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Whitestripe

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I've always found it interesting that the US's primary school education is considered by many to be shit, yet the US has by far the majority of the most highly ranked universities in the world.

University rankings are mostly irrelevant to the actual teaching. Also, the top being best in the world doesn´t make the system good if majority gets shit.

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I've always found it interesting that the US's primary school education is considered by many to be shit, yet the US has by far the majority of the most highly ranked universities in the world.

Endowments? Certainly Harvard mostly doesn't have to worry about where the money is coming from.

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My point being that for having a school system that supposedly fails, the country still manages to produce many of the world's finest scholars, and has a majority of the most influential and prestigious academic programs on the planet. That does not only apply to private universities either: Just look at the University of California system. And it's not that the majority is shit, when despite having an incredible amount of universities in comparison to other countries, most are still very well funded and produce well-trained students. Also, international students do not account for a majority of the numbers, so one can't say, "Well sure, but all those people are actually from foreign countries."

Rather than asking ourselves why the primary education system is supposedly failing, isn't it a more interesting question to ask why despite its supposed failure, a large amount of students are passing with high SAT scores and GPAs, earning degrees, and even becoming world-class academics?

Could it be that there's something far more important than the education system itself, and that is the motivation of the child to succeed? There are endless resources for gaining knowledge, many of them free; it's the child's own lust for culminating their intellect that determines if they can utilize those resources, and succeed with the ones they have. A child who truly is determined to become more educated, will do so despite how poverty-stricken their school is.

In my opinion, the most important variable to this equation is the cultural one. If one's culture does not emphasize the importance of education, and there is no motivation triggered in the child (they do not directly perceive why an education furthers their life, how it furthers their life, and then want it to further their life, then the education system becomes quite meaningless to them. Can lead a horse to water but...

Socialization plays the biggest role in this. But to be honest, I don't see how the US's primary school system is necessarily any worse than that of any other developed country.

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I've always found it interesting that the US's primary school education is considered by many to be shit, yet the US has by far the majority of the most highly ranked universities in the world.

Yeah, but how many Americans are going to those? Especially in the Grad and PhD programs, which is more what most of those "Best in the World" rankings measure.

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The problem with Standardized Testing is it very often results in "teaching to the test".

On the other hand, without Standardized Testing, you can get alot of "not teaching at all". Standardized Testing exists, after all, as a way to ensure shit is actually being taught in class.

I was in a teaching certification program for 2 years. I used to think the whole "teaching to the test" deal was BS. Now, I'm really quite disgusted with how things are run. As someone who had planned to teach secondary (middle school/high school) English, the one thing that stood out for me was that because of Standardized Testing, many of the new pedogogical theories out there (that have significantly positive results) are strongly discouraged in a reading classroom due to the fact that the powers-that-be cannot "scientifically validate" those results. Now, keep in mind that the criteria (in terms of factors TPTB will accept for validation) are so far in the realm of pure logic that it does not take into consideration the more intuitive side to writing/reading comprehension. After all, how can you assess the more intuitive aspects of writing/reading on a standardized test?

It's an absolute joke what "the test" (and teaching to it) has done to schools. Where I live (a small town) there are two major high schools. One has more of a Hispanic presence and in that presence there are many students who do not speak English as their primary language. Because of that alone (and "the test" does not sufficiently take this type of matter into consideration), the school's overall test average dropped.

Then the funding was lowered (as if lowering a school's funding is going to magically fix things).

Then parents of the "good students" pulled their kids from the school and sent them to the other school (predominantly white). That brought down the average for the following year, and the following. Now, there is "the stupid school" in town, and "the good school." One continues to lose funding. The other continues to gain funding.

It's enough to make your head spin.

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According to one source I found (NCHEMS), in 2006, 68.6% of students (national) in public high schools graduated high school. Of those, 61.6% went directly to college (both 2 and 4 years). So, that's 42.2% of all public high school students.

Also, from wiki:

The 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau found that 19.5 percent of the population had attended college but had no degree, 7.4 percent held an associate's degree, 17.1 percent held a bachelor's degree, and 9.9 percent held a graduate or professional degree.

So you're looking at less than 10% of the population making up the achievement of the fame of world-renown schools.

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I've always found it interesting that the US's primary school education is considered by many to be shit, yet the US has by far the majority of the most highly ranked universities in the world.

1. These universities are places where non-Americans teach other non-Americans. The top-ranked US universities have little to do with US primary schools.

2. You think the average of a population has anything to do with how the population behaves at its tails.

3. The US has interesting demographic parameters. If you break up US school children by race, they behave pretty much like the same population in the best other countries’s systems. (My guess, without much data, is that US Asians are slightly disadvantaged by the US system compared to how they would do in, say, Singapore, and that US Blacks do a lot better than they do in, say, Nigeria. But it’s just a hunch and would be cool to analyze; I’ve never set foot in an American school.) Such phenomena become invisible when you average over populations.

