The Current Crisis in US Education

 

Leading articles in the Atlantic and New York magazine have laid it out in stark and unsettling detail:  student reading and math scores on the standardized NAEP tests issued to US students portray US students’ math and reading scores at their lowest point since 2015, after consistently falling since then.  A direct contrast to the situation prior to 2015, when math and reading scores were consistently rising, indicating that US students were reading better and were doing math better consistently.  Now they are doing much, much worse.  Not the top Tenth Percentile students, who are well achieving, and are consistently staying that way.  No, the worst affected are those in the lower percentiles, who are getting worse, less able to do math, less able to read at grade level, much less at adult level.  Which means, they will be more and more likely to be shut out of the job market for lack or requisite scores.  Since they are now among the most marginalized, the most subject to class and racial disparities, the most likely to live in resource-starved neighborhoods, the American problem with equity and its achievement will only get worse.

 

Many reasons are given for this decline, of course, but they tend to be presented as sole causes, rather than what they really are, a series of interlinked causes.  Among them are:  isolation and reliance on inadequate virtual learning during COVID, the rise of smartphone use, antipathy by teachers and parents alike to the standardized tests of the No Child Left Behind Act, which were often seen as punitive, with low scores on such tests leading to punishments.  Also, the clout of teachers’ unions, who want standardized pay and benefits for all teachers against merit-based pay for good teachers.  (It’s still the case that the poorest qualified college enrollees are the ones who go into education, and many a college professor has complained that his/her worst students are the Education majors.)  To which I would add, schools, especially public schools, becoming the dumping ground for all kinds of societal problems and neglect, and are thus unrealistically expect to address long-festering social problems and issues of equity, equality, and equality of opportunity while also teaching to an acceptable level needed pedagogical skills, especially in science, math, literature, and reading.  But such are impossible demands to meet, and unsurprisingly, in the name of equity merit and emphasis on developing talented individuals are allowed to ignominiously fall by the wayside.  But as economist Noah Smith recently pointed out in his Substack column, “Noahpinion,” allow merit and talent to be shortchanged in the name of equity, demanding equal results, no matter how specious, rather than equality of opportunity, shortchanges all students, https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/bad-education-is-a-terrible-way-to?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.  

As Karl Marx himself pointed out in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” not all individuals are equal to the same quality and quantity of work, which was his justification for the pay method of the first stage of communism, “socialism,”:  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” in contradistinction to “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  But Marx here was only concerned with physical capacity for work, even though he should’ve added, mental and intellectual capacity as well, for not all are equally intellectually gifted.  Gifts are widespread across the human race, but they are most unevenly distributed.  So, the bottom line is, when we truncate the especially gifted in the name of an “equity” that only ensures the triumph of mediocrity, we only shortchange ourselves as a human race and as a human society.  Noir can we sanguinely expect AI to fill in for what we have lost in basic cognitive math and reading skills.  AI is no substitute for human ability and knowledge, and is itself frequently wrong.  If we humans lack the cognitive skills to recognize AI error, we only perpetuate it.  There was a famous experiment several years ago, involving students given a math test where they were allowed to use calculators, but the calculators were set to be 20% off.  Yet, for many of the students, face with the cognitive dissonance engendered between what their own cognition told them was the correct answer, and what the calculator said was the correct answer, chose the calculator’s answer instead!  Not at all auspicious.  That is why teaching critical reading and math skills is vitally important not only to the US educational system, but to any educational system.  It is time to get back to the “basics” on teaching and learning, and perhaps, not allow or insist that our public schools address all social problems, a task they are not prepared to undertake.  (Private schools, and charter schools, have the leeway to address which social problems they will address, and which they will blithely ignore.)  Equity is a worthy goal, but it is not the only goal.  And it will not happen overnight, but will take some time.  For a start, we’d be better off emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than equal results.  As a good psychotherapist I had once put it, “If it weren’t slow, it wouldn’t be real.”  Real, sustainable change takes time.  That which is easily and facilely achieved can be easily and facilely undone, also.  Lest we forget.

