"Reality Check on Schools," by Beverly Eakman, brought back a sad memory.
33 years ago this summer, I was very pregnant with my last child.
"Forced busing", a bizarre experiment in color-coding our society and having nothing to do with education, loomed in Denver.
Thundering thoughts about some bunch of abstract psychobabble people using my children as lab guinea pigs must of reached baby in uteri, for she darn near kicked my bladder out through my ears.
So I put together a rough little "anti-busing" petition and trudged my very sweaty, fat and slow body door to door in our Denver neighbor hood, until I'd collected signatures from over 300 homes.
After some twenty years and the educational destruction of untold numbers of children, that ill-conceived experiment ended.
The most memorable comment I heard came from my black neighbor, David Fields. With deep sadness he said, "Roni. I worked hard all my life to get out of the ghetto. Now they want to bus my children back in there." Roni Bell Sylvester

Reality Check On "Real" Schools

Amid 40 years of hand-wringing over nonexistent or, at best, mediocre, gains in student achievement in the nation's public (and even many private) schools, what is most noticeably lost is any concept of what comprises a truly "basic" education.

The latest finding from study at Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes is that even the entity known as "charter schools" falls far short of expectations in comparison with run-of-the-mill, chaotic "traditional" public schools (See hyperlink: Charter schools hit, miss in new report ).   Some 37 percent of charter schools even came in below public schools.

Many "poor" families, in addition to parents who dissatisfied with the lack of focus on academics in public schools but cannot afford an alternative, have elected to send their children to what they believe is higher-performing charter schools.   What they don't realize is that if a school is accepting any sort of federal funding, which always trickles down as state funding as well, then the school environment, as well as the curriculum per se , is going to be pretty much the same -- awash in political correctness, junk science and sex education masquerading as history ("social studies"), scientific method and "health," respectively.   In particular, tests will be watered down as "assessments," which are not really tests at all, but opinion research with large doses of mental health screening instruments interspersed among the opinions and occasional academic questions.

Many readers have probably seen versions of the following test -- an eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. This particular one was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.   A similar one was used as an entrance exam for public high schools in New Jersey around the same time.   If a student couldn't pass it, then back to elementary school for him or her, or else a low-paying, menial job.   So the message was two-fold: (1) success at real academics mattered; and (2) education was, in the end, a privilege, not a "right."   Thus, the school environment was infused with strict discipline, in the form of "Yes, Ma'am" and "No, Sir"; appropriate standards of dress and decorum.

What follows, then, is an honest-to-goodness test , not a "questionnaire," not an "assessment," not an "instrument."   I especially like the first entry under Geography:   "What is climate?   On what does climate depend?"   Our nation's education leaders and policymakers might want to avail themselves of this test as a reality check:

8 TH GRADE FINAL EXAM, 1895

 
Grammar   (Time: one hour)

1.          Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2.          Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3.          Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4.          What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of "lie," "play," and "run."
5.          Define "case" and illustrate each.
6.          What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7-10.     Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the             practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic   (Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes)
 
1.          Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2.          A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 ft. long and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it

hold?

3.         If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cents/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs.

for tare?

4.             District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school for

seven months at $50 per month, with $104 for incidentals?

5.         Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6.         Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7.         What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per foot?

8.         Find the bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9.         What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?

10.       Write an example of a bank check, a Promissory Note, and a receipt.
 

U.S. History   (Time: 45 minutes)
 
1.         Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided

2.         Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3.         Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4.         Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5.         Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6.             Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7.         Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8.         Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
 
Orthography (Time: one hour)
 
1.         What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2.         What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3.         What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate

  letters, linguals.

4.         Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'

5.         Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6.         Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7.         Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post,

non, inter, mono, sup.

8.         Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the

sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9.         Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein,

raze, raise, rays.

•  Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical

  marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time: one hour)
 
1.          What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2.         How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

3.         Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4.         Describe the mountains of North America.

5.         Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St.

            Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.

6.         Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7.          Name the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.

8.          Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9.          Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10.        Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
 

When this author was interviewed on Pat Buchanan's radio show a few years ago, I brought along a copy of a test like this to make the case that the U.S. was not pursuing real academics.   My opposite number, as it were, was a liberal professor, who alleged that (a) the three R's were less relevant in modern times, falling way behind things like teamwork and socialization, and that (b) most people absorbed enough "basics" in the course of things to get by anyway.   When I pulled out the test and asked both the guest opponent and Mr. Buchanan (a former Jesuit student and quite learned), to answer these questions, neither man could do it, save for three or four.   That was in the 1990s.

Today, departments of teacher education are unable to instruct in what constitutes a basic education for any subject.   In social studies, for example -- the term itself ought to tell us what is wrong with history, civics and government -- educators have no clue of a connection between national sovereignty, the Declaration of Independence, self-evident truths, inalienable rights (the original version of "human rights"), liberty, private property, and popular sovereignty.   So, they can hardly be expected to teach about the Constitution, or to conduct a real examination of the letters that went back and forth between our Constitution's framers, who by these letters hammered out the weaknesses in the forms of government that had been tried up to that time so as to bequeath something different to a fledgling nation.