Assembly

In days of yore, school assemblies gave us a break from heavy-duty note taking and the chance to daydream virtually without penalty. Today, daydreaming may be something that you can get extra credit for.

It would certainly be a more constructive use of student time than the latest in progressive education. “A new text, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the numbers, covers such topics as ‘Sweatshop Accounting,’ ‘Chicanos have Math in Their Blood,’ ‘The Transnational Capital Auction,’ ‘Multicultural Math,’ and ‘Home Buying While Brown or Black,’” according to The Education Reporter. “Units of study include racial profiling, the war in Iraq, corporate control of the media, and environmental racism.”

Multiculturally, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that in a 29-country high-school-aged student comparison, the United States ranked 24th. Such comparisons usually focus on skills that transcend language differences, such as Math and Science.

Our lingual skills are not much better:

• “I could mention the widespread complaints about the federal No Child Left Behind law, and note how strange it is to hear school superintendents complain that schools cannot possibly teach all children to read and do mathematics from the third to the eighth grade—that so modest an ambition is far beyond their capacity—that any such goal will require tens of billions of new federal appropriations—and that the demand for basic skills, so unprecedented, is causing the schools to eliminate science, social studies, art music, extracurricular activities, even recess,” Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University, points out. “No one even tries to explain how children will study science or social studies of they have not learned to read.”

• “I literally had students ask me what the words ‘omit’ and ‘rapid’ meant,” says Dorothy Lang, an associate professor of business at The College of Staten Island. “In earlier years, I’ve had students with such low comprehension of course material that their grades on the Introductory Management midterm exam were in the single digits.”

• In California, “Students are tested for knowledge of eighth grade math and tenth grade English,” Xiachin Claire Yun of the Pacific Research Institute reports. “They only have to answer a little more than half of the questions right and those who have not satisfied this requirement by the tenth grade are given five chances to retake the test.”

And what are the teachers’ unions doing to raise educational standards? Some of them have their own mathematical problems in which their numbers just don’t add up. “Wayne Kruse, a former sixth grade teacher in Lawrence, Kansas, pleaded guilty to one count each of theft and forgery in connection with more than $97,000 in thefts from dues payments to the Lawrence Education Association (LEA) between November 2003 and August 2004,” according to the National Legal and Policy Center. “Because he had no prior convictions, Kruse received two years probation. The LEA is an affiliate of the National Education Association.”

(The teacher’s union in Washington, D. C. has run into similar problems, as we have reported earlier this year.)

California’s community colleges, meanwhile, may have been engaging in financial legerdemain on a grand scale in conjunction with some of the state’s high schools. Golden State activist Andrew F. Carl, recently presented some of these allegations in a lawsuit.

“This suit challenges the long-standing practice of California Community College’s solicitation and enrollment of K-12 students as young as five-years-old, involving in excess of 188,000 K-12 students during the 2001-2002 school year alone, in illegal and oftentimes nonexistent community college physical education classes.” Carl claims that state officials have already found that the community colleges owe taxpayers at least $25 million with one district alone—the North Orange Community College District—owing $900,000.

Carl alleges that the high schools that figured in some accounting schemes also evidenced great creativity. “We possess evidence that a single High School Booster Club have [sic] reported income of in excess of $1,000,000.00 for a single one-year term” Carl’s suit claims. “That, ladies and gentlemen, represents a lot of cake sales and car wash fund raisers.”

“So too, some payments to coaches from a single High School Booster Club amount to in excess of $50,000.” Maybe they read Rethinking Mathematics.

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