The Dumbing of America

The College Board announced recently that it will take another step backward on its flagship SAT college entrance exam. The SAT, once the dominant test for high school juniors hoping for a seat in a discriminating college, has lost its numerical advantage. On the coasts of the nation, it is still the test of choice in most schools. In the mid-section of the country, however, the ACT has steadily gained numbers so that it now has surpassed its rival in numbers of test takers nationwide.

It cannot be said for certain that the College Board is changing because of the competition from the ACT, but the fact remains that recent changes will bring the venerable measure closer to its younger foe. The real story of what the College Board has done comes into focus with a little historical perspective. The SAT has been gradually dumbed down to accommodate our increasingly less capable high school population. Back in 1994 the College Board succumbed to pressure to remove the devilish antonym and analogy questions. These questions measured both vocabulary and critical reasoning skills, two elements found dwindling among high schoolers. Anyone who works with college freshman and sophomores as I do can attest to their poor vocabulary and paucity of reasoning skill. To protect them from ego damage, the SAT stopped asking them hard questions. I think that is metaphorically called punting (and I don't mean using a long flat bottomed boat.)

The other major change in the SAT is the removal of "SAT words," a term of derision that has been applied to any word that the hearer does not recognize. In other words, erudition is passe; we be down with dumb. The remarks by one high school student concerning the changes are telling. Commenting on the old test which had, "hard words and stuff," she was relieved to know her vocabulary would not need to grow much to score well on the test. I can't wait to get her in Composition class.

On another front there is a furor over Common Core standards in education. Many conservatives are joining the fight against them. Rachel Alexander of the Christian Post makes a false statement typical of many objectors: "Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration." First, Common Core is not a curriculum; it is a set of standards. Curriculum is what and how you teach; standards, like Common Core, are the goals you hope to achieve by teaching what you teach. The Common Core is simply a set of concepts that students are expected to know at a given stage in their education. It is up to the local school, even the classroom teacher sometimes, to decide what materials and lessons to use. Second, Obama is not forcing any state to adopt Common Core. Sure, there is federal money available for those who do, but just like many federal programs, states can choose not to take the money.

Alexander also cites Diane Ravitch, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, saying Common Core has not been proven. That is not true either. Tennessee has vigorously applied Common Core standards along with a rigorous teacher training and accountability regime and their student scores have rocketed toward the top in national rankings. Meanwhile Michigan dithers over what to do and our student scores are rapidly sinking toward the bottom. There may be honest objections to how standards are applied and how and when students are tested, but objecting to standards is like saying you don't care if students learn anything.

We cannot spank them anymore; that would be abusive, so they misbehave with impunity. They might sue if we make onerous demands on them as teens, so they have freedom without responsibility. Schools purport to teach diversity and end up promoting mindless uniformity. Across the country nearly 20% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Year after year American students fall farther behind students from many other countries. If I didn't know better I would suspect a sinister conspiracy to produce a generation of mindless automatons who will stand for nothing and fall for anything. That sounds suspiciously like the technique used by the Serpent in the Garden. Surely we wouldn't fall for that again.

A Hill Worth Dying On

April 15 has come and gone once more. Like many Americans I dread its coming, work madly to complete the endless forms (or pay to have someone else do them), and grumble more loudly than usual that I pay too much for needless programs and wasteful spending. I am not going to fight the income tax battle here, but I did notice a couple interesting sideshows in the news that got me thinking.

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy apparently was willing to pay his dues for the privilege of grazing cattle on federal land up until 1993. Then something changed his mind. Amid all the flag-waving and shouts of government heavy handedness, the true position of Mr. Bundy as a law-breaker may have been lost. Gracy Olmstead has a good summary of the situation in The Federalist this week. Politico reports that Bundy is more than just an aggrieved rancher; he is a radical activist who does not recognize the authority of the federal government. He's sort of like a holocaust denier in that way. I suspect many of the tea party flag wavers who gathered on his ranch this week are ignorant of the real story.

A strangely similar fight has been going on in a completely unrelated arena over Common Core educational standards. According to an article in The Foundry this week, fifteen states are backing out of their association with Common Core. This too is being framed as a battle against federal over-reach, but as in the Bundy case, ignorance abounds. Articles like one on Fox News website chronicle the activities of people who object to Common Core, but offer nothing substantive about their objections. A quick look at the standards themselves can dispel most of the objector myths. (There is a good myth-buster at the Common Core web site.)

What scares me most is not that the government wants to take our money or set standards for educating our children. I fear the kind of people who can jump on a band wagon without knowing where it came from or where it's really going. These are the same people who are swayed by half-truths and misdirection perpetrated by crafty policy salesmen. It is the grifter's trick to get you to look at his right hand while he steals your watch with his left. Only in this case we are not losing our watch, we are losing our freedom.

It is misguided for Christians to be fighting Common Core or the Bureau of Land Management. What we should be doing is taking a majority stand against the tyrannical minorities which are systematically stripping us of our Constitutional rights to practice our religion freely. A handful of atheists got prayer and Bible reading removed from public schools. A tiny minority has insisted that homosexual practices must be accepted as an alternative lifestyle and to disagree is bigotry. Although a Pew Research poll shows that Americans agree 4 to 1 that abortion is morally wrong, it remains legal to kill unborn children.  And I wonder how many people are really offended by Merry Christmas. Really.

