Bob Barr

SAT Doesn't Stand for Sex Aptitude Test
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
October 24, 2007

The decision last week by a school in Portland, Maine, to provide students as young as 11 years old with the most invasive types of birth control, including pills, patches and even implants, has rekindled the debate over "sex education" in public schools. The good news is that this debate has been turned up a notch or two by publicity surrounding Portland's decision. The bad news is that, like most controversies in modern America, it will capture the public's attention only until another scandal or natural disaster pushes it off the front page. That's unfortunate.

Fundamental questions about what is and what should be taught in our nation's many school systems — and particularly the value of public education in our country — ought to play a far greater role in what passes for public policy debate than it does. In the most recent Republican presidential "debate," for example, while there were a couple of references to education, the questioners and the candidates alike dwelt far more exhaustively on who might be "the most conservative." Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani regaled us with repetitive pats on his own back about what a great — and "conservative" — mayor he was. Former Senator Fred Thompson sought to prove he was not "lazy" by reading us his resume. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney pleaded with us more than once to let him occupy the conservative "house that Reagan built."

Not a single candidate — in either of the two major parties, that is — seems to consider the fundamental questions of what is being taught in our public schools, and how well it is being taught, as sufficiently important to discuss publicly during this campaign.

What is particularly distressing about the Portland, Maine controversy is not so much that it is taking place at all, but that it is occurring even as those very same public school systems fixated on providing their young charges with birth control options, are failing miserably to provide students an adequate basic education in subjects that really do belong in schools.

One might presume that since the Portland school district folks have found the time to focus on giving 11-year olds birth control pills without parental consent, the schools already have achieved a 100 percent success rate in meeting academic standards. Wrong.

As the Portland, Maine education gurus are pushing condoms, pills, skin patches and implants onto middle school kids, more than half of its eighth graders — some 57 percent to be precise — either do not meet or only partially meet state standards for reading. Those same middle schoolers fare even worse in math and science — with 71 percent of eighth graders failing to meet, or only meeting in part, math standards; a figure that rises to 85 percent for science subjects. You get the picture. Portland's middle school students may not be able to read or do math real well, but they'll be able to tell you all about condoms and birth control pills.

It doesn't get much better for Maine's students after they leave middle school and take on the challenges presented them in the state's high schools. The Pine Tree State's SAT ranking is as bad as it can get. Maine is dead last (three places even below Georgia) in a list of all 50 states showing how their students scored on the SAT. One might suppose that if the "SAT" stood for "Sex Aptitude Test" rather than "Scholastic Aptitude Test," Maine might rank considerably higher. However, that would hardly be a foregone conclusion. Despite the attention and resources devoted by "educators" in Maine and in other states to sex education, research indicates no correlation between dispensing birth control to students and greater use of contraceptives by those students. In other words, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him wear it; or perhaps I have mixed metaphors.

Georgia public schools — while thankfully not yet doling out birth control pills and implants to 11-year old girls as in Maine — spend considerable time and taxpayer money meddling in these same areas, even as the state founders near the bottom of objective national education rankings. The Maine school scandal ought to serve as a clarion call to pay more attention to whether our kids can read, write and compute, and less to whether they know how to use a condom or pop a pill. After all, if they can't read the warning labels on a dispenser of birth control pills, do we really want them taking the pills?

Bob Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.