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My wife is involved in a charter school here in Boston. The people running the school are brilliant. Their solution to the problem seems to be Spanish immersion. They hired a half dozen Spanish teachers to teach K-12 Spanish.
I blame colleges charging outrageous prices. They can charge so much because students are peer pressured into going to college because HS diploma means crap anyway. Later on college diplomas will mean crap I mean they already mean crap.
Bacholers degrees are total crap nowadays. You need masters + up to get any respect.
What they need to do is make college more vocational school/apprenticeship instead of forcing people to take a well rounded education.
Come on taking art + music and such as a requirement for graduation. Forcing people to take crap courses/ones they are not interested in that wont even help at all in the real workplace just to make money. Too much bureaucracy, administration in the colleges/schools in general too.
There is community college for that. I think a college degree should consist of more than vocational education. You can check out my post on the ed forum for further discussion on that.
I, too, would like to see an honest discussion about turning our country's decades-long educational decline around....."
That is a great article from the link above. Thanks!
Here's one passage that I'm sure some of us can relate to here in this forum. So many posters have opinions but then when asked to prove them they are totally clueless and unable to do so. It is pretty sad!
>>>> Da Costa laments that students are no longer trained in logical analysis, and consequently have difficulty using evidence to reach a conclusion. R. Jackson Wilson finds this to be the greatest change he has observed during a quarter century of teaching history at Smith College. "Students come to us having sat around for twelve years expressing attitudes toward things rather than analyzing," he says. "They are always ready to tell you how they feel about an issue, but they have never learned how to construct a rational argument to defend their opinions." Again, these complaints are amply substantiated by data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. On one test of analytic writing measuring "the ability to provide evidence, reason logically, and make a well-developed point," only four tenths of one percent of eleventh graders performed at the "elaborated" (what I believe should be considered college-freshman) level.<<<<<
This is where we went wrong. We NEVER should have changed the emphasis from pushing kids to excel in academics and having them try to be among the smartest in the class while having them learn to deal with failure, to making education be all about raising the kids' "self-esteem" and by doing it the WRONG way by lowering academic standards and changing the thrust of the classroom experience to resonate with the lowest common denominator in the class. Before I even started to read the article I was going to offer this as one of the main reasons why schools turn out such dummies these days. They haven't learned to think! All they've learned is that the world revolves around them and their feelings are most important. NO WONDER we have so many people unemployed. What awful attitudes they developed in school. All it did was handicap them later in life.
>>>>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. A good education, it was said, maximized the child's innate spontaneity, creativity, and affection for others. To the extent that logic and acquired knowledge interfered with that process, they were devalued.<<<
This is APPALLING!
>>>> According to Arthur N. Applebee, the director of the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning, the typical college-bound high school student reads only sixty-five pages a week (even with Advanced Placement courses factored in), or less than ten pages a night. <<<<
I had to read more like 60 to 100 pages per night or more! No way could I have gotten away with only having to read 60 pages a week. This is AWFUL and this is all college age kids are being expected to do these days?
Fixing the problem does NOT require that another penny be spent. In fact if you cut teachers salaries and or paid them based on results of their kids achievement, you might see a COMPLETE turn around. Middle and High School teachers don't deserve what they are paid if freshman at Harvard are barely able to construct simple subject-predicate sentences and that is it! Kids whose writing skills at that level shouldn't wouldn't have even advanced to the 7th grade level where I went to school! We need to go back to teaching the way we used to when kids really were challenged and when are education was on a par with the UK and Japan and other places.
Of course the dumbing down was by design. Having raised nothing but a few generations of couch potatoes who can't think for themselves, is just what the elites wanted. People who can't think are easy to brainwash and easy to control. Those of us who want to take our country back have our work cut out for us giving crash courses to our peers about what Liberty and Freedom; why it is important and why continuing to be apathetic, compliant and unaware will only hurt us in the long run!
In that key group, 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia. That is beyond pathetic."
That doesn't strike me as "beyond pathetic" at all. There are many great, prosperous nations that we'd then still be ahead of, and I don't know what the percentages are we might be 4% away from being #3 on that list.
What is Germany, the strongest economy in Europe? Beyond beyond pathetic? Switzerland? Austria? All pathetic?
One of the issues for me is that many of these threads discussing schools and employment options is why people continue to breed like bunnies if these are problems that they know their offspring will face.
