History Matters to Me

And at a time when other liberals were besotted with affirmative action as a strategy to undo the cruel injustices of American history, Humphrey pointed out that race-based remedies could only prove divisive when good jobs were disappearing for everyone. Liberal policy, he said, must stress “common denominators — mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears.”

In 1976 he joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent — and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.

It sounds heretical now. But this newspaper endorsed it then, while 70 percent of Americans believed the government should offer jobs to everyone who wanted one. However, Jimmy Carter — a new kind of Democrat answering to a new upper-middle-class, suburban constituency, embarrassed by industrial unions and enamored with the alleged magic of the market — did not.

“Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy,” President Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union address, a generation before Bill Clinton said almost the same thing, cementing the Democrats’ ambivalent retreat from New Deal-based government activism.

When the first international math test was administered to students in eighth grade and 12th grade in 1964, our eighth-graders came in next to last and our seniors were dead last. In the first international test of science in the early 1970s, our seniors scored last. In additional tests of mathematics and science in the 1980s and ’90s, American students seldom surpassed the international average.

Using the logic of today’s reformers, American education has “failed” consistently for the past 50 years. But wait — Obama said in his State of the Union address this year that we should ignore the “naysayers” because “America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers are more productive than ours. No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on earth.”

As the China-born, China-educated scholar Yong Zhao, now at the University of Oregon, has pointed out, there is no logical connection between international test scores and the success of our economy. Our scores have been poor to middling for 50 years, yet we have the greatest economy in the world.

Obama rightly said that we must encourage innovation, creativity and imagination in our schools. But the course his administration is pushing — and pushing hard — is to emphasize testing even more than George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. As more states evaluate teachers by their students’ scores, teachers will feel pressure to teach to the tests, to devote more time to preparing for the tests, and to decrease the time spent on non-tested subjects. Some teachers and administrators will cheat. And some states will lower their standards to raise scores.

This is great news for the testing industry, but not for our nation’s students and teachers.

Instead of promoting innovation, creativity and imagination, the current obsession with raising test scores discourages these things. Students are learning to pick the right answer and being penalized for thinking differently. Subjects that spark students’ imagination, like the arts, are being squeezed out of the school week. And some districts plan to develop standardized tests for all subjects, which are guaranteed to do damage to students’ ability to think creatively.

All this in the name of beating other nations on scores—which has little bearing on our success as a nation.