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| Breaking down that awful American education thingy | |||
| 2011-01-12 | |||
We now have a massive study of the reading abilities of 15-year-olds (roughly 10th-graders) in 65 systems worldwide showing that U.S. schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts. The study, called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. It covered the OECD's 34 mostly wealthy member nations (including the United States, most European countries and Japan) and 31 others. The test was scored on a zero to 1,000 scale... The United States ranked 17th (500), slightly above the average (493) of the OECD's advanced countries. This was behind Japan (520) and Belgium(506), and just ahead of Germany (497), France (496) and Britain(494).
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| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #6 ...these persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom - broken homes, street violence, indifference to education - that discourage learning and inhibit teaching....a strong predictor of children's school success is the educational attainment of their parents. The higher it is, the more parents read to them, inform and encourage them. For half a century, successive waves of "school reform" have made only modest headway against these obstacles. It's an open question whether the present "reform" agenda, with its emphasis on teacher accountability, will do better. What we face [is] overcoming the legacy of history and culture. Yup, yup, and yup. I have a few questions about education and I have suspicions about the answers to these questions. I wonder how home school, private school, and Catholic and Christian school outcomes compare with public school outcomes. Does the Department of Education do any good or is it a waste of taxpayer's monies? What is the effect of social engineering and political correctness on educational outcomes for students? Do teacher unions hinder student learning? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-01-12 14:00 |
| #5 In all fairness, public education can be divided in the US between liberal school and conservative schools. Parents who care put their kids in conservative schools. Do not underestimate them. Conservative schools are downright ferocious. I visited several of them some years ago and was very pleasantly surprised. A conservative school in a very poor region was what I called at the time, a "minimum security educational experience", with kids from harsh neighborhoods, had close to old style parochial school discipline. Most kids would do okay in their lives, but about 10% had the look that they *would* succeed--fire in the eyes. A very low dropout rate in that school, and good test scores. The biggest problem was adults trying to sneak on to campus to mess with the kids, so they had an armed security detachment. About the same time I went to an upper middle class high school, again conservative, and was amazed. I saw a group of seniors off by themselves doing day trading. One of those "Uh, can they do that?" moments. One classroom was to prep students for national academic competition. Holy smokes. Advanced college level everything. Specialist PhD teacher for just that. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-01-12 10:42 |
| #4 Johnny is too dumb to fight. A fourth of potential American military recruits can't join because they are too fat. That got some media attention. But the fact that a quarter of high school graduates who tried to join failed the written exam attracted less attention. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2011-01-12 08:26 |
| #3 IMO, the main problem in "Western" educational system is not that "Johny can't read". It is that Robert, who is a straight A student and a joy to his teachers, can't think. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-01-12 05:10 |
| #2 Do we really need to fix our schools, or is it just that certain subsets of the student population aren't holding up their end? The school system here is an indoctrination into liberal thinking. The kids in one of my kids classes all had to do a report on some kind of "green" energy source. For "balance" the teacher wanted the kids to list the positives and negatives of each kind of energy. So where's the problem? Nothing was compared to coal or nuclear or gas. One little example of how liberal thought infuses its way into our children. One of the teachers started going off on how gerbil worming was such a problem. Of course my kids was (unfortunately) the only one to raise a hand and ask about what all the debunking and flawed science was about. That was the end of that lecture right there lest the rest of the kids figure it out. Of course the teachers' unions, in our educational system's best interests, make it so hard to get rid of teachers that in some cases pedophiles are paid full salary, and are accruing pension credits, to just stay at home. And the parents do little or nothing to cover the schools' and teachers' backs, or to monitor and "correct" the education they are getting. And where do I begin with the idea that in some places it is illegal to home-school your child? |
| Posted by: gorb 2011-01-12 03:20 |
| #1 The most highly paid and incredibly incompetent educators on the PLANET. Screw you, making children more stupid than when they went to school to start with. Better they scrabble at home than messing around learning of farce knowledge like "climate change" and alinskley crap that destroyed all of their future opportunity. |
| Posted by: newc 2011-01-12 02:01 |