It cost approximately $7,524 in 2002 to educate one child in the United States, at 47,575,862 children attending elementary and secondary schools (including high schools). That's close to $4 billion a year for public education. And each year the budget is increased by another few million dollars. This is the most logical strategy, national educators and government officials and politicians can devise for improving the minds of America's children. Is it working?

A simple scenario will reveal it is not. In one small American town, cars are littered with bumper stickers claiming that the driver is the "proud parent of an honor student." In fact, out of 197 six graders, 126 made the honor role. Well, one may ask, are there that many smart kids in one town? The answer is simple, no. The fact is that propaganda elevation of student achievement comes with the stroke of a pen.

This fake establishment of academic success is spreading epidemic-like by combining elevated self-esteem with blatant grade inflation, all in hope of masking the failure of American public education (Gross, 1999). Furthermore, there is an increase of students enrolled in "advanced placement classes" in high school, which offer opportunity to receive college level credit. However, once they enter college, instructors are finding that these "advanced" students' score below average on entry-level test and classroom performance.

But with all the money being spent on education, should not our students be the best and brightest in the world. Think again.

This was shown when our highest-achieving students, those in "advanced placement," many of who were also "honor students," were placed in international competition. As part of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study competition, America entered these gifted students in several special contests, optimistically pitting their skills against the best of the rest of the world.

The results were crushing. Our best are apparently far from good enough. In the overall math contest, for example, America scored near the basement, fifteenth among sixteen nations. In calculus our smartest teenagers performed almost as poorly - fourteenth out of fifteen countries. In geometry, the academic embarrassment reached its zenith. The top American youngsters scored at the absolute bottom.

Our leading young science scholars did no better. The American advanced placement high school physics seniors, so thoroughly advertised in the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly the Washington scholarship) and in nationwide science fairs, performed even worse than our best mathematicians. They scored dead last, some 25 percent below the leader, Norway (The Conspiracy of Ignorance, 1999).

So is the answer more money? No. The answer is that the school system should drop their hands from begging and actually teach our students. Why should citizens continue to fund an establishment that continues to fail? The public school system does not need more money; it needs more teachers and parents who care. Not those who simply want to increase their budgets or ride around with bumper stickers promoting false dreams.

It makes no sense to believe that more money helps people learn better, it is obviously up to the efforts of the educators, administration and faculty, including parents, to want their children to gain knowledge about the world around them. Other cultures understand the value of learning, not just for getting into the best college or finding the best job, but also to improve on the state of the world through discovery, exploration, and survival.

If America has become so slack in achieving academic aptitude then some other country will soon develop a young population that will rise and make strides beyond the ability of Americans. Culture plays a large part in development of a nation. America's prosperously-laxed culture has obviously overtaken America's ability to learn.

© 2003 by AfroStaff