Hard Roads Ahead
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Saturday 17 May 2008
Walt Disney would have been proud of John McCain's presentation on Thursday of what the world might look like at the end of a first McCain term as president.
Listening to the speech was like walking through the gates of Fantasyland, which Disney always said was the happiest kingdom of them all. The war in Iraq will have been won. Crack intelligence work will have led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Taxes will be lower and the U.S. economy will be swell. And maybe best of all (I'm not sure for whom), work will have begun on 20 brand-new nuclear reactors.
Senator McCain never bothered to mention how we were to reach this wondrous state, and he bristled when a reporter suggested he was offering a "magic carpet ride."
Elisabeth Bumiller of The Times had the best line when she wrote in Friday's paper that "there were no real checkable facts in Mr. McCain's divination."
On the same day that the senator unveiled his candy-coated vision, a former governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise, came by my office to talk about a much more prosaic matter - the terrible job that the nation is doing in getting its high school kids ready for the real world.
At a time when the nation is faced with tough economic challenges at home and ever-increasing competition from abroad, it's incredible that more is not being done about the poor performance of so many American high schools.
We can't even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.
Mr. Wise is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a policy and advocacy group committed to improving the high schools. The following lamentable passage is from his book, "Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation":
"International comparisons rank the United States a stunningly unimpressive eighteenth for high school graduation rates, a lackluster ranking of fifteenth for high school reading assessments among 15-year-olds in developed countries, and an embarrassing 25th for high school math."
Those are not the marks of a society with a blissful future. Four years of college is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life and we're having trouble graduating kids from high school.
Mr. Wise believes (as does Bill Gates) that America's high schools are for the most part obsolete, inherently ill equipped to meet the needs of 21st-century students. The system needs to be remade, reinvented.
"It's not that our system is getting worse," he said. "It's that other countries are coming on harder and faster."
More than ever, high schools need to be a conveyor belt to college. In 1995, the United States was second in the world (behind New Zealand) in its four-year college graduation rate. "We've actually increased the percentage from that time," said Mr. Wise. "The difference is we've gone from being second in the world to 15th because others have come on so strong."
The rest...
Hard Roads Ahead
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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What we are graduating is almost as bad as what we aren't. The kids I'm seeing at the college level seem to think they should pass if they occasionally show up for class and get an A if they have regular attendance. The only thing "No Child Left Behind" did was teach our kids the value of a piece of paper (as opposed to what that piece of paper is supposed to represent) - and how to cheat. And yes, that is one of many components needing to be dealt with by the next president if we are going to survive as a society in the coming few decades.
Barbara Fitzpatrick
