There are plenty of statistics available that "prove" that American education is declining - most notably Department of Education reports from both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
You can either 1) do a little research and figure this out yourself, 2) believe us when we say that American education is on the decline, 3) continue believing we are the world's smartest people and that status quo is sufficient.
I agree scott. However, the important issue is, why is it in decline and how do we restore public education to it's former glory?
Personally, I believe the public school system was coopted by the Left and turned into a liberal indoctrination laboratory. I think the NEA and the Department of Education need to be disbanded and defunded and that control of the schools needs to be put back at a local level where it belongs.
I'd like to see it go a step further, with the complete privitization of schools. What K-12 education lacks in this country is compe ion. There is no incentive for schools and teachers to do anything more than achieve status quo.I agree scott. However, the important issue is, why is it in decline and how do we restore public education to it's former glory?
Personally, I believe the public school system was coopted by the Left and turned into a liberal indoctrination laboratory. I think the NEA and the Department of Education need to be disbanded and defunded and that control of the schools needs to be put back at a local level where it belongs.
That'd be fine with me. Localized schools were, more or less, when you didn't have the State and Federal Teacher's unions or the State and Federal Education agencies dictating your every move. Local communities could tailor curriculum to suit the population they served.
But, I'd be all for complete privitization.
We (well, my beautiful wife) home school.
no, our workforce is super skilled, they just charge too much.. why would a company pay an american 50 bux an hr when they could pay a chinese or indian 2-6 bux an hour for the same work?
tell me why if our educational system is so inferior that thousands of foreigners choose to get an american education?
actually, anyone tell me. also, if our k-12 education was so horrible how can americans graduate from college?
and in many other countries education is free or costs very little. so, why do the rich foreign parents send their students to america for an education
i dont think its all bad in the US, but perhaps the ratio of excellent educational ins utions to the number of crappy ones in the US has a greater disparity than those of other countries. i agree with Extra Stout in a way, it might be more of the at ude and personality of americans that effects their education rather than the actual schools themselves. people here might not take as much pride or extend enough effort into getting a higher education than the people in other countries.
Clandestino, please familiarize yourself with what a "non sequitur" is, re-read your posts, and ask yourself if you are getting your point across correctly. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your incoherent rambling isn't just a typo before I respond.
i have said americans have a good educational system. if we didn't, many foreigners would not be coming to our schools to learn. they would stay in their free to low cost ones. also, since we must have good universities, we therefore must have good k-12. to graduate from college you had to have learned something in your 13 years of pre-university education. you can't be totally re ed and just go into college and graduate.
Since you evidently didn't take the time to research, and you are still unwilling to take the word of people who clearly know what they are talking about (perhaps simply by reading previous threads on this very message board), I am tempted to let you continue living in your dream world.
Instead, I will once again provide statistics on the failing US education system.
* A 1993 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that 90 million adults - 47 percent of the population of the United States - demonstrate low levels of literacy. The level of literacy among adults had fallen by 4 percent since 1986.
* Only 15 percent of college faculty members say that their students are adequately prepared in mathematics and quan ative reasonings lower proportion than among higher-education faculty in Hong Kong, Korea, Sweden, Russian, Mexico, Japan, Chile, Israel, or Australia. Only one in five faculty members thinks students have adequate writing and speaking skills.
* Despite the growing importance of scientific knowledge, surveys have found that Americans are woefully ignorant of basic scientific facts. A majority of Americans,. for example, do not know that the earth and sun are part of the Milky Way galaxy, and a third of them think humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. A 1994 survey by Louis Harris & Associates and the American Museum of Natural History found that only about one adult in five scored 60 percent or better on a test of basic knowledge of subjects like space, animals, the environment, diseases, and earth.
* In the late 1980s, a national survey of high school seniors found that fewer than half could define even basic economic terms. Nearly two thirds of the seniors were unable to correctly define "profit," and less than half could define a "government budget deficit." Most seniors were also baffled by the concept of "inflation." The author of the "Report Card on the Economic Literacy of U.S. High School Students" concluded that "our schools are producing a nation of economic illiterates," and that the level of economic knowledge of students who had the benefit of twelve years of education is "shocking."" Especially damning was the finding that even students who took basic high school economics answered only 52 percent of the questions correctly. Students who took "consumer economics" got only 40 percent of the answers correct, while students who took social studies courses were right only 37 percent of the time. A 1992 survey by the National Center for Research in Economic Education and the Gallup Organization yielded similar results. High school seniors answered basic economic questions correctly only 35 percent of the time.
