Ill-advised Governor Perry missed the broad side of the education system behemoth with his off target argument that financially stressed taxpayers have some peculiar higher moral duty to subsidize the education of children of foreign nationals residing here illegally… while their own children have been grossly short-changed by not receiving a credible basic education out of the very same education establishment.

What “morality” is using children of foreigners residing here illegally as an excuse to hand more money over to failed schools which produce wide swaths of students of legal citizens who can’t read or write, and routinely graduate high schools with no working grasp of Arithmetic, Algebra I or Algebra II or Geometry, considered the minimum of a solid high school education, that could get them a job as a … competent floor tile installer … and they don’t even have the linguistic skills to follow written instructions to mix the mortar correctly? 

Does that seem insignificant?  A tile floor layer works in cement.  A mistake in the geometry calculations of the design as it fits in the area – and every job is different – can cost thousands of dollars to correct, a mistake in materials caculations that results in over-ordering a color lot or under-ordering can cost thousands more dollars.   Two mistakes like that can completely ruin a tile installion business, shoddy workmanship is not tolerated by customers.  In the TIMSS international testing comparisons, it was discovered American students could not answer even one geometry question correctly while their age-mate students from dozens of other countries answered most of the geometry questions easily.

The subject population of the claimed moral dilemma, students from Hispanic, usually Mexican citizens illegally in the USA, typically speaks a household/social/poor grammar/slangy dialect of Spanish and the overwhelming majority of them have practically non-existent reading, writing and spelling competencies in their maternal language.

In contrast, their Mexican, Central American, South American and European Hispanic peers are drilled daily in expression in grammar, literature and expository skills, along with rigorous math, science, history and foreign language, preparing them for higher study in university and to meet rigorous competency exams or competently prepared to enter the skilled trades workforce.

A Spanish exchange student in Arizona this past year was aghast that her Hispanic classmates couldn’t write their own names correctly.  Not a one of them was in the senior-year-level pre-calculus and physics classes – which was a level of academics that was norm for sophomores in Spain.  So, the Hispanic students in a very well-funded US public school were graduating categorically unfit for any higher level work in ANY language, on three continents.

That particular school, recently constructed at great taxpayer cost with all the best features, has an academic success rate that is exemplified by one recent class: Of over 100 students graduated, about 20% went on to university, of those 20% only ONE succeeded in graduating university. ONE college graduate out of over a hundred. There are a lot of idle graduates sitting around, back at home, in that town, most of them “White” or that is to say, “Anglo, ” and “Legal.”

What’s the difference from the Anglophones in US schools? Students with English as their mother tongue overwhelmingly struggle with the same profile.  Many typically speak a household/social/poor grammar slang and a disastrous number of them have practically nonexistent writing and spelling competencies in their maternal language of English.

Our schools do not train in the skills globally understood as needed to keep learning throughout life: literacy, rhetoric, organized and logical writing, basic note-taking, adept in a level of mathematics required for college acceptance or quality in any of the technical trades. On these two pillars, language and math , are ALL other fields of study and work established.  Yet, the schools from Pre-K to PhD demand every year more money and year after year fail to deliver a solid education while consistently delivering a plummeting rate of return on the investment in a diploma.  Education costs continue to skyrocket – totally divorced from all other national economic activity.

Twelve years of US education and our graduating classes are heading not to college or work, but to home confused and discouraged, unable to get through the job market door because they can’t read or write or do simple arithmetic, despite school transcripts that imply they can. They had years to learn a foreign language to enable them to compete for entry-level positions at multi-national companies, but the schools didn’t train them. Years of sitting at desks to learn math, but the “facilitators” didn’t show them how to do it. Years to practice solid reading and writing skills at increasingly challenging levels they didn’t do so now they can’t read a basic document and explain what it means.

So what “morality” is it to dump a cynical guilt-trip on taxpayers to pay for students who, despite what Governor Perry and numerous other politicians have been led to believe by the smooth-talking education “experts,” will end up on the street with debt they can’t pay anyway, such is the degraded state of our education delivery system?

