Posted on 04/11/2018 6:59:27 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Our school systems fail to prepare children to succeed as adults and are ineffective for the goal of deep and rich learning. It’s time to change that. It’s been 35 years. With the passage of that much time, and the human promise that it carried, the problems and deficiencies identified in 1983’s clarion call for action should have been corrected.
The call came from the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) in its report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. That report and its findings demonstrated the inextricable link between education and America’s economic competitiveness and national security. We were losing our edge, and our shirt, to other countries. In a growing global economy we were losing to such friends as Japan and Germany; and in the midst of the lingering Cold War we were losing as well to our fiercest competitors, namely Russia and China, which had made education, particularly in math and the sciences, national priorities.
At home, it was a different story. There was no special focus on education. We thought our schools were great. But the NCEE, a broad, bipartisan commission, had contracted with researchers, held hundreds of meetings and dozens of hearings, and assembled data about the progress of other countries relative to the U.S. And the data revealed otherwise.
There was “a rising tide of mediocrity,” A Nation at Risk told us, with educational content that “was a mile wide and an inch deep.” The report revealed, in the words of Reagan, an education system plagued by “low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and a failure to challenge students to push performance to boundaries of individual ability.”
The report sparked a national outcry. President Reagan made more than 50 trips around the country to get Americans’ attention.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Mediocrity implies that intelligent people can leave the bulk of the education of their children to the System while supplementing it at home. The truth is that the System is sucking the ability to reason and to think from the brains of the children and no amount of home supplementation will be enough to both impart the education lacking in the System and counter the incessant mind conditioning.
I worked in manufacturing for 22 years and have now taught Engineering subjects in high school for the last 16.
The average student entering our school cannot do basic mental arithmetic (5th grade stuff) and cannot read 1/16 inch on a student ruler.
Too many of them don’t even want to try to think analytically; just look stuff up on their phones.
Completely the creation of the “education schools.” Our EDD’s at work.
What is that graphic purporting to show?
FTA: “President Reagan made more than 50 trips around the country to get Americans’ attention.”
Yet he couldn’t muster the political will to rid us of the obvious point of failure - President Peanut’s Dept. of Ed (DED), despite multiple campaign trail denouncements.
Anyone who’s ever read a Mcguffey Reader knows how badly the American education system is failing. PO’d parents ought to pass them around at school board meetings.
RE: What is that graphic purporting to show?
1) Math proficiency by ethnic group
2) Math proficiency based on Parent’s level of education.
Thanks. I thought that might be it but the label “Math Proficiency” appeared nowhere on the graph, so I was left wondering.
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