 

I’m a socialist, and while I believe in equality and equity, I also believe in utilizing talent, ability, merit, and skills, and enabling as many as possible to attain them.  If this means unequal results in an equality of opportunity, so be it.  It’s like the Superbowl:  no matter how evenly matched the two teams are, at the end of the game there is a winner, and a loser.  They can’t both win.  Yes, we do need a socialist meritocracy, a Jeffersonian “Aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity.”  We d need to encourage our best and our brightest, and we can by providing readily-available access to excellence, which is what the New York City magnet schools and CUNY system of higher education have done so well over the decades—enabling marginalized, working-class, and Jewish students access to achievement and excellence, giving them the chance to excel.  No, they didn’t all become real-estate moguls, but so many of them became distinguished scholars, professors and teachers, and even Nobel Prize winners.  This is what we should be aiming at as socialists, a meritocracy based on equality of opportunity, not penalizing the meritorious and talented because it doesn’t elevate mediocrity and inability to achieve in a false and spurious sense of “equity.”    

Christianity, Immorality/Sin, Theology and Atheism

 

(Selected indignation, insight, witticism and commentary from me, an ex-Catholic atheist.)

 

Say It Loud and Clear!

 

The question professed Christians cannot answer: "Why do you Christians sin so much?" Isn't the God you believe in, once you embrace him (or is it her, or it?), supposed to infuse you with the Divine Grace to make you stop sinning?! I had a Catholic priest tell me, as a lame apologetic, "We're all sinners." To which we "immoral" atheists can reply, "We may have 'sinned' by masturbating, or having sexual intercourse outside of marriage, but none of us sinned by—

Catholic priest-pedophilia (or by Protestant pedophilia), nor by its deliberate cover-up by Catholic bishops and cardinals!"

 

Christian Liars

 

Of the Ten Commandments, both the Protestant Ninth Commandment, and the Catholic Eighth Commandment, forbid bearing false witness against one’s neighbor, i.e., lying.  Yet Christians, notably both Protestant and Catholic, lie all the time, especially when 1.) it’s to their advantage to do so; 2.) to get back at someone; or 3.) to curry favor with a third party; or of course, for any combination of the above.  They’ll even lie under oath, perjure themselves, if they think they can get away with it.  They’ll lie shamelessly, banking on God’s forgiveness.  What hypocrites!

 

So Many Moral Pieces of Shit…

 

…believe in God and the Savior Jesus, and look forward to Divine Forgiveness for their transgressions when they die, or even before, even as they freely commit moral atrocities against others, in direct contravention of Christ’s own admonition to “Love thy neighbor as thyself”!

 

Had a Chat with Satan Today

 

He affirmed that he likes me, and thinks I’m really worthwhile.  He also gave me a number of good things over the years:  metal music, “playing with myself,” recreational sex, just to name a few.  But Jesus Christ, meh.  While he says he loves me unconditionally, he also says I’m going to burn in hell forever for being an ex-Catholic atheist!  As for Jesus’ Christian followers, they were notable for consistently treating me like shit.  They are the analogues of the “good Jews” Jesus himself called “hypocrites,” “Pharisees,” "whited sepulchers."

 

Heretical

 

Did Satan create Catholic priest-pedophiles, deliberately covering-up Catholic bishops and Cardinals, indifferent-to-priest-pedophilia Popes, and in my case personally, booze-soaked unctuous hypocrite Catholic priests such as my high school principal?  No, theologically speaking!  According to Christian (not just Catholic, but including Catholic) theology, all these and even more nefarious evils were created by omniscient, omnipotent, infallible and benevolent God himself, not only out of his unconditional love for all humanity (even as he sends many humans to the torment of burning in hell forever!), but also, as part of his—Perfect Divine Plan.

 

The Gospel According to Johnny B. Goode

(No, Chuck Berry, I do not apologize!)

 

To paraphrase the Gospel of John—

 

“For God so loved the world he gave it Catholic priest-pedophiles and deliberately covering-up bishops, Cardinals, and even Popes; Prosperity Gospel hucksters such as Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar; Antichrist Christians such as Donald ‘I’m proud to be a Christian’ Trump; Popes Francis-and- Leo XIV-bashing Catholics such as JD Vance, and much more.  Further, in his Yahweh incarnation, God gave us Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and those nasty West Bank Jewish settlers; in his Allah incarnation gave us Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and Islamism; and in his Catholic incarnation, gave us the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, the ecclesiastical murder of Giordano Bruno for teaching modern science, and the burning alive of tens of thousands during the Middle Ages for alleged witchcraft, for homosexuality, and for heresy!”

