Florida Test Scores: How Democrats and Unions are Dumbing Down America

If you are a Florida fourth grader you just got smarter by an act of congress.  Well, not quite.  Instead of congress, it was the Florida Board of Education who, in a frantic and intensely embarrassing conference call on Tuesday, May 15, decided to lower the passing grade on the state’s writing test from a 4 to a 3.  It was the only solution they could come up with when almost three quarters of all students failed (!!!) the test.  These idiots actually think this solves the problem.  If the kids can’t write, just tell them it isn’t important.  Close counts.  Not your fault.  Pick it up later in your spare time between playing computer games and cashing your welfare check. 

            Remind me, eight years from now, not to hire anyone with a high school diploma from Florida.   Thanks to their school board they won’t know how to speak, read or write, compute, think critically or have a shadow of an idea about science, civics, history or geography.  On the other hand, they will have a strong sense of entitlement.  They will be the ultimate corruption of Rene Descartes declaration, “I think, therefore I am.”  Their mantra will be, “I am, therefore I deserve.”  All of this, because the Florida Board of Education has taken a steep dip down the slippery slope of educational debasement.  A slope well oiled by the NEA and AFT. 

Here is a rough description of the situation.  Florida fourth graders have to take state tests to indicate progress.  They were asked to imagine riding on a camel, what it was like and what happened.  The students were then tested on sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation.  The grades for these tests range from 0 to 6 with a 4 passing.  Only 1 in 4 students passed the test.  Teachers complained that the test question was, “too hard” and that their students may not know what a camel is.  Other educators complained that they hadn’t been told that the students would actually have to follow all those pesky rules!   It makes me wonder whether or not the teachers could pass the test.  

All of this is nonsense of course.  The problem is not that the question was too hard.  The problem is that the teachers, thanks to their teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party’s passion for keeping the nation ignorant, don’t think they need to teach their students a darn thing.  The teachers aren’t supposed to make educational requirements that would interfere with the lives of themselves, the students or, heaven forbid (!) the parents.  Don’t make the students write complete sentences, or write essays as homework, or speak in coherent sentences.  That is too much stress for the poor dears.  It is too much supervision required of parents.  It certainly is too much paper grading for the teacher.  Let’s just say the students are too poor, too ethnic, too…insert the excuse of your choice…to be required to do what other students everywhere do.

Be honest, one quarter of the students taking these tests did pass, and did so legitimately, in the same schools with the same resources as the failed students.  It is typical of the Democratic/socialistic attitude to see the answer to the problem as making the passing score lower.  A Republican/capitalistic attitude says, find out what the good teachers and good students are doing and share those successful strategies with others.   You don’t improve things by finding the lowest common denominator.  You improve things by challenging everyone to be/do/think better than the next person.  Singularity should be the goal, not homogenization. 

Raise the bar and keep the faith.