Real Asian Education: Not Excellence For All
It's not your father's education. Now it's about reforming society, not teaching. Marxism's brave new producation targets sought to erase inequality, but brought famine and poverty. Today, federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind legislate that "all will succeed". But kids are suffering under unrealistic goals and in the name of "higher order thinking", they get math books don't teach math, and reading methods that don't teach how to read. Washington's Terrry Bergeson is running for re-election as state superintendent up here in Washington waving a 90 percent WASL high stakes test pass rate as proof that "all high school graduates will reading and compute at a high level".
If John "not my baby" Edwards promised that every school should be excellent, would Asian parents really stop aspiring to send their child to the "best" schools and push their children to be the best when every school and child is "equally excellent"? If excellence is to exceed average, isn't a level passed by 90 percent a very low level of performance? How could any diploma set at such as level good enough to guarantee admission to Stanford or a job with Google, when in truth you would still have to (*horrors*) compete to be best? My elementary kids wrote better than the high school papers in the bottom 10 percent that I graded. The ugly secret is that the pass levels in every state are set by officials to whatever it takes to fail everybody the first year, but pass all but the worst by their "deadline" for success. The 90 percent pass rate is just the statistical rug that hides that our WASL and every other test has still not escaped the curse of underperformance. It is a lie to claim success for all when ethnic, income, language and disability groups continue to fail at 2 to 4 times the rate of average, with the best scores going to the most affluent and best educated ethnic groups.
It was protests from "back to basics" parents that led California to junk the worst of whole language, which dropped phonics, spelling and grammar, and fail the new-new math like the miserable Mathland which tossed out standard arithemetic in favor of singing, writing, and finger counting. There is nothing progressive about requiring everybody to jump as high as the university bound. Soon, all California 8th graders must pass algebra when many never mastered arithmetic. My son had to write sentences on his first day of 1st grade with no instruction. His math books had cutting, pasting, and card playing but no actual instruction in carrying, long division or common denominators. Now his high school "Core Plus" shortchanges basic algebra, but critically asks "if John's IQ is 75, is he retarded?" Asian parents need to be able to critically recognize nonsense when the emperor has no clothes, and put an end to misguided "reforms". Promising or demanding excellence of all is doomed to fail. The true ancient wisdom America can, but hasn't learned from an Asia that has never believed that all students can be "best" is to simply teach challenging material to memory, and reward only the the highest achievers with the grade of "excellent".
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