I don’t see how that makes sense at all.
If everyone in the world was mixed together, and then redistributed randomly to countries of different sizes, then the average score for each country would be the same (assuming that none of the countries was so small that statistical variation was large). The fact that averages aren’t the same mean that people aren’t randomly distributed, Korea and Finland have better educated ones then Mexico and Chile. The sizes of the countries doesn’t enter into it.
All I know is that 95% (or more) of resumes I see for new MS and PhD engineers are from people who went to university outside the United States. Which is fairly scary.
We have lots of schools in our district, and one high school, whose students come from families who really care about education, has significantly higher test scores than the others, though the teachers are paid the same and the physical plant is actually worse.
The parents of lots of my kids’ friends would rather buy a new car than spend money on college.
In the school my kids went to one teacher said that Harvard was no better than the local community college. That guy would have gotten lynched at the high performing school. Hell, I was tempted.
If you think schools are deficient, get involved. I never found teachers resistant to volunteering, quite the opposite. In our district in NJ, admittedly in a town with a lot of researchers, parents were in the classes all the time talking about stuff they knew.
Sure the schools could use more money, but if parents cared that would take care of itself as bond issues would pass. My old town never rejected a school bond.
My daughter’s European friends went to college for free. I wonder if such a path would encourage kids to study harder in high school. If they know that their parents can’t afford anything more than a community college, why bother?
Why? 4% of the world population is in the US, so you’d expect 4% of new PhDs to come from here if we were churning them out at the same rate as the rest of the world.
Am I understanding you correctly?
When you apply for a job, are you expecting to compete against everyone in the world who has your credentials, or just people in your neck of the woods?
If you are looking to hire a person, are you expecting the entire world to apply for that position, or mostly people who are in your neck of the woods?
I’m in academia, so applicants do usually come from a sizable chunk of the world. Apparently the same is true for whatever engineering job Voyager is accepting applications for.
I didn’t really put that right. The US is a large country with many different school systems. Most countries aren’t like that. At a minimum, we should consider each state as a separate entity when comparing other countries, and perhaps each individual school district. If we look at Europe, as a whole, it’s going to perform worse than many countries that make up Europe.
I can draw an even sharper contrast: the first group does not exist except as an obnoxious straw-man, while the second group is EVERYBODY.
What DOES exist is a contrast between people who want public schools to work for everybody, and people who are okay with some kids being in totally wretched schools if it means that other kids are in extra-good schools.
Meanwhile, boy howdy would I be thrilled to go to a Finnish model.
It depends on how tough it is to get into free college. I imagine if all public universities became free, admissions criteria would become stricter in response to the increased number of applicants. So in that case, I could see students working harder.
I’m sure there would be some unintended consequences. When Georgia first instituted the HOPE scholarship, it allowed high school graduates with a 3.0 GPA to attend any public university for free. Students started gaming the system by taking easier classes so that they wouldn’t have to work so hard to get a 3.0. Which was dumb, since university standards didn’t change. But still, so many students were able to take advantage of the scholarship that the state started to complain about being bankrupt (I’m skeptical of this claim, but whatever*). So they raised the bar. You now not only have to have a 3.7 GPA in high school, but you have to score a 1200 on the SAT (and keep a 3.3 GPA in college). That second amendment is the killer, IMHO. Kids who don’t make over 1200 tend to be the ones who need financial help the most.
*I’m skeptical of this claim partially because the state started whining about how broke it was while it removed the maximum household income eligibility ($100,000). People are who are broke generally don’t do crazy things like that.
Exactly!!
How does a school get rated as “low performing.” It’s compared to a “high performing” school. It’s all relative, in other words. Vouchers work because there are disparities, both real and perceived. Vouchers only work when there is someone to escape from and someone to run away to. And the horrible thing is that they PERPETUATE this inequality rather than address it.
The same thing with charter schools. They are attractive because they serve as an alternative to the “bad” schools, where people apparently don’t know what the hell they are doing and the kids are all bone, thugs, and harmony. But if we made all schools charter schools? Oh, hell no! That will take away the specialness and wonder of “our” school. We can’t have that!
