Very strongly stated:

Clark County School District students tested in January on their grasp of first semester material in high school algebra and geometry didn't just fall short of the mark. The preliminary report on end of semester exams shows they missed it in a spectacular way.

Across the valley, 90.5 percent of 17,586 students who took the new end of semester exams for Algebra 1 failed, scoring at 59 percent or lower.

In Geometry, 87.8 percent of 18,792 students earned the equivalent of an F.

The 10,032 students in Algebra 2 also made a dismal showing, with 86.6 percent unable to achieve a passing grade.

The preliminary numbers jolted Superintendent Walt Rulffes, who said Wednesday that district staff are analyzing the test, its implementation and the scores to identify why students made such a poor showing.

"Maybe this is the shock we need to get the system fixed," Rulffes said.

I doubt it - if a continual failure pretty much across the board and around the country for the past couple decades hasn't shocked us into fixing the system, this dismal failure won't, either. Of course, since the problem is the system, there is no actual incentive on the part of those in the system to fix it - fixing it, you see, might require effort and acceptance of painful change on the part of those who make their living off the edcuational status quo.

The R-J conveniently provides some of the test questions at the bottom of the linked article - I haven't been in math class since 1981, and I was just about the lousiest math student one could imagine (much to the dismay of my mathematician father and physicist mother); but I aced the five sample questions just working them out in my head. As I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer nor a person with more than a cursory familiarity with algebra, etc, the only excuse for the massive failure rate in the schools is that the kids have not been taught the math.

The teachers aren't teaching, the kids aren't learning and the parents aren't insisting upon results - in broad terms, this is why the public school systems fail. Certainly, there are teachers who teach; there are kids who learn; there are parents who care...but it is abundantly clear that the majority of the people in the system don't fall into any of the three catagories (teacher, learner, caring parent). This, in turn, demonstrates the fundamental flaw of our education system - it is "free and compulsory"; as if anything is actually free (actually, our school system is fabulously expensive), and as if one could compel another to learn. As I've been saying for a very long time, time to scrap the whole miserable failure and start over again from scratch.

The people being educated - certainly beyond 5th grade - should only be people who want to be there, who are brought there by parents who will insist upon results, and are greeted at the schools only by educators positively on fire with the prospect of imparting knowledge to young minds. The only way to approximate this state of affairs is to:

(A) Abolish the "compulsory" part of education

(B) Provide vouchers and tax credits to parents so they can purchase whatever education they wish for their children.

Implementing (A) would turn education from a taken-for-granted right into a better-do-it-right priviledge. Implementing (B) would allow education systems to arise which are tailored to the desires of the parents and the needs and abilities of the students. No more keeping disruptive kids in school because budgets are determined by "butts in seats", no more "one size fits all" educational curricula as if all children were duplicates of each other.

We have entirely lost our way on education - we expect State and Federal governments to work it out for us; we expect that everyone will do well at it; we are bamboozled into paying a higher and higher tax price for a worse and worse product...time to stop this insanity and apply a bit of common sense to education.

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