The Bundy ranch has no hills worth dying on, but any one of the issues just mentioned qualifies. (OK, not Merry Christmas.) The Great Commission commands believers to make disciples. If we took that charge seriously we could effect the only change that matters in the long (long) run: changed hearts. That is why Jesus died on the hill he knew was worth the cost. The price paid on that hill must move us to pick our battles carefully, but pick them. There are hills worth dying on.

An Open Letter to My Children

The full title of this post is really "An Open Letter to My Children and Anyone Else Who Wants to Hear Clair Blather About the Joys and Disappointments of Parenting". Many years ago when we still had three children living in our home, I lived under the delusion that I was a pretty good parent. It wasn't until the three little birdies left the nest and started families of their own that I began to doubt my self assessment.

Each one of my dear ones has made it clear on separate occasions that they would not have been in unreserved agreement with my measure of my parental perfection. Likewise, each has exhibited some behavior which would cause any concerned parent to have some degree of disappointment. Please do not misunderstand, my children (or you listeners-in); I am still proud to call myself your father, and nothing you have done or can do will diminish my unconditional love for you.

And there it is: the major flaw in my parenting which has been pointed out by you and, at times, by your dear mother. I cannot seem to craft a compliment or statement of praise without inserting a "but" in it. You must hear echoes in the halls of your memory of me saying, "You did a good job! But..." Each of you has received deserved praise from respectable sources throughout your lives. Yet I wonder if I ever said how proud of you I am without sticking my "but" in it.

Perhaps each of you has reason to "hate" me. (I am using the 21st century, Gen-Y version of "hate," not the Bible version or the Webster version.) I know if my father was as you perceive me to be, I would "hate" him. I look back on the situations when I behaved really badly and cringe. I have said and done some really dumb things. And while it may be true that there is no excuse for stupid, there is a difference between stupid-mean and stupid-thoughtless. If I had only thought better...

So now that you are all parents yourselves, I want to encourage you to break the mold (if in fact there is a mold). Let your children know how great they are. Sure, you will correct them at times. But there must be more times when you simply praise them. If as parents we are to model God's love, it is imperative that we remember what manner of love we enjoy, "That while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." When Jesus went to the cross, it was the Father saying,"I love you this much." And there are no "buts" about that. 

A Flood of Questions

I haven't seen the movie Noah, and I doubt I will see it for quite a while. I gave up first run movies in theaters in protest of the price long ago. You can judge how long by the fact that I think I paid the princely sum of $5.00 for the last ticket. My children, who did not inherit the frugality gene, tell me it now costs north of $10.00 for the ticket and the typical drink and popcorn adds another ten-spot. No thanks. As much as I would like to see the flick, it's not worth $40.00 to take my wife and I when it will be $2.00 at Family Video soon, and free later on Netflix if it isn't too big at the box office.

But I do feel compelled to write about Noah, if only because I am hurt that it means I have probably lost my chance to write a screenplay for the novel I have been waiting to have discovered. You may not be aware that I have been peddling my own historical fiction, fantasy adventure romance novel about the life and times of Noah and his angelic helpers. The Kindle version is still available on Amazon, but I think it can be considered "out of print" as my on-demand publisher, Xulon Press, has not received my annual &*@#$24.99 maintenance fee for several years now. (That seems like a scam to me; can it really cost twenty-five bucks per year to keep a digital file available?) Maybe if enough people try to order it, they will "find" the file in some archive. Who knows?

Back to the movie. I did read some reviews. Sophia Lee of World Magazine calls Noah "a dark psychological thriller wrapped up in a horror film."  She remarks that, "Noah makes serious attempts at grappling with deep theological questions.... But Christians shouldn't be surprised that a secular production would miss the most important and critical element of this Genesis story—the gospel of Christ." Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian says the film is "a big muscular movie" that is "bombastic and redundant and subtly disappointing." Bradshaw also says that writer/director Darren Aronofsky has pretty well expunged God from the story line. What a surprise: Hollywood ignores the elementary role of God in a biblical story. Who would have guessed that?

I will wait to see the movie for my final judgment, but I have to give Aronofsky credit for seeing what I saw in the story of the biblical Noah (Great minds...). My motivation for writing a Bible-based fiction/fantasy was the realization that all the characters in the Bible were real human beings with real human foibles and they struggled with real human (and demonic) enemies. Even though Aronofsky is an avowed atheist, he does invest what he calls "personal passion" in the Genesis story (according to Lee). He also claims to have done 10 years of research, which may explain how he ended up with a story idea so similar to mine.

Maybe the best thing about all the fuss over Noah, the movie is the fuss itself. As a wise woman in my Sunday School class said, it opens the door to spiritual conversations. Anything that turns that knob is at least partly a good thing. Maybe I should stop sulking and take advantage of the moment. Maybe I just did.