When my son was in 11th grade I was asked his History teacher why he never got assigned papers.
"It's too hard to check whether they were just copied from the Internet," was the answer I got.

I graduated from a well-regarded public high school in 1997, and I shudder to think of all the coloring I did. Middle school was the worst; in high school AP classes shielded me from the worst of it, but still. I colored in French class, Latin class, English class, science class, and "Social Studies". I colored in health class. Oh yeah, I guess there was some coloring in art class, too. Thanks for reminding me of how much I hated school. Eesh.

Remember, the economic strength of our country depends on our educational system, so throw more money at it! If we're losing jobs to other countries, it's because our educational system isn't good enough (ignore those unemployed Ph.D.'s). So throw more money at it!

Hey, hear about Sputnik?

But they've all taken their abstinence pledges, so it's all good. As long as they know what the Bible has to say, who needs writing.

Well, with such a sterling example of academic achievement in our fearless leader, I'm sure all this will be sorted out soon.

As the mother of a public high school student who does challenging work I have a lot of thoughts, none systematic. Randomly:

1. If you impose tests the impetus to teach to the lowest common denominator can overwhelm the willingness to risk teaching more challenging, less test centered content. Testing might make students less not better prepared.

2. Students especially boys have way too many diversions in the form of computer and video games. I firmly believe that these devices condition kids to have even less of an attention span than they already might.

3. I distrust these sky is falling pronouncements and I doubt if testing is the answer, see number 1. Correlation is not causation, but your friend's perception is occurring at the same time that amount of testing for content is increasing not decreasing. That might not be a coincidence.

it's really hard for me to believe that i'm so far out of high school that i remember doing term papers. that i remember doing 8 to 10 page papers analyzing content, theme, character development, relevance to current events not only in English, but in History.

a "college prep" class where kids are asked to color a poster? that was beneath my sixth grade english classes.

btw, i graduated from public high school in 1991. is that really so long ago that curricula are so different now?

I got a better education in Boston Public Schools than kids get these days and my school was basically a medium security prison.

Only one-quarter of high school students who take a full set of college-preparatory courses — four years of English and three each of mathematics, science and social studies — are well prepared for college, according to a new study of last year's high school graduates released today by ACT, the Iowa testing organization

Why should any sane high school student bother with college prep.

Read, for example - and just for example, Barbara Ehrenreich's blog about how even news reporting jobs are now being outsourced to India. All sorts of advanced jobs - the sort Kevin thinks these students should prep for - are now being outsourced.

For student's to do all this college prep stuff, there had better be a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And - I'm telling you - it ain't going to be there.

So all this handwringing about how education isn't working and how students are doing well enough in science, and blah, blah, blah misses the point.

The point is that the game had better be worth the chase or there's no point in bothering.

I'm a TA of Political Science and I can say that the papers I grade are usually VERY poorly written. And we are talking about a sample size of a couple hundred at this point. But here's the thing - Are college students REALLY getting less than C grades on their college papers? I have no idea what the average grade is in a college level English class but I feel like we can measure this. You know, instead of relying on the opinions of a biased business interest group. Obviously, this isn't simple. For example, some colleges may require an English class and others may not. At the schools where it is not required, there is probably a selection bias involved as well (only the GOOD English writers are taking English classes). As far as MY average grade in my PoliSci classes is concerned, I'm usually looking at a B-. But that might be because I've resigned myself to the fact that these kids write like shit and a PSCI class is not the appropriate forum to teach them how to write (I try, but I don't really have the qualifications).

Lastly scoflubs, tell your History teacher he's just being lazy. Turnitin.com makes this process so easy its pathetic.

Public high schools are a joke. Nobody wants to learn, everyone just wants to get by with grades that will get them into college. It is not the student's fault for this. It is our culture's fault.

Regarding term papers and other projects: the amount of cheating is staggering, and many schools have adopted "no cheating" software services and their work is electronically scanned into a database that reviews it for similarities to various publications and other students' term papers. As a consequence, middle schools and high schools do a lot more "in-school" preparation of work, and in some cases, limit the sources that students can use. I don't have a problem with this, since the goal is mostly to develop research and writing skills. Still, this is a huge change from when I was in school. (There is a similar problem for elementary school students, except that the problem isn't the Internet, it's parental contributions to work.) Some schools obviously deal more creatively with it than others.

