Hu's on First, Opinion
By Arthur Hu Columnist EducationNews.org Published 08/23/2008
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Arthur Hu Columnist EducationNews.org

View all articles by Arthur Hu Columnist EducationNews.org
Hu's on First, Opinion
Arthur Hu
Columnist EducationNews.org

It's not your father's education. Now it's about reforming society,
not teaching. Marxism's brave new producation targets sought to erase
inequality but brought famine and poverty instead. Today, federal
mandates such as No Child Left Behind legislate that "all will
succeed." But kids are suffering under unrealistic goals and in the
name of "higher-order thinking": They get math books that don't teach
math and reading methods that don't teach reading. Terry Bergeson - a
candidate running for re-election as state superintendent in
Washington state - is touting a 90 percent pass rate of the
Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) high-stakes test as
proof that "all high school graduates will read and compute at a high
level."
If John "Not My Baby" Edwards promised that every school would be
excellent, would Asian parents really stop aspiring to send their
children to the "best" schools and push their children to be the best
when every school and child are equally excellent? If excellence is
to exceed average, isn't a level passed by 90 percent a very low
level of performance? How could any diploma be set at a level good
enough to guarantee admission to Stanford or a job with Google, when
in truth you would still have to compete to be the best? My
elementary school kids whose papers I graded wrote better ones than
the 10th graders at the bottom 10 percent.

The ugly secret is that officials in every state set the pass levels
to whatever it takes to fail everybody the first year but pass all
but the worst by their deadline for success.

The 90-percent pass rate is just the statistical rug that hides the
WASL, and every other test has still not escaped the curse of
underperformance. It is a lie to claim success for all when ethnic,
income, language and disability groups continue to fail at 2 to 4
times the average rate, with the best scores going to the most
affluent and best educated ethnic groups.

It was protests from "back to basics" parents that led California to
junk the worst of whole language that dropped phonics, spelling and
grammar and fail the new-new math like the miserable Mathland that
tossed out standard arithmetic in favor of singing, writing, and
finger counting. There is nothing progressive about requiring
everybody to jump as high as the university bound. Soon, all
California 8th graders must pass algebra when many never mastered
arithmetic. My son was supposed to write sentences on his first day
of first grade with no previous instruction. Math homework consisted
of cutting, pasting and card playing with no instruction for carrying
numbers in addition or dividing with common denominators. Now his
high school "Core Plus" shortchanges basic algebra but critically
asks "if John's IQ is 75, is he mentally challenged?" Asian parents
need to be able to critically recognize nonsense when the emperor has
no clothes and put an end to misguided "reforms." Promising or
demanding excellence of all is doomed to fail. The true ancient
wisdom America can but hasn't learned from Asia is this: it has never
believed that being the "best" student is to simply commit
challenging material to memory and to reward only the the highest
achievers with the grade of "excellent."

Published August 24, 2008