User:Zpippin/essays/No Politician Left Unpaid
From Free Talk Live
This is an essay written by Zach Pippin for a class at the University of South Carolina.
It has been suggested that essays are best posted on the forum, because they have a single author but can be commented on by others. You can then link to those forum threads from appropriate wiki articles, like Government Corruption.
Essay
Terrorism. Iraq. Social Security. Those are the issues that George Bush and John Kerry debated before the 2004 Presidential election. They were also the items on which the President spent the most time talking during his State of the Union speech in 2006. This would lead most people to believe that those are the most important things facing our country today. Many times children are used when discussing these topics. We must keep our children safe from terrorists. We must stay the course in Iraq and finish the job so our children do not have to fight the same war in twenty years. We must make sure Social Security is around when our children reach retirement age. It does not stop there. In fact, almost any issue can be spun as helping the children. We need to pass this health care plan, sex offender registry, internet censorship law, and fill in the blank, all to help the children. In all of this protecting that politicians are doing they often forget one of the most important things a child needs. An education. Most of the lawmakers have excellent educations that they take for granted.
South Carolina’s fifty-four percent graduation rate is the only higher than Hawaii and the District if Columbia. (Manhatten Institute) When public school students in South Carolina took nationally standardized tests they routinely scored in among the bottom of all the states. Today students take the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT) which conveniently eliminates the comparison of South Carolina students to those in other states. South Carolina manages to achieve such excellence on a meager budget of $7,100 per student. What is the remedy? “We need more money!” is the universal cry of educators.
Is more money really the answer, though? If more money is equal to better education, then inversely less money would mean inferior education. That, however, is simply false. A small private school in North Charleston, South Carolina spends just below $2,900 per student, not even half of the public schools’ spending. Despite this appallingly paltry budget the students at the school scored in the eighty-fourth percentile on a nationally standardized test.
Since public school students do not take a nationally standardized test it is hard to compare results. The one way South Carolina students can be ranked on a national scale is SAT scores. The South Carolina Department of Education SAT Report 2006 reveals that public school students scored more than thirty points below the national average. In the report the space where private school scores were supposed to be is suspiciously blank.
The fact that South Carolina is not the best at educating children is clear. Does this mean that other states can be proud? Certainly not. The United States as a whole is not that great on education either. It is a common known fact that American students have scored lower on internationally standardized tests than many others. Some people might try to lay the blame on the test, claiming that it does not accurately test the students based on how they are taught here in America.
The international tests are not the only ones on which American students are doing worse. The same test that still haunts South Carolina students is the bane of high school seniors all over the nation. SAT scores have been falling since the 1960’s. this decline led to the infamous “dumbing down” of the SAT in 1995. What is an interesting fact is that while SAT scores have plummeted, federal spending on education has sky-rocketed.
But is the money to blame for this problem? Not necessarily. What is part of the problem is the strings attached. Whenever the federal government gives money to the states for education it puts many restrictions on it. These restrictions on the are made in the name of improving education. The federal government believes it knows better about educating than the states, school districts, schools, and parents. Consequently, a representative from a very liberal district in California has the same vote as the representative from an ultra conservative district in South Carolina on how money is spent at the South Carolina schools, and vice versa. Another view that is not much better is that someone in Washington has more of a say in how that money is spent than the parents of the child on whom it is being spent.
Clearly education reform is needed not only in South Carolina but in the whole country. Politicians campaign with this in mind promising new programs, tougher standards, and more money. After elected, the issue seems to fade from importance in their minds.
Though he is usually the butt of many jokes questioning his intelligence, President Bush is actually a well-educated man. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he does not see the real problem with our education system. He does acknowledge that education is a problem. In fact, he actually devoted two minutes of his 2006 State of the Union address to the issue of education. In those two minutes he announced that No Child Left Behind was raising standards and test scores. He also announced that he was starting a program to recruit and train new teachers for math and science.
A cursory glance at the President’s speech might give the illusion that education is improving in America. Standards are being raised, that is good, right? Is it really helping our education system, though? High standards do not automatically lead to higher performance. A standard that every child should get all A’s is could be set, but it will not happen. Setting high standards, yet failing to achieve them does nothing for education. What about the other claim that test scores have also come up? That can easily be explained. In South Carolina, after students continued to fail on nationally standardized tests, the state invented its own test, the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test. All of the sudden South Carolina test scores started to rise. Could it have been that the new test was easier or that the teachers were focusing on material they knew would be on the test? Nonsense, the newfound success was obviously due to higher standards.
However, are these artificially higher test scores actually benefiting the children? Of course they are not. The only thing they do is give children false hope and teachers false pride. Making the tests easier for the children only teaches them to expect the bar to be lowered when they cannot reach it. This philosophy will definitely not lead to success in life.
If pumping money into the system and setting standards does not help education, what needs to be done? A great start would be to get the federal government out of education all together. The Department of Education needs to be abolished and the money that comes from it needs to be returned to the states in the form of tax cuts.
This proposal may sound outrageous to some people. Education would cease to function without federal aid. That claim, however, is ludicrous. When the breakdown of spending on education is looked it is revealed that only 8.9% of spending in public schools actually comes from the federal government, the rest comes from the state and local level (Census). The states could raise taxes, keeping those same dollars in the public school system. The only difference would be that the money would not pass through the horrible machine of the federal government that attaches debilitating requirements to it. Even if the states did not increase taxes and the schools took a nine percent pay cut, they would certainly be able to function. Indeed, as was noted earlier, private school operate on budgets more than fifty percent smaller than those of public schools.
In conclusion several thing are evident: education is the most important problem facing our country, the current system is not working, the federal government is incapable of fixing the system, and a change is needed. The fact that private schools can operate on smaller budgets yet achieve better results makes it clear that more money is not the answer. The fact that SAT scores have fallen while federal spending has risen also seems to indicate the same point. If true innovation and progress is wanted in the public education system, the federal government’s money, along with all of the strings attached to it, should be refused by educators and more attention need to be paid to what teachers and, more importantly, parents think is important to a child’s education.
