Say you are a stock investor. You have a small stake in two companies. One company is plummeting fast into the red, while the other is coming out with innovative product after innovative product. What do you do? Do you sell your stake in the under performing company and use the money to boost the investments in the promising company? Or do you pull money out of the more promising company and simply toss more money at the under performing company, hoping to raise its performance somehow? Any intelligent investor would chose the first option. Tell that to our education system.
As I have said before, we place too much emphasis on the bottom portion of the school population, thus leaving those at the top to fend for themselves in a system designed for people much less intelligent. In a new article from Time, my unscientific assumptions have been confirmed: America is a bad investor. Instead of putting our money in the places where it will most likely create the most benefit, we dedicate ourselves on creating an Authoritative world of education, where everyone is equal. The amount of money we spend on trying to bring the slowest up to speed is staggering:
American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.
Who does this bad investing benefit? Not the geniuses for sure, who are often forced into classes far below their level. It doesn’t benefit the most handicapped either - it is the geniuses who invent ways to fight all the different ailments in our world: from mental retardation to muteness. It doesn’t even benefit the common man: the mentally retarded in most cases simply go on to depend upon welfare. Meanwhile, by turning away the most intelligent, the geniuses end up under performing and becoming isolated: almost as many suicides and drop-outs are from the top 5% as from the bottom 5%. No, the only people who benefit are the politicians who claim to be fostering equality by investing in the weak. Even that is a lie; As far as I know, equality is where everyone gets the same resources invested in them.
A new plan in New York would pay students to score well on standardized tests. What!?!? Have we learned nothing about fair play and fairness. Unfortunately, the primary measure of school performance is standardized testing schools. If students are payed to score better, than they are essentially being paid to make the school look better. That is misrepresentation to the public and is absolutely unacceptable. That’s as bad as a suspect paying off the jury… it is simply unacceptable. If we want to reward students for achievement, which is a good idea, then we should find better ways to do it. Host parties for honor students, take students out who make exceptional gains, but don’t use money to artificially inflate test scores.
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