Posted on 03/21/2015 8:06:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
No other nation in the world spends as much on education as the United States.
According to our leftist friends, who prefer to measure inputs rather than outputs, this is a cause for celebration. 
I guess it shows we have the best intentions. Or maybe we love our kids the most.
For those who prefer to focus on outputs, however, it’s very difficult to be happy about the results we’re getting compared to all the money that’s being spent. Heck, in some cases it’s almost as if we’re getting negative results when you compare inputs and outputs.
To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about the Royal Air Force in World War II, never have so many paid so much to achieve so little.
Now we have more evidence that American taxpayers are paying a lot and getting a little (though I have to admit that non-teaching education bureaucrats have been big winners).
The Washington Post reports on some new research to see how America’s young adults rank compared to their peers in other nations.
The results aren’t encouraging.
This exam, given in 23 countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving. The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex, modern society. And U.S. millennials performed horribly. That might even be an understatement… No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.
There were three testing categories and Americans didn’t do well in any of them.
…in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom. “Abysmal,” noted ETS researcher Madeline Goodman. “There was just no place where we performed well.”
Here’s the comparative data on literacy.
Here’s how Americans did on numeracy (which may explain why there’sconsiderable support for the minimum wage).
Last but not least, millennials didn’t exactly do well in problem solving, either (which may explain their bizarre answers to polling questions).
By the way, the researchers also sliced and diced the data to get apples-to-apples comparisons.
Yet even on this basis, there’s no good news for America.
U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. …Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. …ETS researchers tried looking for signs of promise – especially in math skills, which they considered a good sign of labor market success. They singled out native-born Americans. Nope.
At some point, we need to realize that decades of additional spending and decades of further centralization have not worked.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to shut down the Department of Education on the federal level and to encourage school choice on the state and local level.
After all, we already have good evidence that decentralization and competition produces better test scores. There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.
P.S. We’re never going to solve this problem by tinkering with the status quo. That’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is why Bush’s no-bureaucrat-left-behind scheme didn’t work. And it explains why Obama’s Common Core is flopping as well.
P.P.S. Moreover, it will probably require big reform to deal with the brainless types of political correctness that exist in government schools.
P.P.P.S. If you want more evidence that the problem isn’t money, check out this research on educational outcomes in various cities. Or look at this data from New York City and Washington, DC, both of which spend record amounts of money on education.
P.P.P.P.S. I can’t resist sharing this correction of some very shoddy education reporting by the New York Times.
P.P.P.P.P.S. On the bright side, the inadequacies of government-run schools helped give birth to the home-schooling movement, which then led to this humorous video. And the political correctness that infects government schools results in a bizarre infatuation with gender performance, which helped lead to this funny video. And this bit of satire on the evolution of math training in government schools also is quite amusing.
Philadelphia, which pays the teachers a fortune and has a horrible school system, recently closed 12 big schools because they are “out of money”.
There was just a newspaper article that in the remaining schools, kids have to share text books which are falling apart, and there are not enough books for the kids to take home at night.
But when they closed those 12 enormous schools, they just dumped thousands upon thousands of new books in empty buildings with no effort at all to redistribute them. The few teachers that are interested enough have to go there and personally look for books for their classes. the city is now going to hire an outside firm to catalog all the unused books.
The article in the Democrat owned newspaper reported this without a single reference to waste and mismanagement.
Look for the union label
It’s not an education. It’s babysitting.
One major problem with our education system is that we are trying to get the academic achievement of a sub-group which has a median IQ of 80 up to the same level as a sub-group with a median IQ of 105.
It's not going to happen. The only way to do it is to cripple the education of the white segment, which seems to be the approach being taken in our public schools.
We also have our teachers having the lowest SAT scores of any academic major. This needs to change.
Pretty much tells the story, doesn’t it?
Time to eliminate the NEA. A complete overhauling of the education system in this country is MANDATORY if we plan to remain where we are as a culture and a country, and even that won’t accomplish the deed until the family structure issues are resolved. Time to go back to the early days when school was really IMPORTANT. Look at the orientals if you want to see how important education is, they take it seriously unlike many American people.
It has become a maxim of the left that everyone is exactly the same, simply shapped entirely by environmental factors.
This has been the maxim to gain power since WWII.
Before that, it was axiomatic on the left that races were absolutely different by genetics. The left was heavily for eugenics and race based laws. Hitler was a fairly mainstream leftist for his day.
The inconsistency of the left is all about power, and whatever works to gain them power is what is “good” at the moment.
Doesn’t matter, people, including conservatives and, yes, FReepers will keep sending their kids to public schools - the FREEBIE is simply too much to pass up for most of us.
Very, very misleading story. Here’s a little-known fact.
On standardized tests:
Americans of Japanese descent outscore Japanese children.
Americans of Chinese descent outscore Chinese children.
Americans of French descent outscore French children.
Americans of Swedish descent outscore Swedish children.
Americans of Mexican descent outscore Mexican children.
And so on through every group for which there is data. The sole exception is that Finnish children do slightly better than American children of Finnish ancestry.
The difference in the overall scores is of course because American average performance is pulled down by groups that score even more poorly in their home countries.
The most likely explanation for the data provided by the article is not a failure of the educational system, of which I’m no fan, but by the change in the composition of the American people, and the even more drastic change in the school age population.
For an outline of how one educational system can do less well than another on average while performing better for (almost) every subgroup, I refer you to the great Iowahawk’s definitive disassembly of Paul Krugman.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
What a truly racist article!
Compares US performance only to those of “white” and East Asian countries.
Get YOUR children out of the government indoctrination centers - NOW!
“...the FREEBIE is simply too much to pass up for most of us.”
It boggles the mind the extent some parents will go to justify keeping their kids at risk of destructive indoctrination, mindless political correctness, and the sinister semi-hidden plan of common core - for at least 180 days out of the year.
And they’re ‘conservative’ by any other measure. Gotta maintain that lifestyle...
However, a growing number of parents are doing whatever it takes for their children.
Very interesting. Thanks.
For as long as they've been keeping these kinds of stats, on average white students have always outperformed black students by a wide margin. There is not one school district out of the many thousands of school districts in the U.S. where black students in a racially mixed school have outperformed or equaled the performance of white students. The chief reason: difference in IQs.
You'd think that after many decades of the same stats the people in charge would get a clue. Well, we know why they can't state the obvious...their careers (and maybe lives) would be ruined. I'll bet even many of the arch-liberal academics know the truth. But they have to lie to cover their rearends.
As I recall, that program was written by Ted Kennedy. Bush allowed him to develop the program when he was trying to hold out olive branches to the left and show how willing he was to work with them.
It's no wonder the program did not work. No leftist will ever write an education reform that has the goal of improving educational outcomes. Bush should not have spent so much time and effort trying to appease the Democrats. He should have just done what was right--implemented real education reform, not some leftist scheme.
The Department of Education is a waste as it is s imply funding the bad result.
Agree - growing, but still quite small.
In pretty much EVERY kind of objective, standardized tests, whites out-score blacks. SAT/ACT; Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery; police and fire tests --- they all show racial differences.
In the Griggs v Duke Power (1971) case, the Supreme Court decreed that tests that showed "disparate impact" (whites getting better scores than blacks) could not be used in hiring/promotion decisions (because of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act). This resulted in companies requiring college degrees instead of testing. Get rid of that one piece of federal legislation, and the whole liberal college racket comes falling down.
Don’t tell me... does this mean we have a generation, or two, or three of DUMBA$$ES? /s
Thank you, and bookmarked.
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