As for coloring, I do wonder about the rise of "presentation expectations," that is, teachers actually make visual presentation part of the basic grade for reports and other projects -- I have complained about this for reports, but to no avail.

Weird. I graduated in 2000, and I had plenty of papers to write. If I recall, along with the fluffy 300-worders, I had at least one 4-6 pager a week -- no, it wasn't exactly a rigorous academic challeneg, but that's pretty good for a fifteen year old, and it sure as hell isn't "coloring a poster" (I would have been into that). And while I didn't grow up in the ghetto or anything, this wasn't some froo-froo private academy, either. Apparently I should count my educational blessings.

I teach high school and can confirm that kids do very little writing today. I try to add some in my classes (speech and debate) but kids need to do a lot more. Generally, the top level kids (Advanced Placement and Honors) are doing fine (although less writing than in past years). The majority of the kids need help. Part of it might be because classes are integrated (slow and average kids), teachers teach to the lowest common denominator. The teaching to the test, discipline issues and large class sizes make it hard to take the time to grade large writing assignments. Plagiarism is a big issue with countless websites selling papers and students cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. Smaller classes more experienced teachers are the only real answer.

From a teacher's pov, catching cheaters is the fun of term papers!

'Public high schools are a joke. Nobody wants to learn, everyone just wants to get by with grades that will get them into college. It is not the student's fault for this. '

It IS the students fault. "Why do I need to learn this, I'm not going to be a mathematician". Thats the problem with our education system, people don't want to be educated, parents don't force it and right wing tv commentators take the side that education is worthless, common sense is all that's needed, blah blah blah. An educated citizenry gets in the way of political order. The right is against public education. Coincidence?

Or they'll be asked to color a poster.

Of the latest American Idol?

Schools vary a lot. I teach at a public high school where there is very little coloring, and there are a few term papers.

It would be wonderful if a politician would talk seriously about improving public schools. People who know about education need to visit the schools and look at what is going on in the classrooms and make recommendations, but such things are not on anybody's agenda.

As far as comparisons to the past, today's students are better educated than their predecessors. If you don't believe me, look at what their predecessors voted for--it would be impossible for today's students to be worse. Seriously, more students are studying more subjects in a more meaningful way. We still have a very long way to go, but it's a little bit better than it used to be. We now have more students taking standardized tests, and the scores are still increasing.

As far as education having monetary rewards, it always has and always will. Have you ever met anybody who graduated from med school, law school, or business school? Did you notice that they were making more money than the median worker?

That question on the ACT that accurately predicted entering college freshmen's GPA

1) Do you like to drink beer and pee in public?

Serfs and peons don't need to be educated. Welcome to the new order.

The statistics aren't great, but they seem to be not as bad as the headline implies. Just over 1 in 4 are qualified in 4 out of 4 subject areas, a bretty high standard. 81% are qualified in at least one subject area. Not spectacular, but it really doesn't sound awful.

"Why do I need to learn this, I'm not going to be a mathematician."

This remains a good question.

From my position in Graduate school this remains a good question. Other than basic addition and subtraction, multiplication, and division or learning how to properly take interest into account, I still have not used any of the algebra or geometry I've every learned outside the classroom setting. In fact, the best use I've put it to is helping out my grade-school age sister do HER math homework.

That said, I'm sure teachers don't assign more essay because they don't want to read more badly written essays.

My 16-year-old daughter attends a highly rated, extremely competitive high school in a university town. She takes several AP classes. Her AP English papers are never more than 2 pages long. She made a poster for an AP chemistry project. She does no homework for civics or AP French (its done in class). Her toughest class is AP Algebra II, but I suspect this is mainly due to the teacher's incompetence (the teacher strikes me as suffering from Asberger's).

I blame standardized testing for this state of things. All the teachers focus on (and this is not their fault) is making sure that all the kids pass the state mandated end of grade tests (EOGs). So anything else is superfluous.

This is, of course, a major disservice to the kids, who will go on to college and have no idea how to handle the courses there.

I wish this was a message board.

To Barabara: The problem with those soft-ware plagiarism accounts and one of the reasons I avoided any classes where the professors used it, is that, at least at that time, submitted works become the PROPERTY OF THE COMPANY and not the student.

