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I had a friend who worked overseas in Japan. He said in Japan they have two separate tracks for students, a college track and trade track. It really works for them, I think we need to bring it here. Let the children and their parents choose EARLY ON, around the 3rd grade or so, which track they want. If they choose a trade, the children and their parents will be given a focus, a clear, achievable guideline for success.
They do the same thing in the UK.
Can't be done in America....too many people would disagree about where their children belong.
We should be copying the Finnish system top to bottom since it has been universally declared the best public education system in the world for decades now. Of course, most Americans won't though because either they are too ignorant to know what the Finns do or because they don't like the fact that the Finns spend far more per student then we do. Yes folks, spending more along with the lower class sizes and more class time that money buys actually does work.
I love how people always run to the Finland argument.
In those nordic nations they have very few people who don't contribute to the tax base.
We have an enormous recipient class that would need to start contributing socially, economically and become full partners in the system, other than just taking.
Plus the fact that their population is only 5.3 million.
I love how people always run to the Finland argument.
In those nordic nations they have very few people who don't contribute to the tax base.
We have an enormous recipient class that would need to start contributing socially, economically and become full partners in the system, other than just taking.
Plus the fact that their population is only 5.3 million.
Right. Because it was liberal policies that created a racial underclass. It was liberal policies that created tax havens to evade tax collectors and reduce our budget. Liberal policies allowed for the en-masse out migration of industry.
Those things happened. Now we need a bipartisan effort to stop the hemorrhaging of cities like Detroit.
Certain conservative policies, like tax incentives for businesses (though the data is sketchy on how effective tax incentives truly are), can work with liberal social programs (like adult literacy programs) in order to help places like Detroit. The combination would help.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.
The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.
And from the same article:
The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.
If that were not true, the poverty issue would have been solved a few decades ago.
Stop making excuses for people who do not take care of their own responsibilities.
Liberals refuse to look at the facts and that's one of the problems. Maybe most liberals can't read very well and that's the problem. It's not so much what's going on in an inner city that's is the problem, the real problem is that so much money is being thrown at education with very poor results.
College tuition rates for example are going through the roof but the colleges are churning out illiterates.
This from a liberal article that of course concludes the answer is to throw more money at the problem -- ignoring the fact that colleges and universities and education in general is costing the taxpayers far more than they did in the past and that tuition rates have become ungodly:
History News Network | Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too. (http://hnn.us/articles/118549.html - broken link)
Over a period of eleven years the proficiency of all approximately 37 million college graduates had declined sharply, in prose by nearly a quarter and in document literacy by almost a third. (The performance of high school graduates declined as well, from 5 to 4 percent in prose and 6 to 5 percent in document proficiency.)
This devastating report has gone almost unnoticed in academia, and in the country at large. The New York Times ran a short story on p. 34 of its December 16, 2005 issue summarizing the report, but otherwise it has received very little attention. In one sense this is surprising, for surely the steep decline in literacy has to bear some relationship to the under funding problem.
No. That assumes that conservatives have only recently been in politics and liberals got to pass everything that they wanted. You do realize the logical fallacies in your statements that you make?
Personal responsibility is but one component. People don't live in vacuums, thus there are many variables.
How is that a hard concept? I mean it's laughable that you wrote this. No seriously, I'm laughing and I sent it on facebook...where a friend ALREADY posted saying "isn't it ironic...don't you think?" (meaning it's ironic you wrote something this unintelligent in a thread decrying the lack of education in Detroit.
My major city school district underwent the problems Detroit is suffering now. Liberal policies in part did help it reach that level of failure. For decades the school board and city council was/remains filled with liberals. Just as with the US and state House representatives of those districts (also liberals) who's main concern was bringing back $$ to the district and spending it on special projects so did the city council and school board. The district was plagued with inappropriate spending on facility upgrades, olympic regualtion swimming facilities, multi million $ science labs, outrageously high district superintendent pay and pensions (a new superintendent every 1-2 years with full retirement), etc.... . All of this and the district had nearly a 50% drop out rate for juniors/seniors. Sure there were students with sucess stories but they were not representatives of the majority. Instead of focusing on teaching students basic skills all kinds of ethnocentric courses are offered and students are still failing to perform on the basic skills at large.
Yes, liberal policies have crippled school districts across the nation in many of the large urban school districts throughout the rust belt.
Last edited by lifelongMOgal; 05-05-2011 at 07:14 AM..
[i]When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.
...
While that is still a problem, it seems the criteria used was very different from the other studies. In Detroit and West Virginia, they measured how to read very basic things, like prescriptions or road signs. Your study, on the other hand, measures how people read at an advanced level. Even the people who scored at basic, about 15%, are probably better at reading than half of Detroit.
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