httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=nTBoycD2Cw4

Are we rearing a nation of ignorant students? This is the question posed in the latest report, Still at Risk, by Fordham's sister organization, Common Core. Its answer: yes, and we better start doing something about it. Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, one in four said Columbus sailed to the Americas some time after 1750, not in 1492, and-most shocking of all-nearly one in four did not know who Adolf Hitler was. It is an education tragedy that a quarter of U.S. teens have no clue about the most dangerous mass murderer of the 20^th century, whose call for a new Aryan racial order resulted in 6 million Jews being thrown into gas ovens and nearly 50 million dead due to his plunging Europe and America into a destructive world war.

The survey results, released at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, demonstrate what Common Core says is the "stunning ignorance" of many teenagers when it comes to history and literature. The organization rightly blames President Bush's education law, No Child Left Behind, for impoverishing public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics. This means that other vital subjects, such as history and literature (as well as art, music, geography and civics) are being downplayed-or simply ignored. This is unacceptable. A vibrant liberal arts curriculum is necessary to the professional development of students, fostering creativity, logic, rational and analytical thinking. More importantly, it provides them with a grounding in core knowledge and ideas that helps them become fully participatory democratic citizens. Our Founding Fathers were steeped in the study of history, languages, literature and political philosophy. They understood America's democratic republic depends upon an informed, educated and engaged citizenry-one that grasps just how precious and rare representative, constitutional government is in the annals of history. "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," said George Santayana. Sadly, this is the case with many of America's teens. Ignorance, contrary to the famous saying, is not bliss. It's time we as a nation realized this.

An interesting press release popped up in my inbox today. An excerpt:

With 13 million children living in poverty in the United States, US Airways has made a bold step to help end the cycle of poverty through a new cause partnership with Reading Is Fundamental. Today, US Airways and RIF are launching the ???Fly with US. Reading with Kids."

Here are a few highlights about the campaign:

• Inflight Customized Books ??? For the month of March, a customized Maisy children's book will be in the seatback pocket of every domestic flight. With half storybook/half activity book, passengers will be encouraged to take the book and share it with a child.
• Lending Libraries ??? Customized, aviation-themed children's libraries (75 books) will be set-up in all 21 US Airways Clubs where children can read while they wait for their flight. The Maisy book will also be distributed in 2008 in all kids' activity packs.
• Read with Kids Reading Challenge ??? Customers and employees will log on to rif.org to track the hours they read for a chance to win US Airways' travel prizes like a Disney Vacation. It's a great site with a variety of inactive games and activities for kids. The challenge will last for three months. Visit RIF.org to participate.

Now, I love to see private businesses rolling out programs aimed at educating kids. I fondly remember participating in Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program when I was a lad. But this is not a well-crafted press release.

"With 13 million children living in poverty in the United States" we should put more books on airplanes and enroll kids in online reading programs?! Airplanes and computers are but two of the luxuries denied most poor kids. I'd take a different angle if were U.S. Air's marketing team.

The Wall Street Journal examines why Finland's laid-back education system leads the world. Long story short, nobody knows. Students in Finland have smaller classes, don't do a lot of homework, don't start school until age seven, and don't move on to new academic material until everyone in their class has mastered the current lesson (therefore, the country has a tiny gap between its highest- and lowest-performing youngsters). The Finns are also a rather racially and economically homogeneous group and Finnish teaching positions are incredibly competitive--two facts that contrast sharply with the United States.

Funny thing is, a lot of what occurs in Finnish schools seems to undermine the prevailing educational wisdom. The country has self-guided student learning, starts students at a relatively late age, doesn't focus energy on high-performing kids, has little standardized testing, and separates high-schoolers into different tracks (vocational and academic). Kids can even walk around in their socks during class. Perplexing.

It may not be simply that they study harder (though anecdotal evidence suggests they do). In this week's New Yorker, Jim Holt profiles Stanislas Dehaene, a young French neuroscientist investigating how our brains handle numbers. According to Deheane's research, we think about numbers in three distinct ways, each of which developed at a different point in human evolution.

