Road to mediocrity

Here’s a promise: one key issue that won’t be talked about much this election cycle is education. It’s sad and a travesty.

I went to a public school, West Jefferson High School in Harvey. I graduated in 1965 and let me tell you, I received a good education. If I hadn’t, I would not have been able to earn a master’s degree from the University of Arizona or a doctorate from Southern Illinois University. This from a guy who had a C-average in high school.

Fast forward to the future and now I am teaching at Nicholls State University. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see the school’s entrance requirements moving upward. That means we are seeing better prepared students than before and, hopefully, that trend will continue. But all is not well in academe. I still see students who do not know the difference between a sentence fragment and a run-on sentence. These students have been cheated somewhere along the line, maybe all along the line. When Nicholls held remedial courses, we had students take English and mathematics classes two, three, even four times just to move on to a beginning English or math course, classes for which they actually receive college credit.

I have never taught at the elementary or high school level, so I don’t know for sure what is going on. But let me tell you some of what I see as major hurdles for public education (and probably private as well.)

• I do not believe the federal government’s plan to “teach to the test,” rather than teaching the fundamentals, is working. Don’t train students to pass high-stakes such as LEAP, train them to know the basics and to think.

• I do not believe students are being taught English and mathematics as they should be.

• I do not believe students are taught to think for themselves. I do believe, however, they are being taught to spit information back without understanding that information’s relation to the real world.

• I do not believe that enough students are being failed. Perhaps we have too many teachers and administrators who believe the students’ fragile psyches are at risk if they get what they earn. I ask this simple question: How can they learn about consequences in the real world if they aren’t taught them in school? I see students every semester who say what grade they expect in a course, then become upset when they make a grade that doesn’t meet their expectations.

• I do not believe that special education students should be thought of as special ed just because they have learning disabilities. What about the brilliant and close-to-brilliant children? Why aren’t they treated like special ed. They are! Oh yes, that’s the government “helping” again.

• I do not believe that teachers are treasured in our society as they are in some others. If they were, they would be rewarded for their services at a much higher pay grade. Here’s a remarkably sublime idea: The more you pay for a service, the more talented the people you can recruit to that type of endeavor. It’s not a bad thing that doctors and lawyers make substantially more than the average Joe. But you could never convince me that either is more valuable to society than teachers.

So, what do I believe, you may wonder. I believe:

• I believe our children are the future.

• I believe we have perpetuated a flawed system that MUST be changed and can be if we rethink the value of a good educational system.

• I believe that Louisiana could become, and quickly, the most envied state in the United States, if we double teachers’ salaries while simultaneously removing the weakest teachers. How do we do this seemingly impossible thing? With the desire, the will and the political strength, we can make it happen. And guess what, if we did, the number of quality students going into education, rather than law, medicine and engineering, would double, triple or quadruple. Then we would have fewer and fewer students who need remedial courses.

With these changes, in a few short years, this state would become an economic engine envied by 49 states.