When I left teaching 10 years ago, anything "challenging" brought screams of protest from students, who whined to their parents, who called administrators to put a stop to the cruelty--by which I mean having to read a 2-3 page passage for a sophomore World Lit class or write a brief summary of a chapter we read and discussed in class. The teachers everyone wanted were the ones who gave out lots of As and didn't get people all up in arms by giving them actual, thoughtful work to do. Assigning a term paper to students who weren't in AP classes would have been professional suicide. My daughter had whole years where she never had homework, and this was in a district that made much of its high standards based on the 2-3 National Merit scholars they produced every year.

The whole concept and construct of schools should be scrapped and rethought if we really want it to be relevant. Right now it's just a holding pen for 5- to 18-year-olds.

Ah, Kevin.

What do you suspect from public (socialized)education? I suspect the 1/5 of high school students prepared for college correlate strongly with private high school grads and homeschool grads.

My mom homeschooled me, and I thank G_d for it.

Posted by: reino on May 15, 2007 at 3:29 PM:
"As far as education having monetary rewards, it always has and always will. Have you ever met anybody who graduated from med school, law school, or business school? Did you notice that they were making more money than the median worker?"

True, but a larger amount of education is not a true test of someone's total education. One can meet plenty of professionals who have an appalling lack of the basics in the liberal arts or the fine arts. They have no understanding or interest in classic or contemporary works of fine lit or art. They are great at their job, make a load of money and yet surely don't seem like what one might call a "highly educated person". Then, one surely can meet profundity in the form of simple people who truly love to learn and read everything they get their hands on.

It all goes back to what we value in education--to make a ton of money or to have a rewarding life. (And what we deem is a rewarding life.) To check a block and fill a resume or to be open and curious to new ideas. It is a reflection of the culture at large.

If one's culture values making loads of money over being astute, so it follows...

Education on some level needs to be advanced in something akin to the expression "Art for art's sake". If kids don't want to learn, we need to fix why they no longer seem curious or motivated?

Maybe it has something to do with the way we highly reward football players and ignore the science "geeks". Play a great game and you get a free ride. Knock it outta the park on a research project or two and find out how much money is available for that bright kid who needs money for college. Surely, that message is not lost on young people?

Nonsense! within the last three years, I graduated a son and a daughter from a large rural(changing to suburban) school district in central Texas. Both kids were tackling tougher mathematics (two years of high school calculus), were writing more, and were required to read more classics than I did when I went to school in the 1970's. While they had to seek out and choose the tougher programs, it seemed to me that most of the parents I knew similarly demanded performance from their children.

From my anecdotal experience, this doom and gloom does not meet reality. Are there some kids not performing or being pushed, without a doubt. Are there more drop-outs and goof-offs than when I went to school? I don't know the numbers and it may be that my sample is self-selected towards higher achievement, but from my observations over the last 14 years that my kids were in public schools, the pessimism is not warranted.

In addition, after twice going through the college entrance race, I have to ask where are all of these high SAT, high GPA, overachievers coming from that are filling up the best schools if not from these allegedly failing schools from around the country.

Thinker is right but you have to go a step further. We make school all about the pot of gold. The goal isn't the education, the learning itself, the point is the pot of gold. So kids see other ways to get the pot of gold, they go looking for them (even though the chances are slim)

Even worse, sometimes they think that the pot of gold is completly out of reach, so why even try?

I was lucky enough to do a school project in high school where I interviewed my peer, and asked them about their thoughts on school. Most of them in the F-D range really hated it. They thought it was pointless, because they wouldn't use the stuff in whatever McJob they'd be doing.

Then I started talking about specific subject matter, about various thing in history, civics, etc. There was no real difference between those at the higher end of the food chain and those down below. There wer those that stood out, and those that were doing nothing more than reciting the text.

The crux of what I found, was that I believed (and I still do), that if you want to improve schools, the focus has to be on learning. Increase the complexity of the knowledge, but reduce the difficulty of the testing. Focus on cooperative environments, and not competitive.

That's how you bring those down below up. There's a small subset of people who thrive in ultra-competitive enviornments, and that's who the current education system is styled to. Fuck them. They're not the cream of the crop. They're the chaff in our society.

Read Gerald Bracy's Blog over at HuffingtonPost. It will give quite a different perspective.