Looking at performance averages across populations and performance gaps between them are largely irrelevant for measuring performance. (They are relevant for something else: stability. If you feel that the primary task of the school system is stability then minimising performance gaps is the most important task. A sad paradox is that the size of performance gaps is correlated with the overall performance, so if you value stability you need to abandon average performance. That is my best and crispest explanation of the political conundrum school systems find themselves in: you cannot improve average performance without reducing stability. Choose.)

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Just as a question: Have the US authorities taken any proper look at the public school systems around the world that actually work? Or are are perhaps they trying to invent the wheel again?

You appear to be speaking with the assumption that there is a single, unified US school system -- this is not the case. Each state makes their own rules about education and even within a state, schools can differ by a substantial amount both in structure and in what they teach. Some of the administrators are aware of what others have done, some are not.

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Schools will never have the same level of influence upon students that parents do. That's why parental involvement is so important. The only way to change that would be to take the children from their parents. As other's have pointed out attempts at wholesale taking of children has gone quite poorly in the past.

Never, Scot"? Because all kids have two drug free parents that are involved in their education, or even their lives? How about kids who float from one foster home to another their whole lives, or who have criminally negligent parents and pretty much take care of the themselves, i.e. the kids on The Wire.

Rather than asking ourselves why the primary education system is supposedly failing, isn't it a more interesting question to ask why despite its supposed failure, a large amount of students are passing with high SAT scores and GPAs, earning degrees, and even becoming world-class academics?

Most of this has been answered, but I'd also like to point out that in areas with truly failing public schools, nearly all the people that make up the top 10% from those geographic areas have a private school education.

And plenty of American public schools are great. I went to a really good public school, for instance, loaded up with honors courses and extracurricular activities. (I have to say, though, that despite all that, the Detroit-area private school kids wiped the floor with us in debate competitions. Their program was much more competitive with a lot more funding. Did anyone here go to Brother Rice? God I hate those bastards.)

Could it be that there's something far more important than the education system itself, and that is the motivation of the child to succeed? There are endless resources for gaining knowledge, many of them free; it's the child's own lust for culminating their intellect that determines if they can utilize those resources, and succeed with the ones they have. A child who truly is determined to become more educated, will do so despite how poverty-stricken their school is.

Also, you should read Gladwell's book Outliers, just for the story of the guy with the incredibly high IQ. If I remember correctly, he is really intellectually curious, and knows all kinds of stuff, but has never achieved the kind of professional success you'd expect to go along with that due to his socioeconomic conditioning. Intellectually curiosity doesn't guarantee professional success on its own.

You appear to be speaking with the assumption that there is a single, unified US school system -- this is not the case. Each state makes their own rules about education and even within a state, schools can differ by a substantial amount both in structure and in what they teach. Some of the administrators are aware of what others have done, some are not.

I agree 100%. This is not to say that maybe there shouldn't be some kind of effort on the national level - maybe even just an accessible resource that combines all of the available information along with off-the-shelf reform projects that come with funding and national conferences, also funded. They probably already do this and I just don't know anything about it, but who knows? Conservatives fight any expansion of the Department of Education tooth and nail. I don't particularly like federal mandates either, in many cases, but that's not the only option.

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You appear to be speaking with the assumption that there is a single, unified US school system -- this is not the case. Each state makes their own rules about education and even within a state, schools can differ by a substantial amount both in structure and in what they teach. Some of the administrators are aware of what others have done, some are not.

It probably appeared so although I came from the opposite direction. It would be stupid for every state/district to start surveys like that on their own instead of doing one nationally.

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I'm not saying they will. I'm just saying that you can design the school system so that the schooling process is much less dependent on a stable, involved home life.

If the kid himself/herself develops a wholly hostile attitude towards education, whether from their parents or wherever, then there's not much you can do except try and see if they have interest in some other form of education. I suppose that's one advantage of the expansion of charter schools.

I agree with Sir Scot. I graduated from a Title 1 high school. I can guarantee that I got very little homework because the teachers knew that the majority of my classmates wouldn't do the homework. There were few tests and one teacher flat out refused to give any assignments once he realized that if he did, he would have to report false grades in order for the majority of his students to pass. Thus, he gave no in class assignments and no homework and did not have to make up passing grades. He left after one year to another school where he could actually teach and have students who would get passing grades on his assignments. In this high school most of my peers were self-parenting because mom and dad couldn't care less. One girl was dating her stepfather's BROTHER and her mom was totally okay with it!! As anybody can imagine, this girl was also getting bad grades in school but mom also didn't care about that. The majority of my classmates did not come from stable loving families that valued education and it showed. Even if schools give little homework like my bad high school did, it still won't improve the educational outcomes of the students at that school if by high school they don't want to learn and mom and dad don't care if they learn.

