Posted on 01/07/2012 2:24:22 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Comparatively speaking, the United States does not starve its education system of revenue. The U.S. is one of the leaders in spending on Education, and yet it's schools are rated "average" by international bodies.
The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.
Worse, out of 34 OECD countries, only 8 have a lower high school graduation rate. The United States' education outcomes most resemble Poland's, a nation that spends less than half on education than the U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I wonder how many of the countries that are ahead of us have teacher’s unions.
The US certainly wastes a lot of money in K-12, for the most part by massively spending on Special Ed in a way that most other countries don’t.
Yet most OECD countries also have silly ideas and wasteful bees in the bonnet. The real problems the US has, though, in relation to these other countries, are NOT -
- Socialism - Most OECD school systems are even more centrally directed and state controlled than in the US. Most teachers in these countries are central government employees, and the local parents have even less of a say in the workings of the public schools than we do. And given that, even people who run the genuine full-on socialist systems would find our American obsessions strange. There is nothing socialist in an international sense about the requirement to mainstream special ed or be multicultural.
- Teachers unions - Nearly all OECD countries have seriously powerful government worker unions, or at least organized political interests. Our teachers unions don’t hold a candle to the French, for instance. This isn’t to say that the American unions aren’t corrupt and villainous; its just that the real damage they do is just a small part of the problem.
- Teaching methods - The US actually has a VAST range of curricula in widespread use; OECD countries do too; and there are all sorts of variant methods of teaching reading (Phonics vs sight reading is a bit beside the point in Chinese, for one). The truth is that on a large scale (as opposed to small tests) the differences in methods are marginal, all else being equal. There are stupid ways to teach reading in English, but this again is a small part of the problem, and I’d say in international comparisons this makes no difference. We could use the renowned Singapore system to teach math and it wouldn’t help much either.
The problem with US education is not institutional, ideological, or technical.
The big problem is that a very large minority of our kids are not culturally programmed to succeed in school. The big secret of all the school policy debates vis international comparisons is that everybody involved knows in his bones that if we took a “bad” US urban school, threw out its American kids but kept its teachers, buildings, administrators and methods, and filled it with even the equivalent lower social strata of German, French, or Chinese kids, straight from Leipzig or Marseilles or Nanjing, their test scores would immediately jump. I have seen this experiment done myself, it happens every day in California, where we have some schools full of very poor Asians straight off the boat.
The fault, dear Brutus...
P.S. In most High Schools today you will also find an office for the Police Department because it is required to keep the students from killing each other.
He did HUGH and SERIES tags too ~ entire sides of very large multistory facilities.
I think a project like this might have led him to use small spray cans rather than large truck mounted broom and sweep systems.
If he'd only known.....................
(He was equipped to stop a Parisian riot if need be)
I’ll have a go at it:
1. We need better discipline in schools. Corporal punishment at primary grades, suspension and expulsion at the high school level or for students of that age who make no progress at a lower grade level. Don’t waste time and money on people who don’t want to be there.
2. We need to bring back tracking- segregating students by ability in order to better instruct groups of students. That way stronger students receive more challenging instruction while weaker ones get instruction they can handle. (Oh crap, I used the ‘s’ word. Too bad. Let logic prevail over whining about ‘racism’ or ‘social justice’.)
3. If we are going to have grade levels and a promotion system, then those promotions need to be strictly by meeting the criteria for passing- not socially promoted because it hurts their self-esteem or because ‘they are bigger than the other kids’. If that means we have some people dropping out of elementary school, or kicked out, too bad.
4. If we must test students for results, let it be with tests that are to measure specific knowledge- as in something that has a correct answer. And no fudging about ‘benchmarks’ or ‘correlations’ or ‘standard deviations’ or other vile claptrap borrowed from psychology.
5. We need more vocational opportunities in high school, period. Everyone cannot (and some should not) go to a four year college. The world needs plumbers, mechanics, and even janitors.
6. Math should be taught without calculators.
7. Tons of money, paper,and time are wasted on Special Education. IDEA is too costly, for too little result.
Hmm....I think I’ll stop there.
Most of that money never makes it to the classroom.
Bueracracy.
“Show me a school today and I will show you a football stadium, baseball field, soccar field, basketball court, showers ,uniforms, all the athletic appurtenances,-—— and a lone file cabinet in some teacher’s room for the National Honor Society.”
You are correct!
They won all their athletic events. They had some top scholars. At graduation everybody had their parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents there if they could.
That was an absolute riot!
ALL the children at that high school were motivated to learn.
A public school grad will miss your point.
But won't correct you.
8. Math should be taught without slide-rules ~
Everybody that works for the public school system is on welfare.
Including my brother and his wife.
In addition, schools should not reward poor behavior as that does not only encourage ill-behavior but penalizes good behavior.
The student receiving the greatest of our resources is the EBD (emotional/behavior disorder) student who is also ESL (English as a second language) qualified. Guess who this student is!
“8. Math should be taught without slide-rules ~”
I don’t think that would be a problem- I don’t think I’ve seen one in years....
The National Honor Society is “c r * p”.
Regardless of whether the National Honor Society has any merit or not is indeed questionable. I was agreeing with the other poster about schools spending far too much effort on athletics and far too little on academics.
Strike that “Regardless of”.....I thought I had backspaced that out...grrr.
Once we left teaching from the bottom up (i.e., phonics and math without calculators) we were DOOMED. And the people leading the charge knew it - and wanted it that way, so as to take us down a few notches in the world.
I agree completely then add on top of that all of the Social Justice BS and its a wonder the kids learn anything useful to real life... like reading, writing and ‘rithmatic.
And don’t get me started on the dumbing down of history. What they do learn is really a disconnected series of ‘facts’ and very little or nothing about the sequence of events and causes that lead up to major events like Wars or the Great Depression. It’s just not sickening in my mind its Criminal with malice of forethought.
I wonder what would happen if you drilled down another level and compared money vs. results for red America versus blue America. Maybe all red counties versus all blue counties.
“I agree completely then add on top of that all of the Social Justice BS and its a wonder the kids learn anything useful to real life... like reading, writing and ‘rithmatic.’
Actually, there’s no great mystery here. The fact is that kids learn today because of parents that have the means to have them taught, OUTSIDE OF THE SCHOOLS (by any of a number of means). The kids that are at the mercy of the schools, namely lower income types are simply wrecked for life.
And yes, it is malice and forethought. Bilingual education is probably the best example - it wound up being Spanish Language instruction, and the kids couldn’t function in what was an English language country. It was no secret, it was OBVIOUS as hell. Parents understood this and PROTESTED - and were to go to hell by the schools. The parents wanted their kids to learn English.
The degree of outright EVIL that we’re dealing with, I think, is simply too hard for most conservative (and moderates, for that matter) to comprehend - and that is why they continue to get away with it. I could go on about Tony Snow and Dr. Laura both thinking that Rush was blowing hot air when he went after education - and then how those two found out that Rush was dead-on as their kids were getting abused by the schools. But they refused to even believe Rush, even with his 99.7% (or whatever) accuracy.
Teacher’s Unions! And trying to use schools for social engineering.
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