There will not be much room on our crowded streets of uneducated youth – badly educated children of legal citizens have nowhere to go, too. The only sure thing will be that non-performing schools will have received again transfusions of massive sums of money, business as usual, which doesn’t include skills development to students of any age, color or ethnicity.

Recall the movie that chronicled the real-life experience of Jaime Escalante in “Stand and Deliver?” Escalante inadvertently exposed the lie that the public school was pushing, that their fail rate was the Hispanic students’ faults. The school wasn’t doing the job and when Escalante proved he could teach the rigorous AP Calculus successfully to the “poor” the “broken-home” the “English as a Second Language” students, the union-dominated public school dumped him, depriving the deprived students of their ticket out of the barrio. So where did this rainbows and sparkles fantasy come from that our public schools are doing ANYONE, legal or illegal, a real service?

Handing over more money taken from taxpayers to this un-performing and gluttonous system is not the answer to the problem, nor is berating taxpayers who for years expressed their concerns that easy entry, arbitrary and politically-guided immigration enforcement would create a plethora of associated problems for years. It’s a dishonest guilt trip to a dead end existence in national and personal bankruptcy. 

What greedy universities aren’t advertising is that it isn’t just about allowing for in-state tuition rates, it includes allowing children of foreigners residing illegally in this country access to the government-controlled monopoly on student loans, which are paid directly to the universities.  Instead of cutting expenses, public universities are pressuring politicians to widen the loan eligibilities so those same universities can haul in more money, with no accountability for non-performance.   The public university doesn’t care whether a student drops out or has a useless degree.  They have the money, the student has the debt.  Not their problem.

A true kindness would be to close our schools and start over with traditional skills-focus and real teachers, not empty-brained “facilitators” who only know one math calculation: their pension.  They promise the world, but it’s nothing more than snake oil elixir as they work a thousand ways to guilt, guilt more money. A true kindness would be to restore integrity to the immigration enforcement structure, not dangle incentives to encourage even more people to sneak in illegally.

The current atmosphere encourages illegality while discouraging legal applications,  uses children as political props to enable university administrators to maintain their six-figure salaries, swish offices, VIP sports seating,  and stately university housing.  We are all constantly harangued to accept solutions to problems that were never identified properly in the first place. This nation – every one of the fifty states – literally cannot afford anymore to carry on in this way. There will be no “kindness” after a collapse.

So, who are these Education 419 Scammers to call struggling taxpayers “heartless?” Just like the Nigerian fraudsters, they set up a nice looking edifice, cooed the right words, intoned with the right airs about “global schools” and took our money by the billions for years, and as they say in Third World countries, they “ate it.”

They let down the students in their care, White, Black, Hispanic, color no barrier to being left behind. On what moral ground do such hypocrites stand to call the people who’ve paid for this in good faith for years, “heartless?” Why do these same people ignore our Apache, Navajo, Hopi and Inuit People, to name only a few of the scores of Native American tribal families across this nation which have been under-served by any solid education system? Why is foreign-citizen “Hispanic” celebrated at the expense of American“Apache?” At “the expense of” is correct; taxpayer money directed to the education of illegals – that would be correctly to “foreigners”- rather than to Native American People?  Does this not highlight the contorted priorities of this political argument?

While public schools and public universities blithely raise tuition and fees, American taxpayers, strained and drained by the Democrats’ debt-ballooning policies resulting in rising joblessness, rising foreclosures, rising cost of living expenses, dropping home values and collapsing retirement portfolios, promised their electrical utility rates will necessarily rise, and lectured that they aren’t patriotic if they don’t hand over even more money to these over-spenders, have a problem.

The heartless schools took our money and left ALL the kids at the curb, uneducated, stolen out of their future achievements because they wasted their years with “facilitators” instead of teachers. Instead of being guided to enlightenment by our education establishment, year by year we all have been led further up river deeper and deeper into a heart of darkness.

wanumba, a Sonoran Alliance contributor, currently residing in Africa, with an MBA in International Business Management from Thunderbird School of International Management, has put children through both the American and French Overseas National Education systems, public, private, and military: 18 different schools, 3 universities, in eight countries on four continents.