The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

This last way of thinking about numbers poses problems for English-speakers:

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19, and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as ???twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.??? French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (???four twenty ten nine???) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief???they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English???the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

The lesson? Skip the STEM bills and pass instead the Mastering Asian Tongues at Home (MATH) Act. Then watch the Asian Advantage disappear.

A recent study finds that one-third of American teenagers regularly post offensive language or manipulated images on the web, and over 25 percent of these online pranks target teachers and principals. Such hi-jinks are not always a laughing matter. Pupils can do irreparable damage when they falsely accuse their teachers of abuse, for example, so many educators are protecting themselves by taking kids to court. But is calling a lawyer the answer? Contemplate the so-called "Teacher Sux" example in Pennsylvania, in which a high school student posted on a website derogatory comments about a teacher ("she shows off her fat...legs"). The lawsuit claimed that the teacher, after viewing the online material, felt unable "to go out of the house and mingle with crowds." Insult-induced agoraphobia? A bit much, perhaps? Our schools do not need ever more lawyers and lawsuits to descend upon them. Most cases of the "cyber-bullying" of teachers should be handled by school administrators, in a common-sense manner, not in court.

"Teachers strike back at students' online pranks," by Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor, February 25, 2008

We stand corrected. Last week, Gadfly posited that perhaps Barack Obama has an open mind when it comes to school choice. After all, he did tell the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about that city's voucher program, "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was ‘Alright, let's see if this experiment works' and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids." That sentence seems to suggest--actually, it seems to state unequivocally--that if vouchers are shown to help learning, the senator from Illinois would support them. Wrong. His campaign, undoubtedly ruffled that they may lose favor with a certain as-yet-uncommitted-to-any-presidential-candidate teachers' union, sent Education Week a clarifying statement. Obama's words were apparently taken "out of context"; the senator has always opposed vouchers and still does, his campaign says. Words taken out of context? Baloney. One of two things is going on here: Either Obama, in his bid to win Wisconsin, decided to lie to the Journal Sentinel and pretend to support proven-effective voucher programs, or he is actually open-minded but being censored by his campaign. Either way, it's a giant disappointment.

"Obama and Vouchers," New York Sun, February 27, 2008

Broad Acres and Adelphi elementary schools are neighbors serving an impoverished corner of the Washington, D.C. suburbs that is home to thousands of recent immigrants. But because the first school sits within the affluent and well-regarded Montgomery County district, and the second resides in Prince George's County, an urbanized district with the typical challenges that label implies, their realities and resources couldn't be more different. Montgomery County has lavished all sorts of love on Broad Acres--a longer school year, smaller class sizes, full-day kindergarten, an army of ESOL experts, and more. It helps that the school receives $1,750 in federal Title I funds for every student; Adelphi gets only one-third as much. Moreover, Prince George's principals are tied down by one of the most restrictive teacher contracts in the country, while Montgomery boasts one of the better collective bargaining agreements. School-by-school reform efforts are great, but what's the takeaway from this story? It's the system, stupid. It's time we tackled antiquated funding systems, outmoded collective bargaining agreements, and all other manner of red tape that impede schools from success.

"Nearby Schools, Worlds Apart," by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 26, 2008

"Some Teachers' Contracts Bind Reforms, Study Says," by Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post, February 25, 2008

Common Core, an organization devoted to bringing content-rich instruction to U.S. classrooms, was born this week. Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason, was born two weeks earlier. It seemed fitting to welcome the former by reading and reviewing the latter.

The Age of American Unreason shares much with Common Core, notably the belief that all students should receive a variegated education that exposes them not only to science and math but also to music, literature, history and the arts. This is, however, but one of Jacoby's arguments; the others are multiple and diffuse. She begins her first chapter, for example, by bemoaning the "plague" of the word "folks."

