Umm, it is not simply a matter of “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Doctors don’t spend a decade in training to simply check off one or the other.
Given the extreme complexity of modern medicine, I should think education were comparatively black-and-white. Poor test scores are poor test scores, no matter how far you try and apologize for them.
I’m confused… I thought this thread was about education and not the ACA/unemployment. 
Ah, so how things are perceived is more important than what’s actually true? A poll is more than just “a data point”? How about these data point: we spend more than 50% more per capita on healthcare than any other country, yet have the highest infant mortality rate of any country in the West (excluding South America and the Caribbean).
Since “spending lots of money for minimal return” seems to be your problem with US education, your opposition to healthcare reform seems rather inconsistent.
You could have answered it yourself with three seconds of Googling. People are mostly quite dissatisfied with the US education system. You might also have discovered that 26% of Americans believed healthcare was the biggest problem facing the US (second only to the economy generally) prior to the passage of the ACA.
Lack of the first can certainly lead to lengthy digressions about the second.
No we don’t. Spending is at or around 5% GDP in most of the industrialized world, with Asian countries spending a little less and Scandanavian ones a little more.
Seriously. I realize its a lost cause, but I wish Dopers would at least try to stick to the topic at hand instead of mindlessly chasing after every piece of chum thrown into the water.
I won’t derail the thread, my apologies.
Various types of welfare payments are tied to school attendance. *Going *to school and being engaged while there are two entirely different animals.
We need to spend more on education, we spend a fraction of the importance education has in our society
I appreciate it.
But back to the topic, your impression seems to have been that we were spending “vastly more” on education then other countries to get moderate results. Given that we in fact spend approximately an average amount compared to other industrialized countries, and get approximately average (and improving!) test scores, does that change your opinion?
Again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek to do better, but the idea that US education is somehow fundamentally flawed, in crisis, etc. seem rather pernicious to me. It delivers a decent, if rather middle-of-the-road, bang for our educational dollars.
Pay them to get good grades then.
But to be clear, I’m not talking about creating a monetary incentive to entice people to go to school or take it seriously or get good grades or whatever. I’m talking about the fact that poor people do worse in school – apparently because they’re poor – so if we can eliminate or drastically reduce poverty, our educational success rate will skyrocket simply as a byproduct.
Of course, that might take a generation or two, and sound-bite-of-the-week politicians who got their jobs through a bi-annual popularity contest have no time for that. So they’re probably just going to continue pissing into the wind and claiming random noise in the signal as successes.
Fair enough. I know per student we spend significantly more in dollars than other nations, and I believe we aren’t getting our bang for the buck. The responsibility of course is shared by many–apathetic parents, “teaching to the test”, and the practice of swapping bad teachers around to different schools rather than simply letting them go. The fix isn’t easy; it involves as much a change in our culture as in our education system. But I see it as getting worse, and would rather address it sooner than to see an entire generation lost in an increasingly competitive global economy.
For the record, I’m an advocate of expanding charter schools and a voucher system where parents can shop around for the best school available to their child. If we want a meritocracy, that is the way to achieve it. While at the same time providing competition and accountability to poorly performing schools.
You know that the voucher system is basically just a handout to the middle class and sponsoring churches, right? Low-income families have neither the time nor the inclination to shop around for schools (not that I approve of their lack of engagement).
Let’s NOT expand vouchers, they are horribly regressive towards the lower class and serve only to hurt public education at a time when it is vulnerable
But do we want a meritocracy in public education? That implies that the best students can get a great education while the poor ones get left behind even more than they already do. This is a major philosophical point of contention.
The alternative is for poor students to hold the brightest ones back. We should certainly have some sort of “streaming” system.
And yet they are mostly (67%) Satisfied or Very Satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child is receiving.
Why the disparity? Almost certainly a media influence: they know from personal experience that the schools are doing well, but suspect from alarmist and misleading media reports that education in general sucks in our country.
Maybe it’s just elementary schools that suck. 
That’s gotta be it!
even under our current system, people can get educated for free. Any person with access to youtube has more education than he can possibly ever have time for. Any person with a kindle can have tons of great books. throw in a cheap mp3 player and iTunes and you have even more. Why do we think that without a public school, poor kids would go uneducated? the only person that goes uneducated is the person that chooses to go uneducated. and no public school is going to help the person who just doesn’t want to learn.