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Math is Math

Last week, the Arizona Board of Regents released a study showing that fewer Arizona high school students are leaving high school qualified to enter college. A slew of related statistics show minorities are scoring even worse, but the issue here is not over racial divisions in test construction. Whether you're black or white, the square root of 64 is 8. Race complaints about testing are ridiculous, and the real problem is what to do with our uneducated high schoolers.

Studies comparing the transcripts and test scores of 2,500 high school students from 1996 and 1998 indicate that 55 percent of 1996 graduates were prepared for college while only 42 percent of 1998 graduates were deemed ready. This drop can be attributed, on its face, to the increased difficulty of the new tests. Students aren't actually getting dumber; they're just facing tougher tests. However, that's no excuse for the embarrassing scores.

These days, attending college is practically a necessity to attaining economic prosperity. Moreover, the U.S. educational structure provides nothing for those unable or unqualified to attend college. European countries have trade schools to train the "less qualified" in things such as welding and carpentry. Arizona is not preparing high school students for anything.

Educators and quasi-politicians need to stop arguing about how some groups are scoring lower and focus on preparation of students. Race arguments are ill-founded for the most part, and generally develop from trends that aren't factually based. The vogue in the political arena is to implicate cultural bias as the culprit in low minority test scores. What kinds of questions do educators think are being asked?

Math is math, no matter what your skin color or cultural heritage. Perhaps the argument would hold water if the questions were phrased as follows: "If two black hating white men use three batons in beating a poor Negro, and each baton is swung six times, how many times is the Negro hit?" Maybe on Native American reservations the laws of physics are different. Probably not. Questions aren't phrased with bias, and one plus one will always equal two.

Thus, the question is posed, "what do we do?" Indeed, if the answer were simple, we would never have education problems. However, a plethora of options exist to boost our educational system in preparing Arizona's youth to excel beyond high school. Investment in children, restructuring the curriculum, and changing the face of education in Arizona are all viable avenues.

No greater answer in the capitalist United States exists than money. Spend money and standards will rise. Constant decisions by local and state officials are employing extra funds for everything but education. Arizona high school students are going to continue to be uneducated unless they are given more classrooms, more qualified teachers and better equipment. Too many classrooms are being boarded up because of underfunding.

Curriculum problems plague the Board of Regents day in and day out. Now, new ideas are being introduced that have worked in other states, such as foreign language instruction, more lab science classes and required arts classes. But will this bring out students' true potentials or just weigh them down more?

Finally, the concept of high school as only a feeder to college where some perform well and other don't needs to be scrapped. There will always be a need for skilled labor, and those skills are hard to come by. If given the choice to learn a trade while taking some of the normal educational load in high school, a number of students would probably be driven to success after high school. It's all about options.

Refuting the validity of testing is a futile endeavor. Testing is not faulty, rather the educational system in Arizona is behind the times. The rest of the United States isn't faring much better, but at least those in the traditional system in other states are prepared enough to attend college in hopes of developing skills for a trade. Education is not for slowing children down; it's supposed to prepare them. To the Board of Regents - stop drowning in rhetoric and give Arizona's kids a future.