I was bussed to schools as a kid. My parents wanted their kids to have the best and perceived the neighborhood schools as being the worst. And you know what? They probably were right. But had they always been bad? NO. As soon as black people were able to live wherever they wanted to and middle-income families left for the suburbs, concentrating poverty in the inner city, schools went to hell. If my professional parents and their brethern hadn’t had the mentality that black and poor = bad and had kept their kids in the neighborhood schools, those schools would have been just as good as the “good” schools on the other side of town. But who wants to put their kid in a suspect school when they don’t have to go there? It’s easier just to go with the school everyone knows is good rather than take a chance on the school that everyone believes is bad. Who cares if you’re just making the problem worse with this decision? The kids who are left behind aren’t your responsibility.
That is the problem from where I stand.
I think that is a big problem. When I went to school, we studied traditional school subjects. There was very little about life skills, morality, not even very much about current events. I’m not doing a ‘things were better in the old days’ rant. I just see that schools are expected to serve so many more and varying purposes that more basic requirements aren’t getting enough attention.
That is certainly not the entire problem though.
It takes a lot of guts to come here for a MS or PhD, into a new environment and a new language. So I’d expect a lot more. Not to mention that the distribution of these guys does not exactly match the distribution of people in the world.
You misunderstand me. They come from a small subset of universities directly, not the entire world. They got there from non-US colleges.
I don’t understand the system precisely (perhaps someone closer to it can help) but my impression is that kids get tracked pretty early, and the ones on the top track get to go to top universities for free. Her current boyfriend, who is German, goofed off and had to fight his way to a better university. However neither he nor for former boyfriend, who is British, have to worry about student loans, and neither come from a wealthy family.
California used to have more or less automatic acceptance with the right GPA, but the colleges looked quite closely at the classes taken, to prevent this kind of gaming.
I’m not aware that it is. NCLB set specific standards for the percentage of students that had to be passing state standardized tests in each given year. Schools which don’t meet that standard are labeled “failing”; schools that do meet that standard are not.
The eventual goal is that all kids pass the test. It requires bizarre math to think that’s reasonable, assuming that academic potential is on a standard distribution. You either concentrate most of your teaching resources on the kids below average, neglecting your best and brightest (which is happening now, and encouraging the best and brightest to leave public schools in favor of private schools, exacerbating the problem); or you lower the “grade level” requirements to a few standard deviations below what the average student can do (which is also happening, and also brings a host of problems with it).
Of course, some schools have a bathtub curve. They do great for the students of wealthy parents; if there’s any level of school choice, affluent parents who pay attention will send their kids there. They do poorly for students of poor parents; if there’s any level of school choice, poor parents who pay attention won’t send their kids there. You therefore get in a self-reinforcing loop: you get the most involved affluent parents, and the least involved poor parents, and your achievement gap gets wider and wider despite your best efforts.
Yes, schools ought to up their game, along with just about everyone in society. At the same time, if 80% of my students are performing far above grade level, and the 20% of my students whose parents have felony records are struggling, does it make sense to call my classroom a failure, as NCLB does?
Or if 60% of the student body is ESL, does it makes sense to rate it on the same scale as a student body that is 3% ESL?
My father retired from his job as a principal disillusioned by the system. Consistently, his school was ranked at the bottom when the paper would publish all the school’s NCLB “grades”. His school district was one of the wealthiest in the state, but paradoxically his school served some of the poorest communities in the state. So of course his school was going to look bad when compared to the others! It demoralized his teachers, who were working their hardest but knew they would never be able to change perceptions. And it demoralized the kids, too. Would would want to go to a school everyone thinks is bad?
It was a wonderful school, but you wouldn’t have known that based on the scarlet letter that had been brandished on it.
I graduated from high school in 1969. In New York we had Regents tests in each major subject, and you needed to pass the Regents test to graduate, so it was a bit like NCLB. I suspect schools cared a great deal about them. My high school was thoroughly tracked, in fact everything was tracked from 3rd grade onwards. None of my teachers spent a second coaching us on this test, nor did they have to. I suspect plenty of classes had lots of practice.
I know tracking is out of fashion, but maybe we should go back to it, so long as kids misplaced have a fairly simple route up. I was almost never bored in high school and none of my friends were ever bored. The philosophy in the district where my kids went to school was differentiation - mix kids, and teach to them individually. I never saw how that could work in the real world.
Or am I missing something and do the 80% get something out of being in the same class as the struggling 20%?
Plus, we have a friend who teaches second grade in Mesa, Arizona. Large portions of her class vanish in the middle of the term as their parents move on to another farm or something. I wonder how the hell she is supposed to get graded.
Pretending everything is alright and dropping the bar to make the numbers better is just as bad.
If the parents won’t set expectations for the kids us as the community should.
I see what you did there.