It's a damn shame that American kids have fallen so far behind their international counterparts in the last 1.5 years......must be Bush's fault! :wink:
Can't get the img to work; http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/9813/slide_9813_129537_large.jpg?1282658327765
Nah......it must have been Clinton's fault: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/04/AR2007120400730.html Certainly the scores would have been much worse for this group of 15 year olds in 2006 had they not made great gains and improvements after Clinton left office. :wink: :roll:
I don't know about the rest of the country but schools here are locally controled. When you consider that districts like the Detroit Public Schools are included in the totality of American schools it's no surprise. There are no Detroits in Finland.
It seems to me that in America today the plethora of after school activities that kids particpate in are frequently determined to be of prime importance by many parents. So much so that they complain that the volume of homework detracts from little Johnny's baseball/basketball/etc practice and he's a budding MLB or NBA star! I doubt if many kids in Finland or Japan or Korea or their parents are very distracted by after school sports stuff like they are here in the USA. Exception would be Korean girls who clearly do no homework at all and mainly work on their chipping and putting!
Terry....you may have something there. I had an Indian cab driver in Detroit once taking me to the airport who said he left his children behind in India because the schooling there was so intense and of long duration. It was something like 8-5 six days a week. He didn't want them in the U.S. with him because he didn't want them falling behind their fellow countrymen. :shock: And yet....in the face of what has happened to our economy we are facing huge deficits in school budgets and every dollar pegged for education comes under fire it seems.
Dave, if you look at the dollars spent on education, my understanding is that you will find that they have increased dramatically over the past 10 years...yet our schools have not improved. Things need to be changed...JO'Co could certainly address this better than I ever could...and maybe he will...but it would appear that throwing dollars at the system without changing it is not the answer.
In my town, Howell NJ, the big thing for years was class size. If you had more than 20 kids in an average class then they would build a new school. You know, the ratios had to be conducive to one on one type interaction. So in a town of 52000 we have eleven schools plus a huge high school. And the achievement scores got lower every year. I'm not as learned as JO'Co but in my day one 70 year old nun with a pointer could keep everyone in a class of 45 on task. A lot of kids today can't speak a coherent sentence let alone write one.
Anyone who went to Catholic schools, as I did, knows that public school theories of education are all bogus. In Catholic schools of the 1950's and 60's, class sizes were limited only by the distance between the four walls of the classroom; and there was no air conditioning; and they could hit you until their last ruler broke...and it worked. The only two guys in my high school graduating class who didn't go to college went career military: one in the Navy and the other in the Army. It worked, because the parents cared and everyone concerned encouraged competition. There was no debate between academics and athletics. The highest GPA's in the school WERE the football players! Our class valedictorian went to Loyola; our class salutatorian played on two Rose Bowl teams at Stanford; and our #3 played baseball for the Air Force Academy. The idea was to win at everything, by having no mercy on yourself. We never lost to a public school in football. Never. Being a public school teacher myself, I won't make a big speech about what's wrong with our system of education, except to post this news piece about a brand, new school in our area that started this week. Its the most expensive school ever built, ($134,000 per student) costing more than half a b-b-b-billion dollars in a school district that's in debt by almost EXACTLY that amount! It is built on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated and it has "talking" park benches and all the latest gadgets... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38807154/ns/us_news-life/ More... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools
JO'Co I attended a Catholic school in Queens NYC. We had 50-60 kids per class. In my graduating class 4 guys ended up at ND. I taught school for 5 yrs. after I graduated. I had classes between 45-50 kids. They came from good homes, wanted to learn (for the most part) and tested well. This was a neighborhood of first and second generation Italians and Yugoslavs. It didn't take, money or small classes. All it took was dedicated teachers and involved parents.
re: dedicated teachers and involved parents. That's it. That's the magic formula and it still works. At my old high school last year, the top kid went to Notre Dame and the #2 kid went to USC. At St. Lucy's where my wife graduated, both of the top two students went to Notre Dame last year. These aren't "rich kids" from an "investing class"; these are middle class and/or working class families who earned it...