 

On the Problem of Evil

 

I would remind you that it wasn't Satan who created Catholic priest-pedophiles and their covering-up bishops and cardinals, Prosperity Gospel hucksters such as Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, Christians such as "I'm proud to be a Christian" Donald Trump, or white Christian Nationalists—he turned all this creation over to God, who did it as part of his Divine Love manifested in his Perfect Plan!

 

Have to Hand It to the Catholic Church

 

It certainly knows how to provide expertise on moral and behavioral issues.  For example, its experts on sexuality, sexual and romantic love, and child rearing are all—ordained celibate old men who read about all such matters in Latin while in the seminary!

 

Response to a Christian Door-to-Door Missionary

 

In answer to the question, “Will you allow Jesus Christ to enter your life today as your personal Savior?”:

 

“No, thank you.  I’ve already allowed Satan to enter my life as my personal Savior.”

 

 

It’s Hard Being an “Immoral” Atheist!

 

It’s really hard being an “immoral” atheist!  And Christians should be more charitable, and realize that.  Consider this.  We spend our days in very busy, hectic, activity raping, robbing,  pillaging, and murdering.  Our days are so busy and hectic doing all this that we don’t even have time to take a decent lunch break.  All we can do is grab a baby to eat on the run.  Then, after our hard, hectic days, the only way we “immoral” atheists are able to relax in the evening is through wild sex-and-drug orgies, after which we finally get some sleep by passing out in a drug-and-alcohol-induced stupor.  That’s a hard life we “immoral” atheists have!

 

Aside from Being an Atheist, What Am I?

 

I’m a victim of overwhelmingly Christian maliciousness, cruelty, abuse, and insensitivity, primarily Catholic, but also Protestant, upscale alleged “freethinkers” who didn’t want to confront the religious abuse I suffered, and one nefarious Jewish person I thought was a good friend until he betrayed me, then had the chutzpah to insist I “forgive” him for his alleged “egregious stupidity”!  (In reality, though, his actions were all deliberate; the “egregious stupidity” on his part was getting caught and being held to account!)  I was bullied and socially ostracized in the Catholic grade and high schools I was forced to attend; my Catholic siblings (my four younger sisters who grew up with me, all pretty, pert, all of them sorority girls in college, and all of them—vapid) regarded me as an ugly, unpopular nerd they wanted nothing to do with.  My Catholic parents, when they weren’t screaming at me at the top of their lungs in 15-minute-long tirades, utterly ignored me; and as a young adult in Indianapolis, the “peaceable religious progressives,” with whom I agreed with on a good 90 percent of the political issues of the day, responded to me with maliciousness, bigotry, and dismissiveness.  All that, too, is what I am.

 

 

 

 

 

Deep Irony Alert! (lest the "woke" left get offended"): Slavery Was Fun!

 In "honor" of Trump and his minions' "whitewashing" (apt term) of American history, museum exhibits, and just plain grousing, as the MAGA loyalist complained about the Smithsonian "overemphasizing" slavery:

1.)   The newly enslaved got to leave their constricted African villages and travel, move, to new and exotic lands across the Atlantic Ocean.

 

2.)   The newly enslaved went there by way of a leisurely sea cruise on well apportioned ships.

 

3.)   The newly enslaved had the opportunity to learn new job skills.

 

4.)   The newly enslaved got exposure to Christianity, and thus became “saved,” instead of being damned to hell for their indigenous pagan religions.

 

5.)   The newly enslaved males had lots of opportunities to have sex with slave women (to reproduce more slaves, of course), and newly enslaved females often had sexual opportunities as well, especially with interracial sex.

 

and last,

 

6.)   The newly enslaved got to meet new people, usually people of a different race and ethnicity, thus diversifying their social circles.

 

So, who says slavery wasn’t fun?

 

 

A Most Inauspicious Sixtieth Anniversary

 

The year I graduated from high school, 1965, was also the year in which average SAT scores peaked.  From then on, they declined.  Not coincidentally, I believe, it was also when the “dumbing down” craze was inaugurated among educators and academics, in order to make a college education more “accessible” to minorities, women, and other groups considered disadvantaged.  By lowering the bar, it was argued, more deserving people could get in, could enter the hallowed Halls of Ivy, and move up socially and economically in US society—thereby ending decades of deliberate discrimination that kept especially generations of African Americans locked into poverty and low-paying, dead-end jobs.  This was also a time when automation was eliminating many low-skill factory jobs, thereby creating new technological unemployment.  Last, the seemingly triumphant final success of the Civil Rights Movement in breaking down the legal barriers of segregation and discrimination, along with the rise of the New Left, meant that there was fertile social ground, especially among the young white and well-educated, to at last seriously address the “race problem” in American life.  Militant demonstrations occurred on college campuses demanding Open Admissions for anyone who wanted to attend, a demanded echoed by black nationalist groups on campus from newly admitted African American students.  Academic standards were seen as barriers to social and racial justice, not as necessary linchpins and gates to ensure a quality education.

