D.C.'s educrats are in full ostrich mode about their abject failure to provide real education to thousands of children in the nation's capital. Their unwillingness to face the truth would be unnerving if it weren't so typical.
The superintendent of D.C. public schools yesterday said he had found some good news in a new national report that ranks D.C. schoolchildren as the country's worst readers and only slightly better than some non-English-speaking children in the U.S. territories. Superintendent Paul L. Vance said the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic students has narrowed.D.C. public schoolchildren in all grades are falling behind their peers in other jurisdictions, even though the District spent $9,650 per pupil in 2001 — the second-highest per-pupil expenditure among the states, according to the NAEP report. Only New Jersey spent more per student — $10,145. Meanwhile, the average salary for a D.C. teacher was $48,651 in 2001 — among the highest in the nation, according to the NAEP report. The District's 16-to-1 student-teacher ratio was about the same as that of the states. Mr. Vance is paid $175,000 a year
D.C. school officials yesterday declined to provide current per-pupil expenditure, average salary and student-teacher ratio information.
via the Washington Times
The education establishment in this country remains largely in denial about their role in conducting a massive and disastrous social engineering experiment for the last 50 years whereby they have foisted bogus education theories onto the backs, and into the minds, of several generations now. Gifted and dedicated individual educators are hemmed in, prevented from doing what works, and forced to focus on test scores per se and plenty of other nonsense. In D.C. they can't even achieve that pyrrhic victory.
President Bush was right to call attention to this continuing crisis during the 2000 campaign. But he and others need to realize that leadership -- from the colleges of education to the school boards, school districts, campuses, and into the classrooms -- is the key. The idiots and incompetents need to be weeded out now and replaced with those who will lead and demand the best, without regard to social theorizing. School districts would do well to consider the kind of long-term commitment to developing leaders practiced by organizations like the U.S. Army and GE.