Monthly Archives: March 2010

Literally trillions of dollars have been spent nationally over the last two decades on education. Both Bush (No Child Left Behind) and Obama (Race to the Top, and others) have pushed for more nationalization of education. In return, America has seen a steady decline in education quality relative to other nations, and this will put us at a distinct competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Let’s privatize education. Let’s eliminate tenure and start richly rewarding teachers that produce and get rid of teachers that don’t. Let’s open the whole market to competition, which will force accountability and efficiency on the entire education establishment. Those that protest give a thousand reasons why none of these things will make education better…but it’s hard to see how it could make it worse. For once let’s have the actions of our politicians match the rhetoric and truly do what is best “for the children.”

You can privatize education and still have a need for a local school board. You can privatize education and not change anything… except the quality of that education for all students.

Despite nearly two decades of state and federal standards-and-testing, as well as big increases in spending, today’s reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the so-called “Nation’s Report Card” — continue to tell a tale of stagnation.  Nationally, the average fourth-grade score was 217 (out of 500) in 1992. In 2009 it was only 221. For eighth grade, the average score in 1992 was 260. In 2009 it was just 264. Oh, and eighth-graders had hit 264 by 1998, which means there hasn’t been even a smidgen of improvement since then.

As parents or educators of gifted students, it’s important that we pay close attention to reports such as the one just release by the NAEP- the “Nation’s Report Card”. Unfortunately, the report isn’t good- but maybe adminstrators will realize that more funding needs to go to gifted education. When we help the highest-performing learners, every student benefits.