Free Killer Politics by Ed Schultz Page B

dots. Birth certificate records show 40 percent of the babies born in America in 2007 were born to single mothers. Meanwhile, the National Commission on Children reports that three out of four children from single-parent families will experience poverty before they turn eleven, and the Department of Health and Human Services says that fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school. No government program is going to solve this—however, better employment opportunities can. And as a society we need to have a national discussion about the importance of families. The concept of family isn’t an anachronism, it is a cornerstone of society. I know some people will naturally bristle because this has been a right wing bullet point for so long, but it’s time for us to take back the issue. Those right wingers like to talk a good game. Let’s play a good game by at least creating a social and educational framework that allows people from all social strata to succeed.
    Now let’s look at schools themselves.
    It’s no secret that primary education in America lags in comparison with many other industrialized countries. In eighth-grade math skills,according to a 2007 USA Today report, our best performing state, Massachusetts, with 51 percent of the students proficient, was well behind Singapore (73 percent), Hong Kong (68 percent), Korea (65 percent), Taiwan (61 percent), and Japan (57 percent). When given the choice, most high school students opt out of Advanced Math, Physics, and Science, says the National Science Foundation. That lack of enthusiasm suggests that there is something terribly wrong with the way we are teaching our kids.
    In some cases, it is the teachers. Every school has a teacher who cannot teach but who keeps hanging on because no one has the guts to deal with the issue. By and large, I support teachers unions, but let’s get real. Not every teacher is competent or worth defending. The stakes are too high to allow inept teachers to retain their positions. For children, these years from elementary school through high school are their only chance to learn to read and write. For every bad teacher allowed to remain in place, hundreds of children lose the opportunity of a lifetime. You, as a member of a school board or as an involved patron of the school district, can play a huge role in supporting great teachers and not renewing poor ones. When it comes to education, grassroots efforts can make a dramatic difference.
    THE TEXTBOOK DUMB DOWN
    A 2006 MSNBC.com report by correspondent Alex Johnson touches on an issue most people don’t know about or consider—the sorry state of textbooks. More than ever, just as agenda-driven networks too often tell their viewers what they want to hear, so do textbook publishers, who must appeal to school boards filled with religious zealots on one extreme and granola-munching atheists on the other. When you consider that Texas and California control one third of the textbook market purchases, you can begin to imagine how these textbooks are being crafted to sell to school boards.
    The textbook industry has consolidated to the point that there are now just the Big Four—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, and Houghton Mifflin. Consolidation to that extent is never good, because when you don’t have to compete, you don’t have to get better. Profit then matters more than performance. When capitalism allows monopolies to form unchecked, you get the same kind of stagnation you find with unchecked socialism. Ironic.
    Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Department of Education who served Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said, “[Textbooks] are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator.”
    Monopolies are changing the way we