As both an administrator and as a father, I am impressed at how much more is demanded of my kids than I was. But this is one state that is highly rated (for good reason). My cousins in a Southern State have a very different experience.

My kids are getting long-term report assignments in the intermediate elementary grades.

Yes, MNPundit, I'm aware of the controversy, but I have to believe that there's a way to limit the software company's use of the students' papers for the purposes of checking future papers without scrapping the service altogether. High school students who think their "work" is of commercial or proprietary value must have a lot more hubris than I ever did (or still do).

My third child is now a freshman in a public high school, the same one her older sibs attended. Because she's twelve years younger than her next-oldest brother, I can see changes. The above-mentioned coloring is one; however, it appears to be an attempt to include the sort of arts education that is practically non-existent now that the 'accountability'-Nazis have had their way with the educational system. My daughter is not being asked to color posters; she's being asked to produce projects relevant to history, geography, English, biology, and geometry, which include elements of the arts. They challenge her creativity, which is a good thing both for her interest level, and for her development.

Both of my older children graduated from the same high school. Both of them have college degrees; my daughter has a job in the HR department at a nationally recognized laboratory, and my son is now working on his PhD. Both of them will tell you that it was always possible to get a good education at our local high school, and that there were always kids who didn't want the education that was on offer. This seems to be a parental problem, rather than a public-school problem.

More testing is not the answer. Do you have any idea how much face-to-face teaching time is LOST to testing each and every year, now that the NCLB mindset has taken hold? And what about the subjects booted out of our public schools because tiny minds don't think art, music, and science are ewssential? If we're in a bad way, you can lay it all at the feet of the politicians who've made public education their favorite whipping-boy.

In my line of work, I do a lot of work with younger writers. These are people who want to use words professionally, who chose to come here and jump through the hoops to become writers. I have been doing this job since 1990 at various companies.

The kids come from higher and higher up the academic food chain (Hollywood being "the last respectable outlaw profession for upper class whiteboys," as David Freeman once famously said) and yet their abilities are less and less.

I credit their inability to read, which stems from all the baloney put out by the "whole language" bunch of morons. They don't learn to read so they don't learn to think. Many of them have no ability to analyze why something isn't working in a script (a very important quality one needs to succeed in this line of work). They can barely string two sentences together that make sense. And these are kids who are supposed to be products of the top end of the education establishment! It used to be that out of 10 new writers we hired we would lose two over a season. It's at least double that now. And of course if you give them any real criticism of their work - the kind a writer has to be able to deal with - they will break down and cry because their "self esteem" has been attacked. That goes to the whole "self esteem movement" who made people feel good without learning to accomplish something about which to feel good for accomplishing.

I am absolutely convinced it goes back to lack of learning to read, then having teachers who wouldn't give them work (since then the kids would drop the class and the teacher would be dropped) and the grade inflation for self esteem that makes them think they're better than they are, when in truth many of them don't qualify as morons - and that's not for lack of having brains, but for lack of having brains that have ever been used.

I wish it was otherwise.

I remember vividly an impression that I had when I was about 26, that I was now just about prepared to go to college.

So, in essence, I'd say everything taught in college needs to be taught in High School and everything taught in High School needs to be taught in elementary school and whatever they teach in elementary school needs to be forgotten.

Meh. Our eighth grader is already writing five paragraph essays, so I am skeptical. She did have to color some maps in geography, but so did I at that age. I'm not sold.

"What do you suspect from public (socialized)education? "

Hmmm... Free, compulsory public education built the greatest, most technologically advanced nation on the planet.

Then something happened in 1984 that changed everything. Reganism. If you look at charts showing the decline of 'real' America in almost every category (except perhaps % of GDP going to he military), the inflection points all lead back to that time.

Worst president ever? 100 years from now an analysis of American history will probably name Reagan rather than our current Bush.

My son attended and my daughter attends a highly rated (Top 100 by Newsweek and others) public high school and both were in a number of AP classes. They seem to teach to the AP test in the social science and English classes. The writing they do is to prepare them for the written sections of the AP test, e.g., in the world history test there is a document-based essay, a change-over-time essay, and a comparative essay and there are similar essays in the English language and English Literature tests. They wrote about one of these short practice essays a week and usually one longer term paper a year in each course. My son is now in college and he seems to be well prepared for the longer written papers that are now required of him.