* SAT verbal scores have dropped from a mean of 478 in 1962 to 423 in 1994-a drop of 54 points. The SAT mean math score has fallen from 502 to 479 - a drop of 23 points. While math scores have risen 8 points since 1984, they are still below 1974 levels. The national verbal average has fallen 3 points since 1984. During the same period (1960-90), spending on elementary and secondary education increased more than 200 percent, after inflation. Class size has decreased by one third, enrollment has declined by 7 percent, and the number of teachers has increased by 17 percent. Moreover, the decline in test scores came at a time when average teacher salaries and the percentage of teachers with advanced degrees both tripled.
Some harder facts for you:
Department of Education statistics show that our top 12th grade students are last and next to last in math and science, respectively, compared to other industrialized nations. Elementary school is the only place where students (all students) seem to be doing "okay" where they rank 12th out of 26 nations in math and 3rd out of 26 in science.
But somewhere along the line something goes wrong, because our 8th graders rank 28th out of 41 in math (with a below average score) and 17 out of 41 in science. Things get worse by the time our kids get to 12th grade, where they rank 19th out of 21 in math and 16 out of 21 in science.
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The fact that our HS graduates are able to gain admission to college's with looser admission standards is not a measure of sucess. The only objective means of gauging the performance of our Education system is to look at time-series (how we perform over time) and cross-sectional (how we perform versus other industrialized nations) data. Both measures show a decline.
@ Scooter just now figuring out Clandestino is what Tpark used to be in this forum.
thanks for the stats. they proved my point more than anything. especially the last two. like i said earlier... in many countries, regular education stops at the elementary level, then students are put on different paths. some are chosen to pursue a vocational path and the others are set on an academic path. at the elementary school level our students are still doing well.
so, what happens by the 8th grade? what happens is that they no longer have all the riffraff taking the academic tests that they compare to the u.s. students. in the u.s. everyone remains part of the testing. the problem is exacerbated in the 12th grade bc almost no countries educated til they are 17/18 like our seniors. most european countries school ends at 16. only the smart ones get to the move on to another 2 years of college prep school(our jr and sr year). in the u.s. all the riffraff is still in school skewing the stats.
so, yeah, thanks for the stats and proving my point.
It's so useless.
"The sky is blue, and here's this picture to proove it"
"Oh thanks for the picture that prooves my point. If you see, the sun is out, at night the sky is not blue. So, once again, thanks for the picture that prooves my point"
okay, i guess you can't understand that if there are 2 schools with 100 students each. one school has to test all 100 and the other school gets to test the 30 best students. the school with the smaller group will have higher scores.
I guess you don't understand thats not the way these stats are compiled.
How have you proven that the 'K-12 education system' in this country has not declined in performance over the last 40 years?
I haven't seen anyone posit in this thread that American colleges and universities are inferior to their global counterparts.
well, tell me manny. how do they get the 17/18 year old German kid to come back to school to take a ing math and science test when he graduated 16 years old and has been apprenticing as a mechanic for the past 2 years... how do they do that? stfu, you have no idea how they test.
us kid gets us k-12 education. he can pass college with the education obtained from k-12. can't be as bad as you say.
when i was in kinder, we pretty much just played and slept and learned abcs, 123s. now, they are using computers and reading.
Selection. Less than half of American HS students go on to pursue a 4 year collegiate education, let alone complete one.
I'd say that most manage to make it through an undergrad program in spite of the education they received in K-12.
Ok. US kids are definetly the smartest in the world. I don't know why I let facts get in the way of listening to Clandestino.
i said the stats are skewed.
funny that you have no comment on the who is tested in our country versus theirs.
In addition, foreign students tend to be attracted to American graduate programs moreso than undergraduate programs.
I think there is a fundamental difference between the goals of the US education system and that of many other countries. To me the US system tries to push everyone to certain level of achievement, then offer at the student's choice, a vast amount of possibilities to further their education. In other countries, students are more catagorized by what abilities they are percieved to have, and then educated in a way tailored to that classification. I think a mix of these styles might be the right answer.
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