There seems to be agreement that New York sports fans are dragging our averages down.
When you try to elevate everyone to a certain level (No Child Left Behind), you cater to the lowest common denominator.
Teachers all over have said they spend most of their time and resources on the slower of the learners. Imagine if they didn’t have to. The brightest kids get left to learn on their own because they are capable.
So… what? Public education only for the gifted? Let the rest go to bricklaying school?
No, public education doesn’t just have to be for the gifted. No Child Left Behind was a fucking disaster though.
Liberals don’t want to entertain vouchers, and some won’t accept that some people are just born not to go to college. This is a problem.
Even if you listen to an interview of the Education Secretary, he doesn’t have a fucking clue how to get to where he wants because he has no defined goals (or we as a nation can’t agree on them)
This separation(college ready vs ARMY vs technical schooling) could happen much earlier than it does now. Now the focus is on graduating every kid from HS and sending them off to college. Let the kids decide which path they want, not the parents.
Every interview I’ve seen with Arne Duncan suggests he knows exactly where he wants to go. However, since the federal government has very little control over education (conservative bellyaching notwithstanding), there’s not a lot he can do about it.
As far as taking choices away from parents, I’m somewhat curious to see what sort of legislation you think can do that while passing constitutional muster.
That’s how much of the world does it. In Japan (according to my wife) you have to test into a high school, otherwise you learn a trade. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. My sister spent 4 years and an ungodly amount of money to get a degree in Communications. She cuts hair now.
Does she have any openings tomorrow afternoon around 3:00? 
I hesitate with making decisions like this during people’s youth because of my own story. I sucked at high school. Not because I was dumb, but because I had a lot of mental issues (that extended to not turning in work I did and tearing up tests and throwing them away before turning them in because I was being perfectionist). In a society like that, I never would have gone to college, but I’m graduating college with honors. It turns out that a college environment works a lot better for me, for various reasons – not to mention the mental issues got mostly sorted out. I also know a girl who had a really high GPA in high school and dropped out of college because she couldn’t handle it and is currently working in the exciting world of Fast Food.
I don’t think basing the entire career of a person based on their teenage or child self is a great idea. There’s too much variation anyway. Some geniuses are shit test takers. you know, the kid who couldn’t recite logarithmic identities to save his life but give him a table of them and suddenly he’s doing proofs above his grade level. Likewise, some ace test takers suck at everything else, some dumb kids get straight A’s because their parents help them so much and so on. I don’t think there’s any good way to measure somebody’s potential for life success based on what they did between the ages of 5 and 18.
That’s sort of not really true. More than 90% of Japanese students go to high school. Without a high school degree, you’re not going to get much of a job, even in the trades. Mostly, you expect school aged kids to be in school, not getting work.
Testing isn’t hard at all if you want to attend Joe Q Random Public school. Getting a top notch high school entrance exam score is necessary to attend the better college track schools, but you don’t have to be any kind of diligent student to get accepted into a high school that focuses on trades. The South Korean system is nearly identical, as apparently are the Taiwanese and Chinese systems (though I have no knowledge of those).
In the developed work, even where you expect kids to go into trades, rather than college, the expectation is that they have at least a high school level education.
Because those US companies (or their armed forces) send to my country are their third-raters who barely finished high school, or are good at faking college diplomas. The exception is their diplomatic corp. They’re kinda good.
My vote (and I have no doubt this has been mentioned above) is that our concept of “liberty” and “freedom” has slowly mutated into a total lack of standards.
“What? You want my child to study fancy math? AND you’re teaching her that we used to be monkeys!! She shouldn’t have to do that, she’ll fall behind on her video game schedule! Here, sweetie, have some more Twinkies…”
Guess what–we were having this same “problem” 50+ years ago when we were doing so many wonderful things by your estimation.
http://www.enotes.com/1950-education-american-decades/why-johnny-cant-read
I hope you notice that date–1955!
Now–
The children who supposedly “couldn’t read” in 1955 had to have been born in 1950, or earlier, in order to be in school in 1955. Which means that most cars, most bridges, most roads, most buildings, etc., in the last 30 years have been designed and built by people who “couldn’t read.” I hope that this is enough to show you how incredibly stupid, ignorant, and just plain wrong your thesis is.
