Academic Credibility Gap

The lack of confidence in the education establishment at the elementary, secondary and higher levels has spread well beyond the political conservatives normally associated with this attitude. The latest Harris poll shows that 37 % of the public has a great deal of confidence in “major educational institutions such as colleges and universities.”

The news is even worse for public schools: 22% have a great deal of confidence in these institutions. Conversely, 62% of those polled have “only some” or “hardly any” confidence in higher education and 77% of those answering the survey offer this assessment of government schools.

It’s a small wonder, given the less-than-stellar performance of the latter. “According to the 2005 High School Transcript Study, American high school graduates are smarter than ever, posting an average GPA of around 3.0, up from 2.7 in 1990,” Lindalyn Kakadelis of the North Carolina Education Alliance writes. “Not only that, high schoolers earned more credits and took more challenging courses than did their counterparts in past years.”

“But reading and math performance scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the ‘Nation’s Report Card,’ tell a far different story.” In fact, they show students failing to accumulate basic skills after completing high school.

“Twelfth-grade NAEP reading scores have declined since 1992; this drop was seen at all levels, with the exception of top performers,” Kakadelis points out. “In math, the news was far worse: A shocking 77 percent of twelfth graders scored below proficiency.”

The Center for Union Facts has launched a web site just to track educational progress in Newark, New Jersey. “The Newark school district has about 3,850 tenured instructional staff,” according to Protecting BadTeachers.com. “Many of them are hard-working, committed educators.

“But can it be true no that more than .032% of tenured teachers are unfit to teach school?” The web site looks at not only this low dismissal rate but also the district’s performance on standardized tests.

“Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), only two school districts out of 615 in the entire state missed all six quality benchmarks (including reading and math performance as well as graduation rates),” the web site notes. “One is Camden, and the other…is Newark.”

This is particularly telling. We have found that states and localities are given a lot of leeway by the feds on those “benchmarks.”

Meanwhile, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is finding that public schools fail on the one thing that these institutions claim credit for—sensitivity. “The cases in which the Educational Opportunities Section was involved from 2001-2006 covered a wide range of situations and included allegations of discrimination against Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Native American, and Santerian students,” according to the DOJ Report on Enforcement of Laws Protecting Religious Freedom. “Of the forty investigations:

• “Fourteen involved harassment by teachers or allegations of indifference by the school toward harassment by students;

• “Eight involved religious expression by students;

• “Four involved equal access for religious organizations to school facilities;

• “Four involved exclusion from higher educational opportunities based on religious belief;

• “Four involved issues of student religious dress;

• “Three involved refusal to provide excused absences for religious holidays;

• “Two involved state scholarships that discriminate against students attending religious schools;

• “And one involved an allegation of a university’s failure to accommodate the religious dietary needs of students.”

And these were just the cases that made it to the federal level because the offended parties kept their complaints alive. “From 2001-2006, the Civil Rights Division dramatically increased enforcement of civil rights protections against religious discrimination in education,” according to the DOJ. “During that period, the Division’s Educational Opportunities Section reviewed 82 cases and opened 40 investigations involving various types of religious discrimination.”

“This is in contrast to one review and no investigations for the period 1995-2000.”

Given the lack of interest of the previous administration, it is a bit hard to say how long such problems have festered, particularly given the lack of attention and action by national agencies even when federal laws are in question. “From 2001-2006, the Civil Rights Division filed two consent decrees, reached on settlement, and filed thirteen friend-of-the-court briefs in education cases involving religion, versus none from 1995-2000,” according to the DOJ.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.