No Sinner Left Behind: America’s Teachers and Ministers Are Failing!

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT ANYONE ELSE, but I’m tired of hearing about America’s failing schools. Google “education crisis in America” and you turn up 368 million results in seconds.

The first story listed is a warning from U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The situation is dire, he claims. American adults lack math and technical skills needed for success in a modern workplace. Compared to counterparts in most developed nations the average U. S. worker is an absolute dolt.

And who can you blame except teachers!

I happen to be a retired teacher and the story got me wondering. If our schools are in crisis what other institutional problems might pundits be missing? Are America’s doctors failing? Do we have a “hospital crisis” too? The same type of evidence used to prove there’s an “education crisis” indicates that we do. Now I have worse news to deliver. Similar evidence shows we have a “church crisis” on our hands.

This is serious, folks. Eternal damnation is no laughing matter.

In fact, I hereby declare myself a famous “church reformer.” I am going to be like Michelle Rhee, who talks constantly about what must be done to fix the schools. I will offer all kinds of fixing advice, like Secretary Duncan, or Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. They have plans to save every student. I will make their efforts look puny. I will have a plan to save every sinner!

True, I have never been a minister. I have never written a sermon. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I remember all the commandments. But I have sat in a church pew. Not recently, I admit, but that’s a technicality.

School reformers never seem to teach or teach only briefly. That doesn’t stop them from spewing drivel.

Why am I so fired up today? The kinds of charts and graphs used to show teachers are failing also prove ministers, rabbis and priests are failing—and failing badly. Sin is up. Church attendance is down. According to Church Leaders magazine only 17.7% of Americans attend church weekly.

Even worse, when asked about attendance, we lie! Almost twice as many of us say we attend as actually show up in pews during services. Even if rampant lying wasn’t a problem, the picture would be bleak:

37% of Americans claim they go to church or mosque or temple weekly or more;

33% go monthly or yearly;

29% admit they never go at all.

Look at this chart:

THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT the more I realize I need to write a book! That’s what famous reformers do. I will go on television and offer sage advice. Then I will go on tour and earn a few fat speaking fees.

While I get busy writing here’s what every concerned citizen can do. Call your representatives in Congress! Tell them we need a new 1,100 page law called No Sinner Left Behind. Tell them to model it after No Child Left Behind. Tell them we must set higher standards in churches. We don’t need more prayer in school. We need more prayer in cathedrals!

Don’t believe we have a “church crisis?” Look at the facts! We’ve got sex between unmarried people occurring in every nook and cranny of the nation. (See chart below.) And who can you blame? The couples having the sex? The people who don’t go to church? Oh no. It has to be the fault of the men and the women in the pulpits. (It’s like the “education crisis” where teachers get blame, even when 1 out of every 7 students misses at least a month of school each year.)

Sorry, I may be hyperventilating. But consider the evidence! More than 40% of babies in the United States are born to unwed mothers:

And what about the same “racial gap” we see in our schools? Look at divorce rates shown on the following chart. Don’t tell me poverty or conditions in neighborhoods around the churches or virulent racism in American history factor into this situation. That’s just priests and rabbis making excuses, like teachers in high-poverty areas.

So, get with it Reverend! Shape up Father. It’s time to save every sinner. Or you will be replaced.

Do ministers have tenure?

Well, if they do, we should take it away.

As I was saying, look at this gap! The crappy ministers must work in the black and white churches. How else can you explain the success of Asian-American religious leaders? Asian-American couples are half as likely to divorce. Statistics also show that 16% of Asian-American babies are born out of wedlock. For all other Americans the figure is 41%. Eight out of ten Asian-American kids are raised in two-parent families. Oddly enough—and I have no idea why this is true—the average Asian-American kid does better in school.

Anyway, good job Hindu temple leaders! Outstanding teaching, Buddhist and Shinto thinkers. You aren’t leaving sinners behind.

NOW THAT I HAVE IDENTIFIED THIS CRISIS, it is up to me, as famous church reformer, to offer advice. So, here’s what we do:

First:  require ministers to focus on “basics” in every sermon. Then measure “before” and “after” rates of sinning. If lying and cursing continue, publish the names of failing priests, etc. in local papers.

If rates of adultery and stealing fall ministers earn merit pay.

Second:  grade churches. That way, parishioners know which reverends are most likely to help them save their souls. Suppose 39% of marriages performed by a Presbyterian minister end in divorce, vs. 19% for a Lutheran minister down the street. Then the latter church gets a “B+” and the former a “D” and you fire the minister.

