Bad Students, Not Bad Schools

In this fine debunking book, Bob Weissberg hacks his way across the landscape of current American education like a marauding army, trashing bogus theories, exposing the futility of pointless `reforms,' showing no mercy to the charlatans, rent-seekers, and fools who promise academic excellence for all. He even dares to argue that our educational failings are not of supply, but of demand, and are therefore not failings at all in any moral sense, just expressions of human liberty. Stuffed with facts, statistics, and research, this book is a relentless attack on the absurdities of educational romanticism, and on what the author calls the `culture of mendacity' that has taken over educational theory and practice in the U.S.A."---John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

"In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, Robert Welssberg tells it like it is. This brilliant and brave book dares to challenge the nostrums of right and left as it presents irrefutable evidence that the numerous politically-correct responses to our failure to educate our young are doomed to fail. No amount of money thrown at the schools, no structural or managerial changes, none of the usual answers cut to the heart of the problems that plague the system from kindergarten through higher education. Making real changes that can prepare our young to excel in a complex world requires acknowledging some hard truths. Professor Weissberg does so with rare honesty---which is bound to make this a controversial book. He marshals irrefutable research results to back up his assertions about what should be done---and what will never succeed---in order to cure the ills that plague American classrooms today. Reading this book is a transformative experience. It should change our way of looking at our children, our schools, and our country."---Rita Kramer, Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers

Recent decades have seen a consistent effort by the American educational establishment to instruct schoolchildren about the importance of "appreciating differences," all in the name of "tolerance," so as to quell burgeoning "hate." In Pernicious Tolerance, Robert Weissberg argues that educators' endless obsession with homophobia, sexism, racism, and other alleged hateful disorders is part of a much larger ongoing radical ideological quest to transform America, by first capturing education.

Americans are increasingly alarmed over our nation's educational deficiencies. Though anxieties about schooling are unending, especially with public institutions, these problems are more complex than institutional failure. Expenditures for education have exploded, and far exceed inflation and the rising costs of health care, but academic achievement remains flat. Many students are unable to graduate from high school, let alone obtain a college degree. And if they do make it to college, they are often forced into remedial courses. Why, despite this fiscal extravagance, are educational disappointments so widespread?

In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, Robert Weissberg argues that the answer is something everybody knows to be true but is afraid to say in public---America's educational woes too often reflect the demographic mix of students. Schools today are filled with millions of youngsters, too many of whom struggle with the English language or simply have mediocre intellectual ability. Their lackluster performances are probably impervious to the current reform prescriptions regardless of the remedy's ideological derivation. Making matters worse, retention of students in school is embraced as a philosophy even if it impedes the learning of other students. Weissberg argues that most of America's educational woes would vanish if indifferent, troublesome students were permitted to leave when they had absorbed as much as they could learn; they would quickly be replaced by learning-hungry students, including many new immigrants from other countries.

American education survives since we import highly-intelligent, technically skillful foreigners just as we import oil, but this may not last forever. When educational establishments get serious about world-class mathematics and science, and permit serious students to learn, problems will dissolve. Rewarding the smartest, not spending fortunes in a futile quest to uplift the bottom, should become official policy. This book is a bracing reminder of the risks of political manipulation of education and argues that the measure of policy should be academic achievment

Robert Weissberg is professor of political science emeritus, University of Illinois-Urbana. He is the author of numerous books, including Polling Policy and Public Opinion, The Politics of Empowerment, The Limits of Civic Activism, and Pernicious Tolerance.