U.S. near the bottom on schooling/test scores

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/30/cafferty.schools/index.html

I have to agree with the article, education all starts with the parenting.

This is what happens when you have parents who think they don't have to punish their children. This is also what happens when those same double standard parents get all bent out of shape when their teachers have to resort to above and beyond measures to discipline the child the parents feel the need they don't have to.

 

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I am not by any stretch an expert on this, but I've heard several times before that much of the disparity between US test scores and test scores from the rest of the world is because the US is much more inclusive in who it attempts to educate and tests. For example, in many countries only the upper half or so of students are sent to "college prep" type highschool courses, while the rest are sent to various vocational-type course. Often when you see statistics comparing the US to other countries, what you're really seeing is the upper half (or third, or whatever) of the other country's students compared to the entire body of US students.

 

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In my day, the kids who were punished got lower test scores and did worse in school.

There's some of that, but the trade school kids in Germany (for an example of a tracking setup) can handle simple math better than the college prep kids in the US, on average.

Which is why both the local machinist trade schools and the local colleges in Minnesota (a very well-educated state) have to teach remedial arithmetic to most of their prospects, and screen their incoming students for such abilities as ranking fractions in order of size, and dividing larger numbers into smaller ones.

Modern machine shop equipment would be run much more efficiently by machinists who could handle simple trigonometry - but that's a pipe dream. Instead, millions of dollars is spent complicating the programs and debugging the results, to allow push-button operation as much as possible.

And a non-tracking competitive setup, like Japan's, beats the US across the board.

 

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Has the principle of allocation ever been applied to academia? You allocate time and energy to one subject over another, which is why you get mediocre grades. I think most of America may be naturally lazy anyway so the results are not surprising to me.

 

Funny, I got my ass beat if I did something wrong, and I did well in school. When I didn't, it was due to the ADHD, not any physical punishment.

That and the typical Japanese sophomore is about as knowledgeable and parallel with HS seniors here in the states.

I staunchly disagree with that method. Student should learn things by hand/analog/mechanically before they go and do more complicated stuff.
By this logic, new student pilots should now learn to fly on lear jets instead of the simpler, easier to fly Cessna single engine planes.

D'OH! Typed my statement above before I saw this.

 

The US's education system is terrible and needs a complete over-haul. It's so bad that the younger kids now aren't actually learning anything. Their teaching 3rd graders Pre-Algebra when most of them haven't even gotten down multiplication, yet. I know this because I work with them on their homework and these kids, who are very intelligent 8 and 9 year olds feel stupid because they don't understand what their doing. At least here in California, which I know is towards the bottom of the bracket in the United States. And with over half of students not being able to pass the CAHSEE or California High School Exit Exam, (which is basically 7th grade level stuff for the most part) maybe it's not the students maybe it's the schools they've been going to and the way they've been taught.

 

Look around any seventh grade math classroom, divide the students into the ones getting their asses beat if they screw up and the ones never even spanked, and ask yourself which group is likely to end up in AP calculus by senior year.

What method?

They have to have remedial arithmetic classes in every kind of schooling there is after high school, in the US. Trade school, four year colleges, all of them. And stuff that would require something like trigonometry - like a cheap and rugged CNC machine with only simple and bug-free software - is far out of reach for the resulting economy.

The schools that work well in the US - the world's best - are the universities. Does anyone think they work by cutting corners on the infrastructure and imposing rigid discipline on the students or teachers?

The costs of poor education are very high, and pervasive.

 

IMO, they need to eliminate many of the jobs in schools that are not related to education. Hire better teachers and give them the resources they need.

Many teachers now are there because they love a certain extra-curricular activity and weren't good enough to take it to the next level. So now they're coach (for example) first and a teacher second.

Also, teachers need to be held accountable for their poor performances just like any other profession.

 

I'm not going to get into another debate about spanking. I'm pretty close-minded about that. Spanking is effective and I think anyone who doesn't think so is ignorant, but that's another thread altogether (which it is actually).
Anyway, sounds like the children that get spanked who don't do well don't have the mental capacity to overcome that. I'm sorry but I can't have any sympathy for those children. If I can get spanked when I was a kid and still do well in school, so can they. What's so hard about understanding that?

This method that you brought up yourself...

For example, if I'm went to school for drafting, there is no way the school should be putting me on AutoCAD right off the bat. I should spend at least several hours in a class with nothing but analog tools, easels, sheets of paper, and pencils. Learn to draft by hand before you start using AutoCAD.
That mindset can be applied to any trade involving mechanics/building/electronics, etc.

