Schools Failing or Newspapers Failing to Show the Entire Picture?

Recently I read an editorial in a major metropolitan newspaper that begins with N and ends in Y and became incensed.

The editorial that got me so angry was called,”Schools failing the nation.” It states that high school graduates are ignorant of the basics and are a serious threat to our future. The editorial goes on to state things like, 88 perent of high school seniors are not proficient on the National Education History test. It goes on to say that Long Island High school seniors in certain areas are more “college ready” than others . It infers that these “sufficiently  disturbing socioeconomic disparities” reflect  directly on the skills of  their educators, instead of many other factors combined.

It compares affluent, mostly white Jericho school district having 87 percent meeting state standards to be college ready. Compared to poor, mostly black Wyandanch school district  only having 5 percent of its high school seniors meeting state standards to be college ready. And that because of these ‘threatening statistics” less of the people educated in places like Wyandanch will go on to a  2 or 4 year college and survive past their first year.

But nowhere, NOWHERE in this self-righteous, pious, skewering of the facts are there mentions of other factors that might cause these numbers to be important or valid. If you truly want to compare senior classes from one end of our LI spectrum to another, why not factor in things like- senior attendance records, grades other than a state mandated test, work hours vs. study hours, teen pregnancy rates and parental involvement, instead of accepting this numeric drivel and blame directed at the educators.

If they want to compare the ability to be “college ready” why not compare  how many Jericho mommies and daddies will pay for all four years of education and not have their kids work at all or even do their own laundry? 

As opposed to the Wyandanch  students ,who will work 2 jobs to try to pay the balance of what their tuition assistance and student loans don’t cover? And I guess that makes predominately ethnically mixed, mostly middleclass East Meadow somewhere in the middle of the two. But if you asked me, most of the parents of the seniors  here are “college ready” enough for their kids and can’t wait till September.

The Truth is, if you want to live in a newspaper editorial, blame spewing, fantasy world of statistical nursery rhymes  think, “Hey diddle, diddle;  the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon...” and then realize that reality tells us that “the cow did not properly plan for re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere or designate a decent landing strip location!”

State educators in History have us teach such falsehoods to our children as “ George Washington had wooden teeth, people during Christopher Columbus’s time believed the world was flat, Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred on July 4, 1776,(when it was really signed on Aug. 2) and Abner Doubleday invented the national sport of baseball.” And that is the difference between state mandated , the true facts and common sense.

The moral of this story is  that people who live in ivory news reporting towers aren't so smart if  they don't give you the whole picture and just trrow some ramdom numbers at you. That I personally doubt that many state mandated test makers even know who *Alan Haberman and Margaret Craig were and what their  historic contributions were. So to have somebody rational sum up...this particular newspaper’s editorial slogan is ,”where there is no vision, the people perish.” It might be better off changing it to, ”where there is limited vision, the people here write stupid sentences and expect the public to follow it blindly. Reader Beware!”

BTW-(*Alan Haberman  invented the UPC bar code and Margaret Craig was married to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and it was her urgings  to him  "remain calm and strong for the American Public" during the Cuban Missile Crisis that allowed for a safe resolution to the crisis, where cooler heads prevailed.)