U.S. Education is Flunking
I wasn’t surprised to see the Wall Street Journal headline “High School Seniors’ Test Scores Stagnate,” but it did bolster my belief that Americans must address the short-comings in how students are being educated. Caroline Porter reported that “despite years of efforts to lift U.S. academic performance, 12th-graders showed no improvement in math or reading in federal test scores released [on May 7, 2014], underscoring concerns that the country isn’t generating career-and college-ready graduates.”
A much deeper concern of mine has been ignored in the fiery debates about teacher evaluations and other educational reforms: How many future voters—whether or not they’ve gotten into college—will know, for example, how a British monarchy’s 13 American colonies became a mighty, unified republic?
Dig this: The great majority of our high schools—and colleges!—do not have mandatory courses in American history. Countless students are not being taught what spurred the colonists to seek independence, and they’re being denied the dramatic accounts of how our basic Constitutional liberties are so often threatened by power-hungry Presidents amid an ignorant citizenry.
