We’d all be a helluva lot better off if they’d simply get back to the basics in school. Concentrate on teaching the three R’s instead of indoctrinating our youth with a bunch of Marxist B/S.
http://4brevard.com/choice/international-test-scores.htm
International Test Scores
Poor U.S. Test Results
Tied To Weak Curriculum
Results In short, the tests showed U.S. fourth-graders performing poorly, middle school students worse. and high school students are unable to compete. By the same criteria used to say we were “average” in elementary school, “we appear to be “near the bottom” at the high school level. People have a tendency to think this picture is bleak but it doesn’t apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school compares well in SAT scores, it will still be a lightweight on an international scale.
1.By the time our students are ready to leave high school - ready to enter higher education and the labor force - they are doing so badly with science they are significantly weaker than their peers in other countries.
2.Our idea of “advanced” is clearly below international standards.
3.There appears to be a consistent weakness in our teaching performance in physical sciences that becomes magnified over the years.
Causes for Failure One would think that with our vastly superior resources and the level of education spending which far exceeds these competitors we would outperform nearly everyone - not so. Dr. Schmidt, who oversees the research effort into the TIMSS results, says the actual cause for the failures appears to be weak math and science curricula in U.S. middle schools.
A more insightful explanation was once proffered by Jean McLaughlin, president of Barry University who confided “The public schools lack focus; instead of concentrating on education, they dabble in social re-engineering”. That assessment was confirmed by the superintendent of the country’s fourth largest school district in Miami-Dade, Florida who said “Half our job is education, and the other half is social work”.
Downward sloping performance confirms John Taylor Gatto’s thesis in his book Dumbing Us Down and his speeches which charge compulsory government education with deliberately producing robots instead of adults who are the best they can be.
Key phrase - “The public schools lack focus; instead of concentrating on education, they dabble in social re-engineering”.