Much has been presumptuously written by pundits and newspaper editorialists about the billion-plus dollars of federal appropriations and District property tax money that have been pumped into the DC Public Schools Infrastructure (the 171 campuses and their buildings, classrooms, laboratories, offices, cafeterias, gymnasiums, and athletic playing fields, etc.) within the last 40 years, in attempts to persuade the public that lavishly preparing the learning environment for the student is equally as, or more, important than preparing the student for learning. The beginning of the decline of learning in the District public schools coincided with such a general decline throughout the nation, when the federal government began sticking its nose into the affairs of the local school districts, during the early 1970’s, to convince the states that their cooperation with federal agendas was the key to greatly increased funding; and to make parents think that they no longer needed to be integrally involved in their children’s education, that the school would do it all.

Of course, while such blatant educational absurdity was favorably received by the District’s parents a generation-or-more ago, the recent editorial hype in “The Washington Post,” positing that standardized national testing shows that District students are learning arithmetic concepts and performing math problem-solving “better” than they were two years ago, has probably made mothers and fathers in DC even more inclined to believe that the current state-of-affairs is favorable and actually working. Yet, most of them seem to remain ignorantly clueless as to what is really happening in the school system, and their essential role in it.

In June 2007, Michelle Rhee was appointed as DC Schools Chancellor by Mayor Adrian Fenty and given a mandate to address the prevailing issue of why DC school children are not learning to effectively read, write, and perform basic arithmetic. Immediately, Rhee began incorrectly focusing her censuring attention on the teachers, administrators, and classroom facilities of the 171 public school campuses, instead of deductively pursuing the real reason why elementary, middle, and high school students were performing so poorly in classes taught by sincerely dedicated, highly educated teachers using expensive state-of-the-art educational resources.

If Rhee had properly done her homework (spending time, unseen, observing what is actually occurring in the classrooms), she would have, no doubt, concluded after a very short amount of time that most of the approximately 37,000 preadolescent and adolescent DC public school students are arriving at school from home unprepared to learn. This makes me wonder about the Chancellor’s motives, for Rhee is a refined product of a dedicated Korean-American family who made a continuing effort to prepare their daughter, over her formative years, to aspire to learn. Her outstanding academic successes are indicative of this fact. This is why I think that Rhee’s public conclusions, placing essential blame for the low academic achievements of DC students on public school teachers, administrators, and classroom resources, were as politically contrived as her current efforts to convince Mayor Fenty’s voting base, mostly comprised of DC parents, that national test scores genuinely reflect student improvement in mathematics and the other core academic subjects.

What, pray tell, does it realistically say when twelve-year-old six graders are prepped two-to-three hours per day to pass standardized multiple choice math tests, in accordance with prescribed math test curricula that the classroom teachers are required to instruct, and subsequently pass the tests, but return to class the following day to flunk daily tests covering the same materials over which they were tested? This, unfortunately, is the sad lot of most of the District’s elementary and middle school students. They come to school unprepared to learn and, while at school, they are taught to pass tests, which will improperly show that they are learning what they are, actually, not learning. All of this is nonsense is done to perpetuate an inept system that is not working.

Any certified educator worth her salt will assert that daily class work is consistently much more revealing and definitive of a student’s progress in learning mathematics, English grammar, writing, physical science, or history than are standardized test scores. If anything standardized multiple choice tests covering differing levels of math and science only serve to show a student’s aptitude to learn, and this is only if students take the test without being prepped for it. The only way standardized tests, over subject matter, reveal the academic competency of public school students is if the tests are administered comprehensively at the end of a school year to determine if the students have learned the necessary amount of material from particular classes in order to receive credit for the classes. These types of tests should comprise objective, essay, and computational problems and questions in order to have total effectiveness.

In sum, parents, not teachers and school administrators, are the individuals exclusively, and naturally, responsible for preparing their children to learn each and every day in states’ public school classrooms. If they don’t do their jobs, teachers are forced to deal with young recalcitrant minds unwilling to learn despite the best lesson plans and the expensive instructional resources with which they are provided. Though numerous state school administrations around the nation are actually turning to the absurd practice, classroom teachers should not be encumbered with the imposing task of parenting their students. If mandatory classroom parenting of America’s children is the sad future of public education, the totalitarianism described in George Orwell’s “1984″ is certainly imminent, and with it the death of adolescent intuition and its budding genius wrought only through the novel teaching efforts of dedicated moms and dads.