Those breeding like bunnies are the ones going after the welfare handouts. Even coming here from other countries by the millions. We now reward single mothers with a life-long retirement plan, they just have to have lots of kids.
One of the issues for me is that many of these threads discussing schools and employment options is why people continue to breed like bunnies if these are problems that they know their offspring will face.
They get paid to do so. The government incentivizes that behavior with freebies and entitlements. The government pays people to breed and not work. Think about it...
According to a new report from the College Board, the U.S. is 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees.
"The problem is that today’s young Americans are not coming close to acquiring the education and training needed to carry out that mission. They’re not even in the ballpark. In that key group, 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia. That is beyond pathetic."
It is fiscal crisis amongst US states that leads to deep and unbalanced cuts in social services and other outlayes that are crucial for maintining a high standard of living.
Cuts made without any attempt to raise revenues only worsen the countrys economic budetary outlook and reducing the standard of living for ordinary americans increases the states budget deficits.
I know for certain that in some of those countries (Norway, France, and Belgium that I know of) college education at a public uni is tuition free and in Canada it's dirt cheap. Take what you will from that.
I, too, would like to see an honest discussion about turning our country's decades-long educational decline around....."
That is a great article from the link above. Thanks!
Here's one passage that I'm sure some of us can relate to here in this forum. So many posters have opinions but then when asked to prove them they are totally clueless and unable to do so. It is pretty sad!
>>>> Da Costa laments that students are no longer trained in logical analysis, and consequently have difficulty using evidence to reach a conclusion. R. Jackson Wilson finds this to be the greatest change he has observed during a quarter century of teaching history at Smith College. "Students come to us having sat around for twelve years expressing attitudes toward things rather than analyzing," he says. "They are always ready to tell you how they feel about an issue, but they have never learned how to construct a rational argument to defend their opinions." Again, these complaints are amply substantiated by data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. On one test of analytic writing measuring "the ability to provide evidence, reason logically, and make a well-developed point," only four tenths of one percent of eleventh graders performed at the "elaborated" (what I believe should be considered college-freshman) level.<<<<<
This is where we went wrong. We NEVER should have changed the emphasis from pushing kids to excel in academics and having them try to be among the smartest in the class while having them learn to deal with failure, to making education be all about raising the kids' "self-esteem" and by doing it the WRONG way by lowering academic standards and changing the thrust of the classroom experience to resonate with the lowest common denominator in the class. Before I even started to read the article I was going to offer this as one of the main reasons why schools turn out such dummies these days. They haven't learned to think! All they've learned is that the world revolves around them and their feelings are most important. NO WONDER we have so many people unemployed. What awful attitudes they developed in school. All it did was handicap them later in life.
>>>>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. A good education, it was said, maximized the child's innate spontaneity, creativity, and affection for others. To the extent that logic and acquired knowledge interfered with that process, they were devalued.<<<
This is APPALLING!
>>>> According to Arthur N. Applebee, the director of the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning, the typical college-bound high school student reads only sixty-five pages a week (even with Advanced Placement courses factored in), or less than ten pages a night. <<<<
I had to read more like 60 to 100 pages per night or more! No way could I have gotten away with only having to read 60 pages a week. This is AWFUL and this is all college age kids are being expected to do these days?
Fixing the problem does NOT require that another penny be spent. In fact if you cut teachers salaries and or paid them based on results of their kids achievement, you might see a COMPLETE turn around. Middle and High School teachers don't deserve what they are paid if freshman at Harvard are barely able to construct simple subject-predicate sentences and that is it! Kids whose writing skills at that level shouldn't wouldn't have even advanced to the 7th grade level where I went to school! We need to go back to teaching the way we used to when kids really were challenged and when are education was on a par with the UK and Japan and other places.
Of course the dumbing down was by design. Having raised nothing but a few generations of couch potatoes who can't think for themselves, is just what the elites wanted. People who can't think are easy to brainwash and easy to control. Those of us who want to take our country back have our work cut out for us giving crash courses to our peers about what Liberty and Freedom; why it is important and why continuing to be apathetic, compliant and unaware will only hurt us in the long run!
Thank you for taking the time to delve into the facts of where we currently find ourselves in regards to our country's K-12 education system. I wish more people were intellectually engaged enough to learn how our schools have devolved precipitously, and why. Only then can we can begin the process of undoing the decades of damage.
If college wasn't expensive as hell here then maybe more Americans would attend.
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