I was recently looking through a publication from the National Center for Education Statistics on "The Condition of Education, 1999."
In reviewing their data, I came across some very interesting statistics. This data shows that the United States has the most successful educational system in the world or the history of the world.
In 1996, we had a 5 percent dropout rate in 10th through 12th grade - 5 percent of kids who were enrolled in October were not enrolled the following October even though they had not graduated. That means we are keeping 95 percent of our kids in school. Considering we have about 52 million kids in the public K-12 system, that is an amazing accomplishment.
Our high school graduation rate in 1998 was 87.6 percent, the third highest of any country in the world. Although we rank third, the U.S. is the only country that encourages every child to continue at every grade, to complete 12 years of school and to graduate. We do not test kids out or remove them from an academic program and send them to a trade school. We encourage all our children - children with English language difficulties (24 percent of California students), poor children who face a multitude of social issues that often work against their success in school (23 percent of California students), children with learning problems (10 percent of California students, including special education) - to go all the way through school. We are the only country in the world that does this. And despite all the public school bashing, we are very successful at it and do it better than any other country on the face of this earth.
In 1996, 65 percent of our high school graduates were enrolled in college the following fall - the highest percentage of any country in the world - and 41.9 percent of these graduates were enrolled in four-year colleges. No country on earth does a better job of sending its kids on to higher education. Ninety percent of these kids are from America's public schools.
There does appear to be a class problem with kids going on to college. Only 45 percent of kids whose parents were not high school graduates went on to college, compared with 56.1 percent of kids whose parents were high school graduates, 66 percent of kids whose parents had some college and 85.2 percent of kids whose parents had a bachelor's degree.
Today in California, 20 percent of kids in school have a mother who did not finish high school.Economic status also affects college attendance. The higher the socioeconomic status, the higher the rate of college attendance.
In 1997, 87.4 percent of Americans aged 25-29 had completed high school. Here we rank third behind Japan's 90.6 percent and Germany's 88.9 percent. But, remember, we educate everyone; they don't! Their higher percentages are from a smaller, more select group. In 1997, 31.8 percent of Americans aged 25-29 had four years of college, again the highest of any country in the world. Only 13 percent of Japanese aged 25-29 have four years of college. (These figures come from The Manufactured Crisis by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle.)
America's free public education system is the best in the world. We do more with more students (every one, 52 million) with one of the lowest public education expenditures per student of any industrialized country in the world.
California, with the seventh largest economy in the world (we produced $1 trillion in goods and services in 1998), ranks 40th in funding in the nation - that's more than $1,000 per child per year below the national average.
Currently, California spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education.
Do we need reform? You bet we do! We need much more help for the 20 percent of our kids who are poor. We need much more help for the 20 percent of our kids who are English language learners. We need more and larger colleges and universities for all of our children. We need better funding for our underfunded public schools, especially in California.
We need to repair our decaying school buildings. We need to make schools into safe zones with plenty of technology, books, paper, pencils, counselors, psychologists, librarians and nurses. We need to give teachers control of their schools and classrooms and make teaching a real profession. We need to provide salaries and benefits that attract and retain a full force of professionals to meet all our kids' needs.
Schools should be community centers full of services and educational opportunity. They should be the pride of the entire community, not run-down, underfunded dumps that kids are forced to attend and where teachers must learn to make do with whatever can be scraped together.
America's and California's schools have done an amazing job because teachers have made them work with talent, pride and determination.
We could do even better with some positive reforms.
Don't fall for the bogus attacks on public schools launched by people with hidden agendas. We have the best public school system in the world. We don't need to destroy it to make it better. If we destroy the current system in the name of improving it, we will have destroyed an incredibly successful public institution - one that has succeeded in creating the greatest economic and political system in the world.
Make no mistake about it, we must not let that happen.