"Only a few decades ago," Jacoby writes, "Americans were addressed as people or, in the more distant past, ladies and gentlemen." But now, she tells us, "folks" predominates--an indication of just how debased American speech has become. From "folks" (which reinforces anti-intellectualism, says she) Jacoby moves on to "troops" (which reinforces the public's thinking about war casualties in "a more abstract way") and ends up with Don Imus's infamous remarks about the Rutgers female basketball team.

Jacoby then lists several different slurs and writes, "The awful reality is that all of these epithets, often accompanied by the F-word, are the common currency of public and private speech in today's America." They are? Where's the evidence? The claim doesn't ring true among people I know.

This is the problem with The Age of American Unreason. It is polluted with factually dubious statements that seem odd, out of place, and arrived at by means that stretch logic. These baseless soliloquies permeate the text.

Which is not to say that some of Jacoby's salvos aren't smart. She convincingly describes, for instance, how the recent fusion of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism (i.e., that opinions [ironically, including her own] are more valid than evidence and facts) has undermined the quest for knowledge. Americans today may be content to know fewer facts about science, history, geography, etc. because they believe such knowledge is largely unimportant and doesn't convey to its possessors any tangible advantages.

Jacoby also notes rightly that policymakers have embraced a similar quid pro quo approach to schooling; they want to see the palpable benefits--more engineers!--of their educational investments. This is the challenge that confronts Common Core: to convince Americans that the "frills" of the curriculum (history, the arts, languages, etc.) are just as necessary as math and science.

But readers of The Age of American Unreason will need to ferret out its good parts among much of less worth. Jacoby's writing is strained by trying somehow to reconcile her support of a more rigid, facts-based education system with her dislike (contempt may be a tad too strong) of the conservatives who share her views.

Thus, readers must wade through, for example, a description of the 1960s that quirkily jockeys between condemning the decade's excesses and condemning the right-wing intellectuals who also condemn its excesses. Jacoby manages this badly.

She also misses many opportunities to attack ideas and not people, which is unfortunate and weakens her book. Jacoby might have presented an informed chapter about the rise of conservative intellectuals; instead, she chooses to be snarky. William Kristol "apparently imbibed contempt for liberalism with his mother's milk and father's spleen." Elliot Abrams is "one of those undead intellectual bureaucrats who seem impervious to every effort to drive stakes through their hearts." Such barbs could have been penned by Don Imus.

This is but one reason why, in an odd twist, The Age of American Unreason cannot itself be considered an "intellectual" book. Jacoby's rather dismissive treatment of faith and the faithful is another. (She attempts to present herself as respectful of religion but doesn't quite pull it off.) The writing is hampered by prejudices, which too often replace detailed, logical analysis.

Rick Hess, who authored Common Core's inaugural report Still At Risk (reviewed below), told USA Today, "There is this kind of Aren't We Stupid? industry." Jacoby's book, alas, is part of it. Unlike Common Core's data-based analysis--which fastens upon pushing schools to teach more content-rich material--The Age of American Unreason is a long, meandering complaint that offers no real solutions.

Potential readers should skip it, and perhaps imbibe some Dostoyevsky instead. Jacoby might not disagree with that prescription.

Everybody knows Detroit has a dropout problem. But no one, it seems, can say exactly how bad it is. According to a new study by the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, just 31.9 percent of Detroit students graduate in four years. MSU researchers arrived at this figure using the so-called "cohort method," mandated by No Child Left Behind, which compares the number of high-school freshmen in a given year to the number of seniors four years later. This approach has its shortcomings; while it discounts the number of students who moved to charter schools or other districts, it does not track those who transferred to private schools or left Michigan altogether (this in a city that has lost about 4 percent of its population since 2000). Still, one suspects that the MSU researchers are nearer to the truth than the state, which guesstimates that 66.8 percent of Detroit youngsters finish all four years of high school. That's a whopping 35 percentage points higher than MSU's figure. Didn't Michigan sign on to the National Governors Association's "Graduation Compact" to improve and standardize graduation data? Whatever happened to that, anyway?

"Detroit schools grad rate: 32%" by Karen Bouffard, Detroit News, February 25, 2008