TRS Morning Post: VEA Continues to Fail Public Education
More money hasn't fixed Virginia's public education system. Why would more money fix it today?
The inestimable Jim Bacon writes on why a recent report from the Youngkin administration shows how Virginia’s public school accreditation schematic simply isn’t measuring anything meaningful.
The VEA’s vitriolic response was more damning than the report itself:
I’ll settle for making one point. Not long ago, Southwest Virginia schools under-performed state averages in the SOL pass rates. Over the past 10 years, as a direct result of the philosophy implemented by the Comprehensive Instructional Program (CIP), Southwest Virginia has vaulted to the top-performing region in Virginia. That has nothing to do with white privilege, nothing to do with higher incomes, and nothing to do with higher levels of wealth. Over the same period, even as inner-city schools have given themselves over to social-educational learning, culturally responsive learning, and the rest of the VEA repertoire of ideologically driven, race-conscious changes, the racial achievement gap has gotten worse. (emphasis added)
Virginia’s public education system has long been a driver for celebrating mediocrity when it comes to results. Plowing more money into the system doesn’t seem to earn much return on investment (ROI). In fact, the problems seem to be getting worse as students are cultured to pass tests rather than ex ducare.
I am reminded of this passage in one of my grandfather’s old books on the history of education and its purpose:
A textbook should be little more than a suggestive outline, not a complete treatise to take the place of the living teacher or to obviate the need of study and research on the part of the student. A textbook should be a stimulus and a guide to work, not a substitute for work. There is, apparently, no way open to mere human beings to educate a man, save by getting him to educate himself.
— William T. Kane, SJ
Unfortunately we have created a culture where tests and testing are the only measures of an educated mind. Somewhere we forgot the old admonishment of thinkers such as Avicenna: education is not filling a bucket with water, but the kindling of fire.
We are failing our children by propagandizing rather than educating them. No amount of money in the world (and no sleight of hand rhetoric) is going to disguise this failure of postmodern American education — and the progressive left knows it just as well as the conservative right. Whether the liberals in charge ‘get it’ in time remains to be seen.
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Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.