EDUCRATS AT IT AGAIN, DUMBING DOWN MORE TESTS

Ever wonder why more and more parents are home-schooling their children or, at great sacrifice, placing their children in private schools? Look to California.

From the Golden State comes still further evidence of the dumbing down of modern education, this time elementary education in mathematics. A new curriculum launched there in 1992 has angry parents in an uproar at the latest fads being embraced by the educrats. From an Associated Press report:

"Students, in a group, must fill an imaginary recycling container with imaginary phone books. But the books and container have only two dimensions.

And the kids also may use a calculator to figure out .75 times 600, part of the exercise. The text gives the answer, right next to the problem, just in case students can't get it with a calculator."

As in Missouri, a state board in California is pushing both new standards and "assessments," which is educratese for testing. Note the emphasis, explicit in California as in Missouri, on "group" or "cooperative" learning in mathematics, as in other subjects. This can be understood as an explicit departure from rigorous standards of individual excellence in a move toward the collective. Gone are those pesky old drills, the multiplications tables and long division, now dismissed as "dry-as-dust" relics by such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Here to stay are calculators and "textbooks" that publish the answers to problems right alongside the exercise. Last year in Missouri, educrats were about to foist on us new math assessments that allowed children the use of calculators in the primary grades. Only determined opposition from parents and a few lawmakers reversed the proposal. Moreover, this trendy claptrap about group activities substitutes play-acting for real learning.

Parents must be constantly vigilant about their children's education. It is a sad but inescapable fact about today's public education establishment that it has proven unreliable and even counterproductive to educational excellence. So the battle goes on.