We're always talking about education, and that's good, we need to. We're ridiculously low on the scale of fully developed countries in regards to education, and this is going to play an increasingly vital part in our society as the burgeoning global economy makes instances of people getting a job on a high school degree and keeping that job for the duration of their working years more and more rare.

You can't do what my dad did. My father, who at sixty years of age still works for the same company he did since before getting his GED, is a blue collar worker making over a hundred grand a year based on seniority and overtime. No one in my generation of the family has a prayer at this (well, except for me since I work for the government).

The point is, we're moving away from those times. Experts predict that workers will hold more and more jobs throughout their lifetimes as generations progress, and this is largely due to the fact that we're offshoring and outsourcing the uneducated labor to other countries.

By contrast, the jobs that stay here in America are going to require higher levels of education as they become characterized more by ideas than by production.

This is the nature and direction of the new American economy, and we are doing the generations that follow us a great disservice by not preparing them for it.

The thing is, we're doing terrible at that. Too many aspects of public education have become parts of the for-or-against style of politics that has become so popular (vouchers/charters/nclb/etc). People talk about giving schools more money, but I remember back when I was ten, we had a very disgruntled teacher explain to us the problem with this.

We had just been visited by a superintendant, and somehow, I don't know how, the teacher got really ruffled and after the SI left, the teacher explained the problem with the schools, and how increased funding for our education system all too often fails to make it to the classrooms where it is really needed.

Twenty years later, too many districts and schools are suffering from the same plight.

Then we have No Child Left Behind. In Scott Abernathy's book NCLB and the Public schools, the overall lesson is that the politicians creating this stuff just aren't looking deep enough into the problem, putting in place some aspects of the program that could possibly work, while most aspects tend to disregard a lot of the obstacles barring many of our children from getting the education they need. Often times the students suffering the most are the ones that are most in need, those coming from poor families, inner cities, etc.

What I see nobody doing seriously though, is looking at what those countries who are doing better in education than we are. Why aren't we looking at why Japan is outdoing us in education? Why aren't we looking at these other nations and seeing what they are doing right and trying to adopt those practices? Or is this a situation in which we want a lower class? A class of undereducated people who will have a hard time surviving in an economy that requires higher education?

Why can't we just swallow our pride for one minute so that our kids can get the education they deserve?

Comments From Left Field

EmmaAnne:

You obviously never read Kevin's mockery of the five paragraph essay. Unfortunately, the interesting Jeanne D'Arc post to which it responded is gone. Further thoughts of Kevin's are here.

On the other hand, my son was doing some of that in 9th grade, and he has turned into a fine writer (which was not necessarily foreseeable at the time).

Unless households unplug the TV, kids will continue to sop up vile and useless material in place of the things one learns when there is no picture-teat to provide car crashes and piled bodies.

When my son was in 11th grade I was asked his History teacher why he never got assigned papers.
"It's too hard to check whether they were just copied from the Internet," was the answer I got.

Posted by: scoflubs

If the teacher wasn't lying, then they were incompetent, or this must have been at some point back in the 1990s when kids were getting relatively competent with computers but you could still find plenty of adults who weren't.

But the point is, I disagree that it's hard to check a paper for being plagiarized. Just Google key phrases. I substitute taught for about a month a couple years ago. In addition to day-to-day stuff, I was also asked to finish up the final two weeks or so of the school year for a teacher who had to leave early. That included grading final presentations by a pretty detailed rubric. I checked most if not all of them for plagiarism, and sure enough, I found one. (I suppose there's no way to tell that there wasn't a lot more than just one, but...) If a teacher who actually knows both his class and how to teach can't check for plagiarism at least as reliably as some schmuck like me who was winging it, something's wrong.

Yes, MNPundit, I'm aware of the controversy, but I have to believe that there's a way to limit the software company's use of the students' papers for the purposes of checking future papers without scrapping the service altogether. High school students who think their "work" is of commercial or proprietary value must have a lot more hubris than I ever did (or still do).

Posted by: Barbara

As I said, I'm not an expert so maybe I'm talking out my ass here, but I find it hard to believe that a teacher would really need such software. Either way, though, a high school student doesn't have to believe their work is worth money (and stranger things have happened) to be offended by the idea that it'll become the property of some corporation rather than theirs or even the teacher's.

