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Originally Posted by cremebrulee
Actually this all started many years ago, before many of us were born.
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Actually, it started in the 1960s...
They wanted to dumb most kids down because they believe excelling is elitist, so they wanted to equalize outcomes and form a cooperative, cohesive society. All we got was a tragically dumbed-down populace, and a society that is more polarized than ever.
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"While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement"
...The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT [Stanford Achievement Test, for grades K-12] scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping [ability/skill-level grouping, aka tracking]."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.
THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES
In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion, as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind."
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The Other Crisis in American Education - The Atlantic
Much more at the link.
And how do we know the population is
still being dumbed-down in our country's public school system 50 years later?
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"This exam [OECD's PIAAC], given in 23 countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving. The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex, modern society. And U.S. millennials performed horribly...
But surely America’s brightest were on top?
Nope.
U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain...The ETS study noted that a decade ago the skill level of American adults was judged mediocre. “Now it is below even that.” So Millennials are falling even further behind.
Top-scoring US millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom scorers (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers."
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...foreign-peers/