We all want the best for our kids. Because of this desire, it’s quite discouraging to see when efforts to boost progress in reading, math, and other subjects flatline in schools across the country, as the chart below shows. Continue reading →

One of the hallmarks of modern America is the tendency toward prolonged childhood. While it used to be the norm to enter the adult working world by one’s mid-to-late teens, students now extend their preparation for career well into their twenties (and sometimes beyond), enabled by parents who act as their caretakers, education experts who insist that they get as much classroom education as possible, and a government that encourages them to stay on the family health plan until age 26. Continue reading →

To many Americans, high school seems like a normal part of life. To not attend is unheard of; to fail to graduate is a death sentence for one’s future.

But what we often forget is that the modern high school is a relatively new concept. As Paul Beston notes in a recent article for City Journal, a hundred years ago America was in the early stages of a high school boom, with 2 million students attending classes. That number rose to 6.6 million by the start of World War II. Today, the number of public high school students measures at 15 million.

But as Beston goes on to explain, the high school as we know it now isn’t the one America knew in its earlier years. That school was far more rigorous. Today’s high schools are the result of several decades of the gradual dumbing down of curriculum.

This dumbing down began in earnest during the Depression years, but as Beston notes, had been encouraged as early as 1912: Continue reading →

For generations, each autumn has bestowed the unofficial arrival of adulthood on young people as they head off to college for the first time.

But while the entrance into the Ivy Halls has occurred for years, one part of that ritual seems to have disappeared, namely, the entrance examination.

Oh sure, we have SATs and ACTs which are taken with religious fervor by any student who wants to advance to higher education, but there seems to be quite a different flavor between those and the examinations of the past.

Take, for instance, the 1922 English entrance examination for the University of Illinois. The first section contains five elements with multiple questions. Students were asked to choose two in each group and answer them in written form. This requirement – written, not multiple choice like a majority of today’s SAT-like exams – is the first difference between the two. Continue reading →

Since Donald Trump got into office and appointed school choice supporter Betsy DeVos as the national education secretary, a good deal of ink has been spilled on the issue of school vouchers.

On the one hand, vouchers seem to promise a better choice and education for students at a lower cost. On the other hand, recent studies suggest that vouchers don’t improve reading and math scores, and therefore are simply a rabbit trail in the quest for better education.

The takeaway from these two viewpoints? Vouchers are an emotionally charged issue which require some careful thought by concerned citizens.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note what the late Steve Jobs had to say about vouchers. In 1995, Jobs, generally viewed as a political liberal, expressed his support for a school voucher system in an interview with Daniel Morrow: Continue reading →

According to the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of 8th graders attain proficiency in writing. But no problem, right? They’re just leaving middle school. Give them a few years under the instruction of high school English instructors and all will be well.

That seems to be wishful thinking, for the Nation’s Report Card shows that writing proficiency is still 27 percent by the time students head to college. Unfortunately, college doesn’t improve the writing woes of American students either. As writing expert John Maguire explains in The Washington Post:
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According to a recent article in the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, preschool-age children have a special talent for memorizing and remembering rhymes. As the Digest explains, a recent study found that, compared to their parents and other older adults, young children are able to recall “nearly twice as many correct words” from the rhyming stories they hear, all while making “far fewer errors.”

Anyone who has been around children for a time would readily affirm such findings. Children, as Oxford scholar Dorothy Sayers noted in 1947, follow three stages of development, the earliest of which she calls the “Poll-Parrot” stage: Continue reading →

For a number of years, it was assumed that public education was swimming along, efficiently educating children of all ages. More recently, the products coming out of public schools have caused a troubling concern to leap into the minds of adults: are schools dumbing down the content they teach to students?

That concern seems to have now made its way into the minds of university professors, as evidenced in a recent study conducted by the Times Higher Education. The study examined over a thousand higher education professors and administrators in several English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, and predominantly the U.K.

Judging from the comments of these professors, the students they are seeing come through their classrooms are ill-prepared, unwilling to study, and in need of kid-glove treatment. Some of the choice comments from these professors include… Continue reading →

The other day, a judge used a unique punishment for a handful of teens who desecrated a historic school building with derogatory statements: read books.

The novelty of the sentence testifies to the fact that kids simply don’t read very much anymore.

But why this dearth of reading? After all, parents try to get kids to read. Teachers bend over backwards to get their students into books. Politicians and other public figures continually tell us that “readers are leaders.” Why then, with all this encouragement, are only 37 percent of high school seniors proficient in reading? Continue reading →

It’s no secret that homeschooling has experienced exponential growth in recent years. So much so, that Chris Weller noted in Business Insider that the homeschool population may soon overtake that of charter schools.

As Weller goes on to note, this popularity is attributable both to the advance of technology, the growing familiarity with homeschooling, and last but not least, evidence that “homeschooled kids do better on tests and in college than their peers in public schools.”

But apparently, some colleges have yet to get the memo on that last point, particularly Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia. Continue reading →