- "Transforming the American dream into the American
tragedy."
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- Part 1: Illiteracy leads to shoplifting, babies, crime,
gangs
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- As an educator in Colorado through the 70s, 80s and 90s,
I watched academic standards and expectations drop like a brick in a bucket
of water, like a jet fighter plane auguring into the ground, like water
cascading over Niagara Falls.
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- As if guided by an invisible hand nationwide, administrators
forced teachers to dumb down the academic requirements. Teachers passed
kids to the next grade level... whether those children performed... or
not.
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- Good students dragged down by their illiterate peers
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- As they failed to cement their educational foundations
with the basics- the gaps in their math, science, reading and English skills-
created terrible frustrations in their personal lives. When their irritation
levels became too great, they 'gave up' their pursuit of minimal levels
of educational achievement.
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- Often, while being 'pushed' up through grade levels,
they acted out their annoyances with disrespect for teachers as they became
malcontents, troublemakers or shut down altogether to cope with their growing
lack of self-esteem... and failures.
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- Cannot think critically, read at a fifth grade level
or balance a check book.
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- This year, Paul Robeson High School in Chicago, Illinois
featured 115 pregnant girls. That equals not only115 dumb girls, but 115
dumb boys, which will beget 115 more troubled babies facing horrific futures
on all counts. Thus, millions drop out or 'graduate' functionally illiterate,
i.e., cannot think critically, read at a fifth grade level or balance a
check book.
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- To completely upend and degrade the educational systems
of America, the late U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, in 1965, passed a bill
to inject 1.2 to 1.5 million immigrants into the equation annually. While
some are doctors and nurses, to be sure, others come from third-world nations
with precious few academic skills. They arrive with dozens of languages,
cultural bias against education and hostility toward learning.
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- Forty years later, we have 100 million people added to
the United States from disparate cultures around the world, as K-12 educational
systems around America grind on in total chaos.
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- With a 600,000 Middle Eastern immigrant load in central
and suburban Detroit, Michigan, as reported by NBC's Brian Williams, "76
percent of high school students in Detroit schools flunked out this June
other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston feature similar dropout
rates from 50 to 60 percent each year 1.2 million teens hit the streets
illiterate."
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- That leads up to the distressing fact that 1 in 7 Americans
remains functionally illiterate:
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- Illiteracy Statistics
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- · 42 million American adults can't read at
all; 50 million are unable to read at a higher level that is expected of
a fourth grader.
- · The number of adults that are classified
as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.
- · 20 percent of high school seniors can be
classified as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate.
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- Source: National Right to Read Foundation
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- Where Illiteracy Leads
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- · 70 percent of prisoners in state and federal
systems can be classified as illiterate.
- · 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate
as functionally or marginally illiterate.
- · 43 percent of those whose literacy skills
are lowest live in poverty.
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- Source: National Institute for Literacy
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- Yet, with those disturbing figures, our U.S. Congress,
by their action and by their inaction, imports an added 2.5 million legal
and illegal immigrants into this country every year. That equals over
200,000 every 30 days. AND THE FOLKS FROM THIRD-WORLD NATIONS HAVE HIGH
BIRTH RATES. Their kids overwhelm our schools... subverting education
for our own children. The immigrants themselves face daunting challenges
as to culture, language and jobs.
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- In Denver, we suffer 85 languages and a 67 percent Denver
Public Schools flunkout rate, as reported by the now defunct Rocky Mountain
News in a story "What Happened?" Ironically, the 'Rocky'
bankrupted in 2008 because not enough people could read! The same holds
true for dozens of cities across our country.
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- Becoming a nation of dummies in the 21st Century
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- What happens when somebody cannot read, write or perform
simple math?
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- If they cannot obtain a labor job, they pursue crime,
drugs, alcohol, welfare, homelessness and worse. Such uneducated women
usually become pregnant and their children become abused, live in poverty
and become wards of the state. Over 13.4 million American children live
below the poverty line according to Katie Couric in a recent telecast.
An astounding 35 million Americans subsist on food stamps.
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- Massachusetts; A Glaring Example.
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- What happens when young adult women fail their educational
pursuits? Let's use one state to show you the underbelly of what's happening
to the United States:
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- Nearly nine of every 10 teen-agers who gave birth in
Massachusetts were unmarried, the highest percentage of out-of-wedlock
teen-age births of any state in the nation. According to the most recent
data available from the National Center for Health Statistics, 86 percent
of the 7,018 mothers under age 20 who gave birth in this state two years
ago were not married.
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- The percentage was higher in Boston, hitting 92 percent.
In Springfield, 90 percent of teen-age mothers were unmarried. "It
is staggeringly high," said state Health and Human Services Secretary
Charles D. Baker Jr. Additionally, it is estimated that 80 percent of
unwed teen mothers end up welfare.
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- The declining quality of the American work force.
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- In a penetrating article, Jared Taylor, "The Silent
Catastrophe" October 12 2009, "One great, avoidable evil we face
is the declining quality of the American work force. The Census Bureau
tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of some two
million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child
population in just 14 years- in 2023- and will become a minority of the
working population just 16 years later.
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- The greatest increase will be in <http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_hispanic_family_values.html>Hispanics,
who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing
little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the
group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn
that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly
educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several
hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin."
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- "We have the possibility of transforming the
American dream into the American tragedy," <http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0206/p02s01-legn.html>says Irwin
Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service. He
warns that our increasingly non-white and immigrant workforce threatens
not only our standard of living, but the very survival of republican government
(the U.S. is a Republic) based on an informed middle class.
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- "Here are <http://nces.ed.gov/PUBSEARCH/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064>some
of the facts," said Taylor. "In 2007, 93.5 percent of white
and 93.1 percent of Asian 18- to 24-year-olds had graduated from high school.
The figures for blacks and Hispanics were 88.8 percent and 72.7 percent,
meaning that Hispanics were more than four times more likely than whites...
and 2.4 times more likely than blacks... to have failed to graduate from
high school."
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- Painfully, as witnessed in Detroit, so many poor people
shoplifted from grocery stores and retail merchants that the businesses
bankrupted or vacated the inner city. Thus, the poor cannot find a place
to buy their groceries... even with food stamps. On a national scale,
shoplifters hoist $35 million a day in goods from retail stores. We all
pay for that massive theft. Think of the implications of adding 70 million
more immigrants (half of whom are illiterate) to our cities across America.
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- John Wayne said, "Life is tough, but it's even
tougher if you're stupid!"
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- Next -- Part 2: Consequences from rapidly growing
illiterate numbers.
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- © 2009 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved
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