The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has come out with its annual review of national education infrastructures, and the study finds that the US pays more for education than any industrial nation but has a mediocre educational output.
It is clear that the calls that American education is "underfunded" don’t meet the facts. We spend an average of $10,240 per student in K-12 education, yet our students rate firmly in the middle of the pack, and our high-school graduation rate is below average.
If spending was the primary factor for making an educational system work, then the US should be firmly leading the world. Yet we are not, because unlike the rest of the industralized world, the US educational system does not stress performance. Foreign schoolchildren are tested far more frequently and under far more stringent standards than schoolchildren in the United States. They are expected to excel.
In the United States, educational spending is doled out under a practically socialist system that funds schools regardless of performance. There is no sense of competition, in fact, schools have every incentive not to improve test scores as that leads to more funding and attention. Our educational system places more emphasis on paperwork and bureaucracy than actually educating students.
If we ran our economy the same way we run our educational system, the United States would be a third world nation. Education is too important to the strength of this nation to not demand accountability and demand better performance for our education dollar. Until real reform like school vouchers and better accountability become a cornerstone of the US educational system, the US will continue to spend more and get less.
We can improve public schools by sending the best students away. Brilliant idea.
Jay if this is your way of supporting the ‘No Child Left Behind Program’ then you are greatly misinformed. First, in that statistic where you claim that each child get $10,240 a year for education is wrong. Did you know that this statistic included private school students as well as public? So that is not an accurate estimate for public schools. I am going to be a teacher and I am a friend with many teachers, and I have yet to meet one teacher that supports this program. All it is going to achieve is keeping our schools segregated, shamefully under funded, and poor. Were you aware that when Bush was Governor of Texas the school slipped in ranking from 34th to 46th in the nation because of his cuts to public schools? The average level of high school math that a graduate completes in Texas is Algebra 1 or Geometry!!! Give Me A Break!!!! This is not acceptable! Get your head out of the sand, quite blindly supporting Bush and every decision he makes just because he is a republican! You can be conservative and not agree with every statement he makes. I invite you to use other news medias Jay besides FOX News.
Intelligent people have made endless efforts to inform the clueless ideologues why applying “market forces” to education would end disastrously. In nearly all cases, the “deregulation” crowd is rhetorically paralyzed in crafting a legitimate response to real-world issues, so they continue clubbing us over the head with the ideology of vouchers, which we’re all acutely aware of.
The one thing Jay is right about is that no amount of money is gonna fix “failing” schools burdened with a liquid student body, a large percentage of which cannot speak English. My school district is a classic example. Each month, the district faces a 25 percent student mobility rate because the local meatpacker burns through third world labor imports that quickly. Not surprisingly, the district also frequently falls behind the “thresholds” of success expected from unrealistic performance mandates approved by both Democrats and Republicans. This is despite the district’s bending over backwards to improve these test scores and employing every imaginable and affordable tool to make it possible to accomodate the business lobby’s perceived entitlement to a revolving door of braceros to suppress wage levels.
It’s not politically correct to admit so it will never be cited by the public schools as the root of the problem of “failing schools”. The genius scenario for Republicans is that they can exploit the silence of the public schools in addressing this issue as a justification for condemning the schools as failures. The GOP has it down to a science, but it doesn’t seem to be a selling point for them…yet at least.
Intelligent people have made endless efforts to inform the clueless ideologues why applying “market forces” to education would end disastrously. In nearly all cases, the “deregulation” crowd is rhetorically paralyzed in crafting a legitimate response to real-world issues, so they continue clubbing us over the head with the ideology of vouchers, which we’re all acutely aware of.
The one thing Jay is right about is that no amount of money is gonna fix “failing” schools burdened with a liquid student body, a large percentage of which cannot speak English. My school district is a classic example. Each month, the district faces a 25 percent student mobility rate because the local meatpacker burns through third world labor imports that quickly. Not surprisingly, the district also frequently falls behind the “thresholds” of success expected from unrealistic performance mandates approved by both Democrats and Republicans. This is despite the district’s bending over backwards to improve these test scores and employing every imaginable and affordable tool to make it possible to accomodate the business lobby’s perceived entitlement to a revolving door of braceros to suppress wage levels.
It’s not politically correct to admit so it will never be cited by the public schools as the root of the problem of “failing schools”. The genius scenario for Republicans is that they can exploit the silence of the public schools in addressing this issue as a justification for condemning the schools as failures. The GOP has it down to a science, but it doesn’t seem to be a selling point for them…yet at least.
Alex, I don’t see why it’s the responsibility of intelligent students to sacrifice their own educational opportunity to shore up public school test results.
Maybe getting the excellent students out of the school will free the teacher to put more interest in the other students. If it results in smaller class sizes, it doesn’t matter that the classes are going to be populated by those who can’t or won’t afford private schools. Low-income and learning disabled students are just the students who would stand to benefit most from smaller class sizes.
What we need is a lot less public input into educational standards. After all we don’t tell our doctors how to perform surgery, we trust their professional opinion. It’s time we trusted teachers to know best how to teach. Isn’t that what we pay them for?
Creationists in particular need to keep their opinions to themselves. Why do we let people who failed their education the first time tell teachers how to teach?