ej-i-kay-shun

A lovely story in NYT.

The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.
“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”

A school oughta be a palace, and a really good teacher oughta be able to make as much as a really good car salesman.  But we've come under some kind of spell.  It's like we believe we're entitled to a bargain; that we can get Honda quality paying Yugo prices; that everything can be shoe-horned into the Wal-Mart model.  We jump up and down and scream about "bad schools", but we refuse even to consider the probability that our policy decisions of the last 25 years are killing the schools that we claim we're trying to help.

This shit's expensive, guys.  And for those who insist that we used to do just fine without spending so much money; people who point out that we spend x% more now per-student (adjusted for inflation) and we're still not getting the performance we need, blah blah blah?  BULLSHIT.  Take a look at some of things schools have to buy now that they didn't have to buy 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.  Computers, Network Servers and Infrastructure, Internet Access, CCTV, Metal Detectors, Private Security, Messaging Systems, and and and.  Now add in the costs of Subscriptions and Software and Maintenance; plus the fact that most of the hardware has to be replaced every 4 or 5 years, plus the software has to be updated/upgraded every year or 2.

Ya want a better, stronger economy?  Ya want better national security?  Then you make the kind of investment in education that you make in any other business.  But you have to start by gettin' your head outa your ass.