A Modest Proposal for Solving the Critical Shortage of Certain Professionals

Several years ago Jay Mathews, a reporter for The Washington Post who covers education, developed a simplistic and highly questionable method of ranking high schools. His idea was to take the total number of students in a school and divide it by the number of Advance Placement courses taken by the students in the school. The quality of the students’work was of no importance; only quantity counted.

Not surprisingly, this easily computed statistic has been an enormous hit with school administrators. Their only goal is to figure out a way to entice more bodies into AP courses. And any way of doing so is pretty much acceptable. The desired result is simply to make the score on the Mathews scale - which he calls the Challenge Index - go up. As stated before, the grades that students receive in the classes or the scores they receive on the AP exams are irrelevant.

Recently, Patrick Welsh (an English teaches at T.C. Williams High School) challenged this system of rating high schools and pointed out that it has little relevance to classroom teachers who deal with students of greatly varying levels of academic ability [see The Washington Post, April 10, 2005; page B3]. Yes, it is highly popular with administrators who love to generate whatever public relations spin that they can manufacture. But, no, it really does not improve the overall academic performance of students who are either unmotivated to perform well or who do not have strong academic ability.

What we really have is yet another system for declaring by fiat that every child is a genius. Let’s place every child in every AP course and dull children will suddenly become inspired and start to excel at quantum physics and write insightful analyses of Ulysses. Why didn’t we think of this sooner?

In reality, of course, the content of these classes will be substantially lowered. Because if they are not lowered, a sizable number of students will fail. Mathews’ scheme is just the same old ploy to eliminate any and all semblances of grouping students by ability, because in the sacred scriptures of all professional educators there is absolutely no such thing as differing abilities among students. We can all be rocket scientists if we just fill out the right application form.

This line of logic leads me to a fantastic insight for solving such crises as shortages of doctors and computer engineers. The only thing that we need to do is to triple the enrollment in schools of medicine and engineering. And why are we having trouble doing so at present? Well, we maintain this silly system of requiring that certain “standards” be met before admission is granted to these professional schools. But these standards are not a part of the Mathews Challenge Index system. You just simply put a bunch of warm bodies into medical school and engineering school and, voila, we’ll have solved the shortage problem.

Just one question for Mr. Mathews: Would you allow me to select one of these new graduates from medical school to perform your next by-pass surgery?

JBY