What did those 'B averages' really mean?

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:14 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED Feb. 14, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
What did those 'B averages' really mean?

Ah, Nevada's "Millennium Scholarships"! Taking millions extorted from Big Tobacco under the guise that he needed it to "pay the health-care costs of lung cancer victims" (in fact, smokers die younger than average, reducing overall health-care costs, even when they don't have their own health insurance, which most do), Nevada's "Republican" governor, Kenny Guinn, promptly ginned up a program to "improve Nevada education" by using the loot to offer full-ride scholarships at Nevada's already mediocre and oversubscribed state colleges and universities to every kid who could graduate a Nevada high school with a "B" average.

What do you suppose happened?

If the only way a Nevada high school kid can win the all-tuition-paid scholarship (valued at up to $10,000) is to maintain a "B" average, what kind of additional pressure do you suppose that now places on teachers and administrators to inflate high school grades to "B or better" rather than stand accused of "depriving" less able students of their chance at four free years of keggers and pep rallies?

A "B" used to mean "above average." Public Radio entertainer Garrison Keillor used to joke that in his mythical town of Lake Woebegone, "every child was above average."

You can see this coming, right?

Each semester, to retain their state financial aid, Millennium Scholarship students are required to complete four classes and maintain a grade point average of at least 2.0 -- a C-minus.

At schools like UNLV.

But of the 1,450 Millennium Scholarship kids attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas last semester, a whopping 30 percent failed to meet even those minimal measurements of academic progress. (The 900 Millennium Scholarship kids at UNReno did a bit better -- only 17 percent failing to make the grade.)

Now, there are always a few young people whose family situation changes, or who find the college experience just isn't for them. Eighty of the UNLV scholarship recipients withdrew entirely within the first few weeks. That's perfectly normal.

But a deeper problem now lies exposed here like a beached whale, for anyone who cares to hold his nose and take a good look. Of the original group of 1,450 Millennium Scholarship kids enrolled at UNLV last year -- mind you, all these young folks supposedly graduated Nevada high schools with B averages or better -- the faculties found it necessary to enroll 439 in remedial English classes, and 124 in remedial math.

In a national report released last fall by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Nevada's public universities were already receiving failing grades in academic preparation and student retention.

"That's a lot of students" so unprepared as to require remedial freshman English, comments Thalia Dondero, chairwoman of the Nevada Board of Regents. "That ought to send a message to the high school English teachers. What are these students not getting in high school?"

Just as importantly, are these really our "best and our brightest" ... or are the high schools now simply handing out "social Bs" to any kid who shows up and refrains from committing a felony on the premises?

A number of the Millennium Scholarship kids complained their first semester of college was "too large of a culture shock," reports UNLV financial aid director Judy Belanger.

Why -- because the profs turned out to speak ... English? Because the cafeterias served such exotic and hard-to-digest foods as ... hamburgers and fries, which had to be paid for in a bizarre decimal-based currency based on ... "dollars and cents"?

Or do they mean they were shocked to learn that if they failed to do the reading and turn in their written work, they actually found their grades suffering in proportion ... even at a school like UNLV, far better known for its basketball teams than its Nobel laureates?

And if so, just what kind of rigorous "college preparation" does that mean our government schools have been doling out, of late?

Nevada's public universities, though they have managed to attract a few fine faculty, are hardly the most academically rigorous or competitive in the land. If Nevada high school kids are finding themselves thus unprepared for the rigors of an education on Maryland Parkway, how much more surprised will parents be -- their kids having cruised along complacently, bringing home straight "B's" for years -- to discover how unprepared they might be for freshman year at (say) Amherst, Stanford, or MIT?

The political pressure in a system of state-funded, socialized schooling will always be to place the highest value on mere attendance and good behavior -- not to upset students by requiring too much of them academically, nor to reveal to parents how little real education is transpiring by grading on any fixed and absolute scale.

In the end, state-funded education is doomed precisely because this conundrum can never really be resolved. The mob that controls socialist "democracy" demands equality of outcome, in education as well as economics. Everyone must end up with precisely the same living standard, no matter how many times armed men have to seize the wherewithal from the diligent, the creative, and the hard-working; turning it back over to the indolent, the drunken, and the incompetent. Similarly, every parent must be assured -- turning Garrison Keillor's old joke to bitter reality -- that their child is "above average," despite the obvious biological reality that some students are inherently smarter, more talented, and have work habits better suited to academic achievement.

And so the brighter kids are systematically reduced to bored and doped-up drones, the classes and the textbooks endlessly dumbed down until their moron compatriots can win their "high school diplomas" for little more than clipping pictures of toucans out of magazines and pasting them in scrapbooks to demonstrate their "concern for the rainforest" and "opposition to global warming."

On the bright side, at least half the scholarship kids who lost their eligibility last semester have re-enrolled for UNLV's spring semester and vow to work harder, bring their grades up, and regain their Millennium Scholarship benefits after paying back the state for their failed first semester.

That's good -- a tough lesson in real consequences, but one that has to be learned eventually.

If only our high schools had taught it, earlier.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 1475 Terminal Way, Suite E for Easy, Reno, NV 89502. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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