Absolutely agreed on both! I think that most people drop out of high school looking at the expected extra curricular activities needed to enter a university and say, meh screw that.
Yes, because in order for there to be a problem EVERY SINGLE PERSON NEEDS TO BE EFFECTED. Just like every other issue: there is no obesity epidemic unless every single person in America is fat, there is no poverty problem unless everyone is poor, there is no issue with Gay rights as long as not every queer is being beat to death by yahoos.
The American populace has too many dumb fucks who doubt evolution but are pretty sure Obama was not born in the Unites States, or who think taxes are high historically and have no clue how progressive tax rates work.
Go look at any top technical graduate program and look at the number of foreign students there are. It’s hard to find a TA who can talk English intelligibly.
From my experience with American’s the issue is they are very insular. Things outside of America get very little attention within their media which actually makes sense given the size of America. If you take a news program the vast majority of it will be about America with maybe a little bit at the end about world news. Of course I am sure that varies if there is a really big international story but it seems to be the general pattern.
This leads to American’s seeming dumb to people from other countries because they seem to have so little general knowledge of things outside of America. Examples I can think of off the top of my head from American colleagues are asking me if we celebrate Thanks Giving in the UK and if we have our own currency or just we just use Dollars.
In my opinion it’s not being dumb it’s a lack of general knowledge of non US things and also a lack of interest in not having that knowledge.
I would imagine there are probably other countries that share this insular outlook but they are just not as visible as America.
No - that is fracking dumb. I don’t have to ask if Thailand celebrates Guy Fawkes Night or uses pounds sterling. Because to even consider other countries have specific british customs or currency is ignoramus dumb on an epic scale.
They were a couple of particularly bad examples I could think of off the top of my head 
They are at the extreme end of profound ignorance.
I actually work with quite a few American’s and the main thing I come across is not so much stupid stuff like my examples but just a complete lack of knowledge about something outside of America.
You think that’s bad… I was asked by an American if we British celebrated the 4th of July. 
:dubious:
But, not all Americans are that dumb, I deliberately started a thread to show how little Americans know about Indonesia, but now it is nearing the second page, I’ve actually learnt new things from it. :eek:
Your sister is an example of a different problem: forcing too many people into college. I absolutely agree that the “college for everyone” ideal is a bad one, and all it’s really done is create a system of for-profit academic institutions which aren’t doing much of anything except charging people thousands of dollars to obtain worthless degrees.
However, the stuff taught in high school is what US society generally agrees is the stuff every citizen should know - the things you need to understand to function (and maybe even be an informed voter and make change).
First, while this is certainly true it has very little to do with the issue under discussion. The sort of standardized tests we’re talking about don’t include geography or general knowledge.
Second, this appears to be a bigger issue for Americans than it really is (especially with regard to Britons, since I used to be one and took a very long time to understand this). You know all sorts of things about the US and its customs because America is rich and influential and its arts, culture and products are crammed down your throat. In contrast, Britain is no longer rich or influential and its ongoing contribution to world culture is now limited to the occasional film or band or royal wedding.
That’s why Americans appear to be ill-informed: because there’s no reason Americans should know more about Britain than you do about Brazil. Or, as Bill Bryson put it [I paraphrase here]: can you name the Prime Minister of Ireland? Probably not, and it’s like nine fucking feet away from you.
Okay, there’s one other reason, which is that America is really large and has virtually every type of weather or landscape, and really far away from anywhere most people want to visit. So, most Americans never leave the country (something like 30% of the population have passports). Britain is really small and really cold and pretty much the same everywhere so everybody goes to the Costa Del Sol or wherever.
ETA: Having said all that, I feel compelled to point out that in the first few weeks I lived here, two people in my high school asked me what language we spoke in England.
The questions you all are discussing are indeed sort of dumb. But the US is around as big as Western and Central Europe*. So the Western European can appear more cosmopolitan while not really exposing themselves to more people and places than the completely insular American. Plus, American culture is readily available in Western Europe, so they can appear more cosmopolitan much easier due to being exposed to both European and American culture without having to go to a great effort to do so.
*slightly less populous but slightly larger.