What point are you trying to make with this statement?

No they work from ridiculously high tuition.

 

teaching 3rd graders pre algebra? oh...what a pack of lies. most of these kids cannot even speak english.

 

I think stupid kids in the U.S. are a product of both shitty parenting and shitty schooling.

Even so, I think a kid that has great parents and goes to a shitty school will be better off in most cases than a kid that has shitty parents and goes to a great school. Really good parents probably wouldn't send their kids to a shitty school though - only unless they were forced to. They'd check the school out and make sure it would be something good for the kids.

 

I'm not sure what you think I wrote there, but nothing about skipping a solid introduction to the mechanics of a trade was intended.

Nobody has much sympathy for them, in the US. Not even their parents. But they aren't getting educated - and they are getting educated, in France and Spain and Denmark and Scotland and Belgium.

Apparently, beating their asses doesn't solve the problem. I mean, if there's anything the kids in the typical dropout bound bottom half of an inner city US high school class is not short of, it's ass beatings.

Not the state schools. At least, not until recently - and recently, they've been slipping a bit. Like the K-12 schools, their funding and community support has been cut over the years, and their performance is (after a lag to work off the investment) starting to reflect that.

And more of their time and trouble has been siphoned off into remedial math and English and such. When I was last involved in the math department of a State university, more than a third of its teaching effort was being expended on high school level subjects. That fraction was headed up.

We may have one of those rare situations where the shit flows up hill.

 

American public schools suck because they're public and compulsory. You end up with a bunch of criminal idiots in school who don't want to be there, sucking up resources from the kids who do want to be there. Not only do they suck up educational resources, but additional funding has to go into policing them, and schools end up becoming more like prisons than places of learning. At least schools function reasonably well as daycare.

I was punished by my folks as a kid, and I consistently scored in the 95 to 99th percentile through elementary school and the 80 to 90th percentile in high school.

Child rearing techniques seem to be irrelevant to raising a smart, successful kid, as long as the parents care about the kid and are smart and successful themselves. That's about the only definite conclusion one can draw from 30 years of data on the subject. It just so happens that rich, liberal yuppies either don't have the guts or the time or both to spank their kids, but it doesn't matter, because the kid already comes out ahead for being white and wealthy.

I don't have any sympathy for ADHD retards. If they do bad in school, it's their fault for not overcoming it. I also don't have any sympathy for kids who weren't spanked and doing poorly in school, because they should be able to overcome that....

 

Interesting topic. But the USA is the richest, most powerful nation on Earth, so obviously is doesn't seem to make much difference if our kids are dumb-asses, does it? Those same dumb-asses are now running the richest, most powerful nation on Earth, and if we need brain power, we just hire it from some other smart, but damned poor, nations of the world. Big deal.

Baron Max

 

By that argument, the best basketball players in the world should be able to smoke, drink, and get fat, since if they're the best, they can do whatever they want!

 

Other people's don't. What's the difference?

As a rule, people who got their ass beat as a kid ascribe whatever successes or virtues they have to those ass beatings. The ascription is unlikely.

It's simple to observe that the higher you go in the educational world, the better and brighter and harder-working the students you take as your observed group, the fewer of them come from homes where they got their asses beat.

It's also simple to observe that the dropouts and failures in the US high schools were not shorted on ass-beatings. They got their share and more. Whatever the problems with the American school system, a shortage of parental ass-beatings is not one of them.

There are lots of poor, non-yuppie types who raise very academically successful children. Check out their ass-beating frequencies. (It isn't thirty years of data that informed you that the people who don't ass-beat their kids are rich, liberal yuppies).

 

The retards get pulled out.

I learned to respect authority (or at least pretend I did) because I was taught to respect authority. What's it matter with the method of how you're taught, as long as you are taught something and learn it?

If I teach you how to count with coins, and someone else with stones, in either case, you are going to say "I learned how to count by this method."

Yes. Trailer trash usually doesn't get far beyond the trailer park.

I thought we were talking about spankings; not beatings.
Are you conflating the two because you can't tell the difference or because you are intellectually dishonest?

 

What??!! ...LOL! But then those basketball players would NOT be the best basketball players .....they'd be hiring the best. Big difference in a nation hiring the best, smartest to keep the nation the richest, most powerful nation.

Baron Max

 

I agree. Voluntary private schooling is the way to go.

 

I like the idea of school vouchers. That way, poor immigrants with genius children can afford to send them to rich, white academies.