 

Looking back sixty years later, we see that what was also inaugurated was a horrible naïveté along with white masochistic guilt, particularly among newly radicalized students and academics.  This meant that, far from opening up academia, “dumbing down” only debased the quality of education colleges offered, and brought in large numbers of students not at all prepared for college academic expectations.  This, coupled with a supposedly “hard-headed” businesslike “transactional” approach to education, where education was valued not as an end in itself, but only as a means for being credentialed to get a good-paying job, made it join naïvely with this “transactional” approach, both of which in tandem played key roles in debasing the quality of education, made education as an end in itself seem “worthless,” and fueled a deeper anti-intellectualism and distrust of “educated elites” that debased the whole of American society, especially when Trump came into prominence, or ever since at least 2015.  A debasement that haunts us horribly today.  Further, while I don’t relish at all quoting or acknowledging conservative commentators, I admit that sometimes they get it right more than does the left—a case of even a blind squirrel finding an acorn sometimes!  (As a former co-worker of mine once put it.)  So, I do have to acknowledge far right commentator Joseph Starobin when he pointedly noted that US society had degenerated from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college today.  The same point was made very recently (as I write, late July 2025) by Boston Globe’s conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby in his column “Arguable,” where he noted that a Massachusetts high school graduate in 1895 was expected to know more, and did, in fact, know more, than a Massachusetts high school graduate today.  He pointedly notes that back then an education was considered both a right (hence, public schools) and a valuable end in itself, against both the onslaughts of the business-transactional right and the anti-discriminatory left against such a supposed mere “nostrum.”

 

And yet—educational equality seems further away today than it did sixty years ago, with many critics, and even rival racial and ethnic minorities, claiming that “affirmative action” and “DEI” only brought a bunch of unqualified African Americans onto college campuses, to the detriment of both more “meritorious” racial and ethnic groups (notably Asians), and even merit itself.  This has even fueled overt racism, such as Trump supporter Charlie Kirk’s comment that if he were on an airplane, the only way he could ensure the pilot was competent was if he was a (presumably straight) white male!  Thus, were “he” gay, transgender, female, African American, Latino, other dark-skinned racial minority, “he” might be “unqualified” to pilot an aircraft, owing “his” piloting to “his” being a DEI hire instead!  

 

Thus has “dumbing down” backfired.  Rather than creating a more racially inclusive society, it’s created a more racially divided society, as even the whole concept of African American “merit” is under question.

 

As my old academic advisor Scott Gordon, late Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Indiana University-Bloomington, pointed out in his 1980 book, Welfare, Justice, and Freedom, there’s an unavoidable contradiction between equality of opportunity and equality as such, or as we and many African American militants put it, equal results.  For equality of opportunity means there are winners and losers, winners and also-rans, some who make it to the top and some who don’t.  It’s like the Super Bowl:  no matter how evenly matched the two teams are, at the end of the game there is only one winner, and the other team is the loser.  While equality of opportunity is a prerequisite for equal results, equality of opportunity does not mean equal results, certainly not in the short one—and no amount of “revolutionary impatience” can change that.  Certainly I, who wishes to eventually see equal results, must concede, in terms of reality, they are still quite a ways away, and that the ability of African Americans to attend college does not ensure their success when they do.  Social, cultural, educational, economic, and other obstacles are still in the way.  (Which does not in any way justify Trump’s open attack on the very notion of even trying to achieve racial equality or even rough parity.)  Further, we are living in a society today that has grown tired of even trying to achieve racial justice, to address even minimally the vast injustices done to black Americans all the way back into slavery.  While I do not know what the solution is, I do know that the naïve left’s “dumbing down” agenda it’s eagerly promoted sixty years ago and since only created another problem, not any kind of solution whatsoever.