Bill Dalton: Failing our kids

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.

Are we creating a new lost generation?

The numbers are in. They’re not good. And we can stop blaming the pandemic.

America’s children are worse students today than their peers were 10 years ago, with reading and math scores plummeting almost everywhere, in rich school districts as well as poor.

Where data is available, reading scores last year dropped in 83 percent of the nation’s school districts, while math scores dropped in 70 percent. Geographic location and race didn’t matter, but the lowest-achieving students are suffering the most.

In one of every three school districts, students are now reading a full grade level below what they were in 2015.

Let that sink in.

The dismal findings were released last week by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and they reveal a long and steady decline in academic achievement in the United States.

The study’s authors, alarmed by the numbers, warned our country is in a “learning recession,” according to The New York Times.

What I find alarming is that no one at the highest levels of our government seems to care. Instead, they’re seeking $1.5 trillion (that t isn’t a typo) in military spending, while gutting the Department of Education and attacking colleges nationwide.

Many voters, including me, didn’t like many of the policies of George W. Bush (or “shrub” as Texas columnist Molly Ivins mockingly called him) when he was president.

But at least Bush was well-educated (Yale and Harvard degrees) and married to a schoolteacher/librarian — not a model. That undoubtedly influenced him to support No Child Left Behind, which legislated accountability for teachers and schools.

Test scores were rising after 1990, but then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s, according to The Times.

That’s about the same time (2015) that the federal government ditched No Child Left Behind, and we witnessed the introduction of school laptops, smartphones and social media into classrooms worldwide.

No coincidence, in my mind, that students everywhere are now suffering as a result of too much screen time. Even adults are hooked, judging from how many I see scrolling on their smartphones like crack monkeys.

Nearly half of American teens are online “almost constantly” compared to less than 25 percent a decade ago, The Times noted. Nearly one in three say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, and many schools don't even require they read an entire book.

What’s worse, the American Academy of Pediatrics just reported that the number of teens getting at least seven hours of sleep is at its lowest level in three decades. Sleep insufficiency leads to reduced academic performance, among other bad things.

It’s easy to blame teachers and the rise of social media for lower test scores, but it’s too easy. The real fault lies with us — parents, taxpayers and our elected officials — who’ve lost touch with what’s really important in this country.

It’s not the culture wars over transgender bathrooms. It’s not who’s “woke” on campus or in control of the purse strings in Washington or Lansing. It’s not the foolish, costly War in Iran.

None of those will matter if we’re raising a nation of illiterates who can’t balance their checkbooks or cryptocurrency accounts.

The Stanford study’s authors noted that, despite flaws in No Child Left Behind, it at least showed that school accountability does change student and teacher behaviors.

And the law reflected a nationwide, bipartisan desire to improve education, which we seem to have lost since a certain someone became president.

His hatred of higher education and attacks on academia is starting to rub off. The share of Americans who now say college is “very important” has fallen to a record low of 35 percent, nearly half what it was a decade ago, according to a recent Gallup poll.

But just about everything today that frustrates or endangers us — from getting your fast-food order wrong at the drive-thru, to air traffic controllers unable to prevent runway collisions — can be traced to failures in education.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out our first priority must and should always be our children. As the cliche goes, they are the future.

If we must choose between spending more on weapons or more on education, let’s at least try to level the playing field. Imagine what $1.5 trillion could do if spent in the nation’s classrooms instead of bomb factories.

Nelson Mandela, one of the wisest humans to walk this planet, observed that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”If you truly want to Make America Great Again, invest more in our children — before it’s too late.

— Bill Dalton is a former reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star and worked for several Michigan newspapers. He spends summers on the family farm near Fennville. His novel “The Bank Game” — a crime thriller — is available from Amazon along with “Dalton’s Bend.”

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