If anybody outside the great state of Iowa reads the Des Moines Register, he or she would know what a sham the Iowa educational system really is.

Based on what I have read, Des Moines area educators are, at the very least, guilty of incompetence. At the worst they have demonstrated such a fundamental lack of intelligence and oversight that parents should seriously question their privilege to teach.

From the front page of the Register comes word that Des Moines school officials replaced elementary math textbooks with “colorful new books rich in literature, geographical references and hands-on activities (12/12/99).”

The new books were billed as a salvation for students, but since the introduction of the books five years ago, test scores have continued downward.

Many students are leaving elementary schools without being able to master such basic concepts as long division and multiplication. The price for that act of lunacy? $326,000.

Despite claims by Houghton-Mifflin that students would do so much better that there would be less need for remedial classes, the exact opposite has happened.

In the past two years, there has been an increase in remedial tutoring, after-school tutoring at the middle school and an expansion of summer school.

It is time to place blame- and it’s not on the students. Humanity has been evolving for tens of thousands of years; thus it is unlikely that in the last decade kids have suddenly gotten dumber. It is more likely is that educators and officials have.

The first crime those uneducated adults committed was when they attempted to make mathematics, the foundation of all sciences, subjective. That was a gross mistake. In mathematics answers are either right or wrong, and in the real world you do not get stickers on your homework. If you screw up, the implications are real and deadly.

Forget the miles- to- kilometers conversion and you just lost the Mars Observer which is worth a few hundred million taxpayer dollars. Miscalculate the load-bearing support of a construction site, and you send workers plummeting to their deaths. But hey, it doesn’t matter. After all, you tried your best!

The example given in the Register involved calculating how quickly the rain forest is being cut down. I even hear at the end of the question it asks how the student feels about the deforestation. Sorry, kids, but that question is better left to the philosophers. Just figure out how many acres we can raze in a day and start that bulldozer!

One teacher interviewed said she liked the new books because they had fewer problems. Give the lady a cigar and a pink slip! If she wants to do less work, she can join a commune and tend to her organic garden. When winter comes, she will join other notables like the Donner Party.

Math is learned by repetition. You need to do all problems in every possible way to master the field, and not just a handful of problems emphasizing group work and advanced calculator usage. It is a hard discipline but one that is useful every day, and without it you will be left behind when making change or doing your taxes. Or calculating your GPA as it approaches zero.

But trying to make math a subjective discipline is the smaller problem.

That the leaders of Iowa’s “vaunted” educational system actually experimented on the students is of greater concern.

Schools are not mazes, and children are not lab rats. But school administrators thought they were scientists and decided to test the new books out on the kids at the elementary level, at which the basis for all future education is laid.

Imagine if a pharmaceutical company offered you a new drug that could raise or lower your IQ by thirty points. Would you leap at the opportunity to be part of the first trial group, knowing the possible outcomes? Better yet, would you PAY that company to test their drug on yourself?

No matter what decision you choose, those students in Des Moines didn’t have a choice. It was just forced on them, and five years later the administrators say, “Oops, better luck next time.”

What makes the situation more pathetic and the administrators even more incompetent is that now they have purchased supplemental materials from Houghton-Mifflin that reinforce basic math facts. According to the media relations director at the company, there is a new series of textbooks with “more problems and less text.”

So the administrators tested the new textbooks on the students based solely on the recommendations of the publisher’s salesmen, who we all know are evolved from weasels. And we paid them for it. Well, let it truly be said that they rise to the level of their incompetence.

If a company wants to test their new pet theory on math, we should demand it pay us for the privilege of testing on our students. Otherwise, we just flush money down the toilet. But worse than the money is that we have at least five years of intellectually stunted students.

If this was China, the administrators’ next bonus would include a blindfold and a cigarette. But instead we give them pay raises and longer breaks.

Go figure.

As parents or future parents, you have to ask whether you want those people teaching your kids.

They’ve already mishandled funds and shown they lack the intelligence to perceive the consequences of their actions. For that they should be fired.

There is one bright spot to all of this. An editorial in the Register (12/17/99) stated how only 70 percent of Des Moines area high school students take algebra and that 40 percent fail. Assuming that the thirty percent who did not attempt algebra would do even worse, the writer declared that 70 percent of the students couldn’t pass algebra.

Maybe he was educated with the new math book!

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill. Do the math.