Third:  introduce Common Core Church Standards. I admit that one’s going to be hard, since there are so many different ideas about how to get to Heaven. I’m still working on this; but I promise I’ll have all the answers if you buy my book.

Fourth: get smarter ministers! School reformers say the problem in U. S. education is that teachers are too dumb. So, create a program modeled on the efforts of Wendy Kopp, and “Teach for America.” Get top students from Harvard and Yale and Stanford to enter the ministry. Call this new organization “Preach for America.”

Trust me:  it would be great.

Really, I have all kinds of bold ideas—so buy my book as soon as you can. It would make the perfect stocking stuffer. And remember, there’s not a moment to lose. America’s teachers and ministers are all failing.

Clearly, we need to start grading churches.
We need to hold ministers accountable when their parishioners sin.

Mitt Romney Takes on Teachers' Unions!

I WOULD ARGUE THAT TWO RECENT STORIES ABOUT Mitt Romney and his family have a direct bearing on the subject of U. S. education.

The first focused on Ann Romney's love of horseback riding. The other outlined her husband's first big speech about schools, and the policies he would implement if elected president, to address America's supposed "education crisis." Governor Romney, who once famously said that he loved Michigan because all the trees were "just the right height," wanted his audience to know that when it came to schools, he was less sanguine. Apparently, America's teachers aren't the right height or don't have enough leaves.

In any case, Mr. Romney's main points can be boiled down as follows:

A. teachers' unions are really, really bad (and, by the way, support President Obama)
B. all parents are really, really good (and should vote Republican) and totally committed to their children's education
C. therefore, we can fix everything if we set up more charter schools and have more parent choice
D. ...because, if we didn't already mention it, all parents are really, really good and committed to their children's education
E. and teachers' unions are really, really bad and frankly, most of their members are scumbags
F. so, we should grade all schools; then parents, all good, all committed, can choose schools wisely, and, of course, all parents will choose wisely, because, well...you get the idea
G. and since private enterprise is always good, and because unfettered business cures all ills in all societies, it would be great if we turned public schools over to for-profit companies, which would mean we'd end up with nothing but "A+" schools, because companies could break teachers' unions (which support President Obama)
H. and have we mentioned yet that teachers' unions are responsible for every problem in U. S. public education?

NOW, DON'T GET ME WRONG. In most stories I've read, Governor Romney comes across as a gentleman. He's a devoted husband, good father, regular church goer, a good human being. Ann Romney seems like a likeable, lovely woman. But it would be stretching the truth beyond recognition to assert that people like the Romneys understand the kind of  realities that confront families farther down the economic scale, teachers who work with children of those families, public school teachers, in general, or the issues that most affect America's public schools as we enter the coming election season.

Indeed, like so many others who claim to want to fix the public schools, Mr. Romney's family long ago decided that the public schools weren't quite good enough for their son and sent him off to an elite prep school at the end of seventh grade. So Mitt never had to walk down a high school hallway, in some city, say Detroit, and rub elbows with any gang members. Not many homeless kids could afford tuition at Cranbrook School, where young Romney was insulated from contact with society's less fortunate individuals. And you can bet he wasn't hanging around with classmates who came to school hungry in the morning, or who went home to neighborhoods crawling with drug abusers at night.

The problem now, when Mr. Romney talks education, is that his isolation from reality is complete. He and his loved ones live in rarified air, and Mrs. Romney, for example, is able to indulge her love of horses. She competes in riding events at an elite level. She has a dressage tutor, who helps her with form, a top man in his field, so successful he has been known to serve guests at his riding school from $4,000 bottles of wine. In fact, on their tax returns for 2010, the Romneys were able to claim a $77,000 loss related to part ownership of a horse named Rafalca.

That's more money than most families see in a year.

Meanwhile, Mitt and Ann's four sons, raised in a home where they had every possible advantage, including good parents, fared well in school. But a recent study by John Hopkins University tells us that not all students come from the same kind of homes. Instead, 15% of U. S. students have problems with chronic absenteeism.

That is:  they miss 10% of all class time, or more.

