SACRAMENTO, CA - Senator Martha Escutia (D-Norwalk) believes California students are too fat and has launched Senate Bill 19 to crusade against junk food. But her bill is itself loaded with lard and ignores the real problem of education--junkthought.

The sponsor actually believes that her bill “shakes up the status quo.” “The state of California and its schools have a responsibility not to sell out our children’s health to the fast-food companies, the snack-food companies, and the soft-drink companies,” Escutia said. “How can we teach our young children about good nutrition in the classroom and then shove junk food at them at lunchtime?”

The students, of course, are not limited to what they can purchase from campus vending machines. As someone not exactly svelte herself, the senator shows that this problem lies outside the schools. SB 19 could also use a diet.

It doubles state funding for free- and reduced-priced meals and would create a grant program for districts to establish “community-based advisory committees to develop district nutrition policies.” Since these committees are obviously unnecessary, the bill is also a jobs program. Student’s diet of junkthought, meanwhile, will remain unchanged.

Facing the Classroom Challenge, a new PRI study by Lance Izumi, shows how California schools of education are dominated by the idea that teachers don’t know anything and that students know everything. In this view, teachers are actually facilitators who simply let students discover things for themselves. Even partisans of this method admit that it makes for chaos.

Instead of figuring out math problems, teachers are taught that students should use calculators. Students who do, studies show, achieve at lower levels. The testing of students to see what they actually know is held to be a capitalist-racist plot by “Nordic” authors of tests. In California’s dominant methodology, students should set their own goals, keep their own records, monitor their own progress, and evaluate their own performance. Memorization of facts, a skill vital to higher learning, is considered oppressive.

When these methods produce failure, educators compensate by advancing students to the next grade anyway, under the doctrine of social promotion, lest they feel badly about themselves. This delays the bad feeling until students reach college or the job market, and find that junkthought has left them unable to compete.

Along with low standards, California also maintains low expectations, especially for minority students. They are held to be incapable of achieving at high levels without special help. Until recently, immigrant students were segregated from the English language instruction they need to succeed in California society. The proven method of phonics has had to fight an uphill battle against “whole language” quackery that has left many children illiterate.

When a charter school run by a private company produces greater results among minority students, the response of the local board, in this case San Francisco, is to kill the school’s charter. And however unsatisfied parents might be with the second-class education inflicted on their children, California resists giving them the freedom to choose where their children will attend school. Meanwhile, both state and local bureaucrats are unable to account for millions in federal education funds, provided by the taxes of those very parents. Junkthought, a corrupt monopoly, and restricted choice are the problems of California education. They won’t be fixed by legislators mounting Rosinante and tilting at vending machines.

- K. Lloyd Billingsley