The problems start at the beginning of the pipeline. Elementary schools poorly educate students, leading to poor educations at the succeeding stages of the pipeline. I saw a sharp decline in undergraduates’ quality after 1985. In 1987, Caltech, a school that requires high verbal scores, instituted a required freshman expository writing class.
Postsecondary professors had to start spoonfeeding students answers to exams without revealing the true contents. Even then, students often make basic mistakes. Add to this the toxic left-wing culture of indoctrination has taken hold in academia. Outside of business and
STEM professors, most professors no longer consider questioning the status quo to be part of their job requirements.
I have three recommendations. 1. Make public schools compete with each other and with charter schools. 2. Have states fund all public schools equally, with separate funding for special needs students. Cost-of-living adjustments can be made based on objective criteria, if necessary. “Hazardous duty” pay can incentivize teachers to teach at riskier schools. By equalizing funding at the state level, funding disparities cease to be a matter of chance and manipulation to become in the domain of the 14th Amendment. 3. Universities should model their values after Middle Tennessee.
https://www.mtsu.edu/trueblue/mtsu-community-values/