I taught in a fine district until I retired. But I could explain to Mr. and Mrs. Romney, rather quickly, that not all parents are good, no matter how fine the district. Not all parents are like them, or like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, or the majority of moms and dads I met. I had Abe in class one year. Abe was absent or tardy 107 times in a 180-day school year. When he did arrive, often late, for first period history, I had trouble educating him not because I was a member of a teachers' union, but because Abe had a devil of a time staying awake. I remember once when he told me his mother let him play video games until four a.m. the night before.

So, Abe's mother wasn't an Ann Romney. She wasn't like the mothers Mitt Romney has in mind when he talks about fixing U. S. education. Abe's mom soon added several lines to her goofy parent resume when she came down to school to pick up her older son, who happened to be getting suspended for fighting, and got into a battle with our school resource officer, leading to her own arrest.

THIS MAN, ROMNEY, WHO WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT, who says he knows how to fix the schools, sees the world through the green-tinted glasses of the top 1%. My wife, a speech therapist, still working in the public schools, could reveal grimmer truths. She once worked with a child with severe emotional disorders who lived in a rusted out automobile with Uncle Buster, a regular marijuana user, but still his best option, because mom and dad were long gone from the family photo. She worked with a nine-year-old boy, a victim of sexual abuse by his father, who had what medical people call encopresis, or leakage from the anus, around partially-formed stool, a common problem in cases of abuse. So he had accidents at his desk almost every day. On yet another occasion a mother "interested" in her child's education came to school to see the principal. Mom was carrying a butcher knife and said she was "tired of being followed." Then she chased the principal down the hall, out of the building, and across the parking lot.

It's not just anecdotal evidence Mr. Romney might consider. Take Chicago, where in 2010, the average student missed 26 days of instruction. We know that tens of thousands of teens in the Windy City belong to gangs; and in one twelve-month period 245 school-age kids were killed or wounded in gang-related violence.

What solution does the Governor offer for that?

Let's grade schools!

Mr. Romney might even pick up a newspaper and see what he could discover. It's never hard to find sad examples, of parents who fail; but here's one of my "favorites," a story I stumbled across in 2008, involving a Pennsylvania mom named Elizabeth Ann Fox. Ms. Fox was charged with child endangerment after leaving two sons, ages 4 and 2, home alone for hours. Police were notified when the boys managed to crawl out a bedroom window. One officer entered the home but was driven back immediately by the overpowering smell of garbage and human feces, which littered the kitchen floor. A second officer located mom--at a fast food restaurant, of all places--where she was enjoying a hamburger and a shake.

Mr. Romney ought to try to work those kind of examples into his next speech about what must be done to fix America's schools.

In the end, Governor Romney is blind to all the ugliness, because he travels only in circes of wealth and privilege. Or perhaps, because he hopes to score political points, he doesn't care to look for any ugliness.

Too bad, too, because we know there are 1.6 million homeless children in the United States today. We know that in 2010 more than 70% of black children were born to single mothers. We know on certain Indian reservations poverty, depression and hard drinking add up to mean that one in four children will be born with fetal alcohol syndrome. We know that here in Ohio, one out of every ten children in Scioto County, where illegal use of painkillers has spread like plague, is born with illegal drugs in their blood streams. And we know that at any given moment, 1.5 million American children have a parent in prison.

If Romney and the critics wanted to see the full picture they wouldn't stop there. What about parents who kill their children? Even these stories are not hard to find; and nothing Mr. Romney has to offer, so far, when he talks about education, would ever do the unluckiest children in our society the slightest bit of good. Consider one example, out of many, a case from West Palm Beach, Florida. It involves Jorge Barahona, accused of murdering his stepdaughter, Nubia, and for the attempted murder of Victor, his ten-year-old son. The boy showed evidence of prior injuries: broken collarbone, broken arm, burn scars on buttocks and abdomen, rope marks on wrists. Emily Rodriguez, Victor's first grade teacher, later told reporters she remembered how Nubia used to visit her class at the end of the day to see how her brother was doing.

Does Mr. Romney really believe the key here would be to focus on Rodriquez because she's in a teachers' union?

YET, THERE THE GOVERNOR WAS, telling an audience last week:  "Wouldn't it be great if we could look back on the last four years with confidence that the [school] crisis had been confronted and we'd turned the corner toward a brighter future?"

Nope. The problems won't go away. Blame it on President Obama. And blame his evil allies, the teachers' unions.

They just can't seem to alter harsh realities.

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Teachers are getting fed up with all the attacks we face.

Mitt Romney and a whole lot of others who criticize us have no clue.