and passing out Southern Baptist literature, while offering their help around the house or in the community.

"I’m sure they were all likable kids, but don’t let that cloud the issue. They didn’t come up here on their own. They were sent. They considered themselves volunteer soldiers in a broadening evangelical army."

A broadening evangelical army?!?

No wonder the Standard Times is sounding the alarm about these terrible bigots. But the worst is yet to come. The paper also reveals, "They have Charlton ‘Moses’ Heston and the gun lobby on their side."

Maybe the Standard Times is right. We should be learning to hate those Southerners as the people at the newspaper do. After all, it was only 140 years ago that they attacked us the last time. We just can’t be too careful. Maybe we could even invite some of the people from Kosovo over to teach us how to hate.

Massachusetts was supposed to be a showcase for "education reform" in the 1990s. It added billions of dollars to its public school system with the promise from the teachers that students would perform better academically.

Now that the first results are showing that students are not performing any better, the state has begun to lower the passing grade that is required for graduation.

At its November meeting, the state Board of Education voted 8-1 to lower the passing grade on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams (MCAS) to 220 (on a scale of 200-800), a level that is just one rung above "failing."

This test is designed for tenth-graders, meaning that most Massachusetts seniors will nearly fail a tenth-grade exam and still be able to graduate. 

"This makes a mockery of reform," said John Silber, former Chairman of the Board of Education. "A deficient performance will be declared sufficient. Sub-literacy will be officially approved as deserving not merely a high school diploma but a diploma sanctioned by the Commonwealth in the name of education reform."

The Board says that the standards will be raised at some future date, but it did not set any deadline. It also voted to test students only in math and English, putting off any requirements in social studies or science.

"We have not scaled back expectations at all," Board member Abigail Thernstrom told Massachusetts News. "This was our first attempt to set a standard. We see this as a realistic starting point. But it can’t remain the standard ten years from now," she said.

At the same time that the state lowered its standards for graduation, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington D.C. educational policy think-tank, released a report that showed further deficiencies in the state’s public school system.

Although Massachusetts earned a "B-minus" in its efforts to improve the quality of its teachers (one of the highest grades in the country), it received lower grades for accountability. "Until teachers face real consequences for student learning, the state’s aspirations to improve are apt to remain frustrated," they reported.

Its president, Chester Finn, said, "The standards and teachers are in place, but as of now nothing happens to principals that do badly. You’ve got no consequences." 

Retreat from Standards Is Nationwide

Massachusetts is just one of many states that are lowering performance standards after a long period of increased spending on education "reform."

"People are backpedaling," according to the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jerome T. Murphy. "Backpedaling is smart when you are heading over a cliff," he told the New York Times.

The Times reports, "Many teachers…maintain that more money needs to be spent on professional development and smaller class sizes. Parents lament that their children are being penalized for the failings of adults."

The state government is beginning to respond in Massachusetts. Legislative leaders are beginning to suggest that there may be a limit to the amount of money they are willing to pour into the public school system. They have added almost $3 billion to local school budgets since 1993 with nothing to show for it. House Speaker Thomas Finneran says, "More and more people are uncomfortable with the idea that spending equals results in education." His more liberal counterpart, Senate president Thomas Birmingham, says that Massachusetts taxpayers "are not a bunch of patsies throwing money away without results in return."

Blaming the Test

Birmingham blames the governor and the Board of Education for proceeding too slowly, but most of the education establishment believes that the Board has proceeded too quickly, and that it has made unreasonable demands in the MCAS. In short, they blame the test.

In October, a group of Cambridge parents said that they would boycott the MCAS. Mae Gaskins, the superintendent of the Lawrence public schools, blamed teachers for using "methods from the 1950s." She said, "They make the mistake of expecting students to change to fit the material instead of changing their teaching to fit the student." 

Much of the opposition to the test is race-related: Studies predict that over four-fifths of black and Hispanic students would be prevented from graduating if compelled to meet even a "needs improvement" standard. Only forty percent of white and Asian students would fail to meet this mark.

The executive director of "FairTest," a Cambridge-based organization that opposes standardized testing, said that the new score was set to discriminate against black and Hispanic students. "It’s a cut score that still massively flunk low-income kids and kids-of-color," said Monty Neill, the executive director of FairTest. The original standard "would have massively flunked suburban kids, too, and then the whole thing would have blown up in their faces."

Neill says that standardized tests promoted by people like Board member Abigail Thernstrom are "racist."