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And here you have a huge problem. By letting the students pass anyway you´re basically telling they don´t have to do anything. If they fail you can´t let them pass ffs!

It's not always as clear cut as this. If the kids are just too apathetic to give a damn if they fail their classes, then failing them anyway isn't going to contribute anything to their lives. At least by passing them you're giving them a chance to do better in the future. It depends on the individual situation, but it can be an incredibly difficult predicament for a teacher whether or not to boost students grades or pass them despite not deserving it.

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It's not always as clear cut as this. If the kids are just too apathetic to give a damn if they fail their classes, then failing them anyway isn't going to contribute anything to their lives. At least by passing them you're giving them a chance to do better in the future. It depends on the individual situation, but it can be an incredibly difficult predicament for a teacher whether or not to boost students grades or pass them despite not deserving it.

The year before this teacher taught, we had another brand new teacher (Teacher A) at the school. This teacher gave out assignments and failed the students who refused to do the assignments and wouldn't study for exams. Needless to say, this teacher failed the majority of his students in a class that was required for graduation. My high school responded by firing Teacher A after 1 year. There was no teachers union so there was nowhere Teacher A could go to for help. Teacher A did the right thing in failing students who wouldn't do the work and Teacher A got fired. The school would now get in trouble with the state for failing so many students in this mandatory class for graduation, especially since it was already known that many of the failed students wouldn't pass the class if they had to retake it. My school only cared that enough students were passed so that they wouldn't get in trouble with the state and they didn't care whether teachers reported false grades. It was our very own "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy with regards to teachers and grades.

When Teacher B began teaching the next year, he learned very early in the year that if he gave out assignments most students wouldn't bother doing the assignments and those assignments that were turned in deserved F's for being so poorly done. He refused to sacrifice his integrity by passing students who didn't deserve to be passed. But looking at Teacher A's example, he knew that he would be fired if he did what Teacher A did, so he just didn't give out assignments because that way he wouldn't fail students if there were no assignments and he wouldn't give up his integrity by reporting false grades.

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And here you have a huge problem. By letting the students pass anyway you´re basically telling they don´t have to do anything. If they fail you can´t let them pass ffs!

If you fail them then they drop out of school. Your school's budget gets cut and you probably get fired for being a lousy teacher because all the other teachers are passing their students so clearly the problem is with you.

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He refused to sacrifice his integrity by passing students who didn't deserve to be passed. But looking at Teacher A's example, he knew that he would be fired if he did what Teacher A did, so he just didn't give out assignments because that way he wouldn't fail students if there were no assignments and he wouldn't give up his integrity by reporting false grades.

The issue is that sometimes, for a teacher "integrity" isn't worth the price of failing students, especially when they know how much impact it might have on their future lives. I've taught a lot of music classes in my life, and how easily I grade depends upon how necessary the class actually is for the students. For intermediate and advanced courses, where the students are majoring in music,or at least very serious about the subject, I am much more strict, as I want their grades to be a true reflection of their proficiency. In classes such as appreciation of music, where the majority of students are taking it simply to meet general ed. reqs, why should I possibly be strict? I do my best to broaden their knowledge and appreciation of music, but at the same time I know full well that the majority of them will never use any of the information, don't care about it, and are simply taking it for general ed reqs. I am not going to screw over someone's GPA in a course I don't even think they should be taking, since it has no tie to their majors.

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I am not going to screw over someone's GPA in a course I don't even think they should be taking, since it has no tie to their majors.

As long as your syllabus is appropriate for the course, and as long as your grading policy is well enumerated at the beginning of the course, it is not your responsibility to safeguard the students' GPA. I didn't "screw over" someone's GPA when I hand out a 18/100 grade on a test where a class average is 75/100. The student, by failing to study, did it to themselves. Now, there may be a legitimate reason why the student could not study for this test, e.g. parents getting ill, etc., and I work with them on those occasions. But students who don't come to class, or those who don't give a toss, they earn that C, or D, or F that I hand them.

Also, maybe this is a difference between arts and science, but I feel that my obligation to educate the students well is even stronger in introductory non-major classes. The general level of scientific literacy in the U.S. is already lower that I'd like. If I don't take the chance to educate these students on the science of biology when I get them in a class, then where else am I supposed to effect those changes? So I take non-major courses every bit as seriously as I do my major courses. In some areas, I'm more lenient on the major courses because I know if they don't get what mitosis is now, they'll get it a second time in genetics, and then a third time in cell biology.

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