Michigan's One Size Fits All Education Plan

One size fits all education will work for our children's generation about as well as one size fits all spandex has worked to enhance the appearance of shoppers leaning deeply into the meat case at the local supermarket. We can shoehorn just about anyone into a pair of those things provided the proper heavy equipment, but the result of such a shoehorning might very well conclude in an unfortunately dimpled display and a to-be-expected decline in store traffic.

Along the same lines, our esteemed overlords in Michigan's educational system have determined that it would be best for all of our students to take a more rigorous approach to their high school education. Since local teachers, parents and administrators (all of whom would simply love the same thing) have been unable to do so, the overlords decided they would take matters into their own hands and simply decree it.

That ought to convince little Johnny to study more--the Governor wants it! And gosh, it sure feels good to know that our rulers have what is best for our children in mind, or at least they have what sounds best for our children in mind.

By my way of thinking, the government will have just as much success outlawing small feet or big noses, not that I expect big noses to ever lose their luster in Lansing. And, of course, there is that nasty little quirk we call the "unintended consequences of any good deed."

Not only are our brightest and most motivated students already taking rigorous educational courses in mathematics, English and science, the classes they inhabit are now also filled with students forced into the classroom who have neither the aptitude nor the interest to be there in the first place. If that isn't a ready-made laboratory for spit wads, I don't know what is.

This is not to say that all those students forced into the more demanding classes are incapable of doing better, or that they are losers. I knew a kid in high school that didn't get above a D in any class he ever took in high school, yet, that kid at eighteen (two years after dropping out) could disassemble an automobile engine and put it back together without having any parts left over. I took the more demanding classes available at my school and I couldn't take apart a BB gun and get it back together properly. One of us was made for Algebra, the other was made for mechanics.

To think that our school or his mother was going to intricately mold an educational plan and shove it down that kid's throat while expecting any success would have bordered on insanity. And, he wasn't alone, he was one of a dozen kids in my class at our small school that attended because they had to. Most of them dropped out immediately when they became of age and, SHOCKINGLY!, most of them have gone on to lead productive adult lives.

There was another group of kids in my school that were there because they wanted to be. This is also a group whose contemporaries are being short changed by the new rules. They worked hard and they attended class. Still, these kids were not capable of taking Algebra as freshmen. Most of them took it as sophomores or juniors, worked hard at it, and passed. That these students moved on to productive adult lives should not be at all surprising except to bureaucrats who seem to have forgotten that not everyone graduating from our high schools need become an engineer or scientist.

Early reports are mixed, of course as parents and teachers struggle to make things work and bureaucrats arrange their tail feathers in ever prouder displays of caring.

No one in this state wants individual children to succeed more than their parents and teachers do, regardless of whatever scheme of the month the blow hards in Lansing happen to be promoting. Any system that routinely dismisses the concerns of parents, teachers and administrators at the local level, just so that they can brand the product from Lansing or Washington, is a system that is destined to fail.