"That’s absurd," Thernstrom told Massachusetts News. She insists that objective standards are the only way that improvement in academic performance of minority students can be measured. "There is no standardized test that doesn’t have a disparate impact on minority students. The only dispute is whether we set the passing grade too low, not too high," she said.

Opponents of higher standards have a powerful ally: the United States Department of Education. The department’s Office of Civil Rights has begun an investigation of the fairness of the MCAS. It says that if the test is shown to have a disparate impact on minority students, the state will have to explain why it does so. Earlier this year, the office told colleges and universities that they could face discrimination suits if they require SAT scores for admission, since minority students score lower than whites on these exams.

Thernstrom told Heterodoxy magazine that "the Office of Civil Rights is rolling out a red carpet for plaintiffs to stop standardized testing," and is pressuring "schools to implement what are, in effect, racial preferences," and "intimidating schools." 

Protracted litigation will destroy the financial and political support for education reform, she says. "That will be the end of education reform in this state." She says she can’t comment on whether the latest MCAS results had harmed political support for education reform. "But it certainly would have if we had used Silber’s standard," she said.

State Board of Education chairman James Peyser says that he welcomes the investigation, since he is convinced that the MCAS has no cultural bias. But he may be hoping that the federal government removes the test entirely, relieving him and the board of the embarrassing evidence of their own failure.

Candide’s Report Card

There are those who do not believe that any education "reform" is needed, because our schools are already excellent. In October, Boston Magazine featured an article entitled, "The Shocking Truth About Our Public Schools: They’re Better than You Think!"

At the beginning of December, eighteen of the nation’s governors held a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the "Goals 2000" program, patting themselves on the back despite the fact that no state had met the eight broad standards that they set for the millennium. The governors reaffirmed their commitment to high standards, but did not give any indication of how or when such standards would be met. They are probably responding to parents.

One observer, Charles Sykes, author of Dumbing Down Our Kids, says, "After decades of endless gold stars, happy faces and inflated grades, American parents apparently were not ready for a reality check about how much our schools are really teaching our children. Across the country, new, higher academic standards that states adopted in a spirit of education reform are being dumbed down. Supposedly rigorous graduation rates are being diluted or dropped, as evidence mounts that too many students will fall short of the higher expectations."

Sykes singled out Massachusetts and New York as states where "officials yielded to pressure to set absurdly low passing grades for their new tests."

Most of the pressure to lower standards, Sykes says, comes from wealthy suburban parents. "Accustomed to thinking of educational difficulties as somebody else’s problem, they and their school districts suddenly faced the possibility of failure." Parents refuse to believe that their own children might not be above average.

"Support for higher standards came with an unspoken caveat: They were quite all right when they were applied to someone else’s school and someone else’s child."

The Massachusetts experience of the last decade seems to confirm the analysis made by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, a book whose excellent theses on intelligence and social class in America were occluded by media clamor about its racial implications. 

Despite the near universal sense that American education is in poor shape, they say, the average American is probably better educated than ever. There is no evidence of a decline in the education of the average student outside of the years 1965-75. There certainly has been some recovery in math and science since then, but not on the verbal side. 

How do Herrnstein and Murray persuade us of what seems to be contrary to common knowledge? "We do it by means of that innocuous word, ‘average,’" they say. America’s system of universal, compulsory public education has set a standard of mediocrity, and has met it. And it is not likely to improve upon it. "Most American parents do not want drastic increases in the academic workload," they report, because most are happy with their own child’s education. "In surveys, many American parents are either apathetic about school or hostile toward more homework and tougher grading." 

In effect, we have built a very expensive public secondary education system that has achieved a widely accepted standard of mediocrity. The education problem, for most parents, is "out there" somewhere. This is probably inevitable in a universal, socialist school system. 

Parents who do not want their children’s achievement limited by a mediocre system get their children out if they can. Wealthy parents do this easily, including most of the parents who draw high salaries for administering the worst urban school systems. 

Almost half the teachers who live in Boston send their own children to private schools. In the entire state, 17% of public school teachers send their children to private schools. Poor parents have their children held hostage by the system. Instead of wasting more time, money and words trying to reform an unreformable public system, we should do all we can to help these parents get their kids out.

Massachusetts has only taken limited steps to allow more parents to send their children to alternative schools. The state allows 39 "charter schools" – public schools that are not covered by teacher union contracts – to operate. These schools did not perform much differently from regular public schools on the MCAS exams.

Charter schools were supposed to be the first step toward a freer school system, but may end up being the last.
   

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