average salary of public school teachers rose 45 percent in real terms from 1960 (the first year data are available) to 1991. This increase masks a more variable trend. Real salaries rose until 1974, when they began to level off and even decline. The average salary reached a trough of $27,436 in 1982, after which it rose to an all-time high of $33,015 in 1991. Instructional staff in public schools generally saw their earnings increase faster than the average full-time employee—from 1950 to 1989 the ratio of instructional-staff salary to the average full-time salary in the U.S. increased by 22 percent (although it sank from 1972 to 1980). Student performance has hardly kept pace with the dramatic increases in resources devoted to public education. While the percentage of students aged 17 at the beginning of the school year who graduated from high school rose 30 percent from 1950 to 1964, it has leveled off since then. In fact, the 1991 percentage is lower than the 1969 peak of 77.1 percent.
Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other performance measures shows how poorly served America’s public school students really are. Just five percent of 17-year-old high school students in 1988 could read well enough to understand and use information found in technical materials, literary essays, historical documents, and college-level texts. This percentage has been falling since 1971.
Average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores fell 41 points between 1972 and 1991. Apologists for public education argue that such factors as the percentage of minority students taking the SAT can explain this drop. Not true. Scores for whites have dropped. And the number of kids scoring over 600 on the verbal part of the SAT has fallen by 37 percent since 1972, so the overall decline can’t be blamed merely on mediocre students “watering down” the results.
Only six percent of 11th graders in 1986 could solve multi-step math problems and use basic algebra. Sixty percent did not know whyThe Federalistwas written, 75 percent didn’t know when Lincoln was president, and one in five knew what Reconstructionwas.”
Simply put, Americans are paying more to get dumber kids. PISA results reinforce that America is losing ground in education despite throwing billions of dollars at the issue.Between what kids are taught in school and what they grow up watching on TV, it’s a wonder anyone grows up with any Conservative values. In Sparta kids were 7 before being sent away to be beaten down in training. Liberals begin our kids’ indoctrination a full year or more earlier, and by one of the most corrupt groups in the entire country, our teachers’ unions.
Instead of training them to love and fight for one’s country like Spartans, our kids are being taught that our Founding Fathers were just a bunch of old white guys who owned slaves.
But if you happen to survive the gauntlet of primary and secondary education, the next step is the scam of “Lower Education”. There are over 18 million students enrolled at the nearly 5,000 colleges and universities currently in operation across the United States, and most of these bastions of lower education should give rebates to their graduates.
There are some great colleges in the U.S., and I believe that the top students still are products of the American education system. A college education can be worth pursuing for those in highly technical or scientific fields, or for those wanting to enter one of the very few fields that is still very financially lucrative, like Medicine, Engineering, Law, and Business. But for nearly everyone else, the college experience is just one big money-making scam for Academia, sanctioned by the government.
College is being sold as a must have, when in fact it is a ‘good education’ that one must have. How one acquires a good education is a whole other issue. If academics were to tell you the truth, it is your paper trail that is most important, not necessarily what you learned. If you don’t believe me, just look at the sexy brilliance Harvard gave to America.
Most kids aren’t even ready for college when they get there, particularly those who are products of government schools. As Freeman reports,
“Another measure of the failure of public education is that almost all institutions of higher education now provide remedial instruction to some of their students. The Southern Regional Education Board surveyed its members in 1986 and found that 60 percent said at least a third of their students needed remedial help. Surveying this evidence of failure among college-bound students, former Reagan administration official Chester E. Finn, Jr., wrote that “surely college ought to transport one’s intellect well beyond factual knowledge and cultural literacy. But it’s hard to add a second story to a house that lacks a solid foundation.”
Yet kids buy into the system. The better perceived the college, the more they can charge. Harvard is therefore better than community college we are told, because community college students don’t usually end up with debt. The more debt you graduate with, the more the government owns you. You must become an immediate producer. You are trapped into the American Dream. The American Dream has now morphed into the American Nightmare, graduates finding that they are now being pimped by the Federal government.
Ironically, kids are forced to become who the government punishes most—the overachiever. Because the kids now need money, and the pimp is going to get his money. The graduates get trapped into productivity, in order to get those loans paid off. But when the loans are done, don’t think the kids are off the track.[18] All that education and hard work just got them off the streets and waiting for the phone to ring.
The call comes when the kids prove that they can produce, and they are assigned wards. One may acquire the shiftless and lazy dude with six kids he won’t take care of, as well as the family of illegals who needs an earner. The government will monitor progress, and assign more wards as the graduates continue trying to get ahead.
The system needs them. College is good, but not necessarily for the students and future taxpayers. The concept of college is not to create thinkers, just earners for the government aristocracy.
There is good news though. Students won’t have to pay for it all. That $50K a year they will pay for their educations will be offset by financial aid.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited students at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia and encouraged them to load up on college loans. He told kids that there is [pp] “lots of money out there for you. Be sure to pick the best college, because the best colleges offer the best potential for your future.
We have built a system where Americans now owe more than $875 billion on student loans, which is more than they owe on their credit cards. Yet Obama regulated the banking industry. It hasn’t gone unnoticed on me that Obama hasn’t decided to make burgers from the sacred cow called ‘education.’
Since 1982, the cost of medical care in the United States has gone up over 200 percent, while the cost of college tuition which has gone up by more than 400 percent. Is it any wonder that Obama decided to make the rising cost of healthcare a priority over the rising cost of education?
Approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans, and the Project on Student Debt estimates that 206,000 Americans graduated from college with more than $40,000 in student loan debt during 2008.
After graduation, these students will be greeted with the most anemic economy in their lives, with unemployment in the stratosphere. It is estimated that there are two million recent college graduates who are currently unemployed. In 1992, America had 5.1 million “underemployed” college graduates. By 2008, there were 17 million “underemployed” college graduates in America.
Perhaps America’s under-employed graduates represent the 317,000 waiters and waitresses who have college degrees. Or perhaps they are part of the nearly 25 percent of retail salespersons who have college degrees? Let’s hope that there is some double-dipping and some of these