About education in general, first of all, my sister and I got pretty good education even at different high schools. On the other hand, though, both our parents work in schools, so at the very least, there was a more careful eye on whether we got our work done than some kids get. For what it's worth.

Also, I find the discussion about allegedly worse and worse student results an interesting contrast with stuff I've heard recently — in the last two or three years, at least — about more and more work. Stories about the overachievers to whom BobPM referred to, for example, or stories about hours of homework every night. It occurs to me that the accounts aren't really incompatible. If a kid gets one 10-page paper assigned each month, or five two-page papers assigned a month, the workload will probably be much higher for the latter but actual stuff learned and thinking and consideration required would be much higher for the former.

Oh yeah?! Well, my kids have to split atoms and do the Rubik's cube in homeroom! Can we leave off the anecdotes already? Look at the data. Things actually are getting worse.

If you don't like data, here's another anecdote: "When I was a boy" I spent most of my time fishing, hiking, and wrestling bears in the wilderness. I imagine most 12-year-olds these days spend most of their time watching pornstars wrestle with things in their asses. Then they go to school and color. We are creating a generation of porn zombies. I blame the clueless parents. And the internets.

Ok, back to watching porn...

High school instruction and testing is all standardized. Someone who does well in eleventh grade math or english is going to do well in twelve grade math or english. But this does not carry over to College. Neither college classroom curiculum, teaching methods, nor tests are standardized. Instead they are highly idiocyncratic based upon the instructors idea of what his classs and testing should accomplish for the student.

California, for example, has statewide standards for instruction and testing for each high school grade but no comparable standards for college level instruction or college level testing.

So with a huge disparity between what is taught and how it is tested among entering college freshman it is no wonder that results do not match up to expectations when projecting from high school results.

I graduated high school in 99, and my brother in 03, both from a high school in rural wisconsin that had a reputation as "decent" for the region. I graduated from a good private college in 03, and he's graduating in two weeks from a different good private college, I'm in a good professional school, and he's starting med school in the fall. The kids who took the AP classes were definitely prepared in those subjects, but nothing else was worth our time. My physics and college prep english classes were both jokes in terms of being challenging work, and they were also the only classes besides band and choir where I was with the "normal" students after tenth grade. Some of my classmates were very successful at high school, but they dropped out of college because of lack of preparation and socio-economic factors.

I guess my point is that schools can simultaneously good and bad, depending on how kids are placed as early as seventh grade algebra.

Decades and decades of dumbing us down. Dumber parents raise dumber kids. Dumber professors train dumber teachers. The way out of this mess is to get out the mess. Take your kids out of the mindless meat grinder. Read to them, read with them, go places, do things. Learn. It's not hard to learn, except in institutional school.

Making no claims for or against the ACT study, and stripping away all caveats for the sake of clarity: I left a tenure-track position at a top-flight public university in part because of my crushing disappointment in my students' (1) writing skills, (2) intellectual curiosity, and (3) sense of entitlement.

Now, the caveats...Yes, there were exceptionally bright, motivated students in every class. Yes, some of the undergraduate papers I received were truly polished. Yes, my "non-traditional" students were clearly my best.

But one anecdote stands out. After I spilled significant quantities of red ink on a student's paper, she came to my office hours, sincerely shocked that I found so many errors in her work. "No one has ever done this to my writing before," she told me. She wasn't angry. She was floored. I responded by telling her that a whole bunch of people had failed her, that was I was sorry about that, and that she'd get no such shortchanging here.

I made every effort to incorporate writing for its own sake into my Poly Sigh instruction. It was difficult, but I operated under the pedagogical assumption that "you are what you write," no matter your professional field.

Ultimatey, though, it was the sense of entitlement that drove me from higher ed. This isn't a function of inferior K-12 curriculum. It's a function of bigger cultural problems: the reluctance to recognize excellence for fear of offending those not recognized; the replacement of competition, graceful winning, and dignified losing with an ethic of pampered participation; and the broader virus of "affluenza" in the U.S. (a problem not remotely confined to our young people).

What to do about all this? Beats me. As Charles Lindblom wrote long ago, the human condition is small brain, big problems.

For students with ability and schools with money, they can get by. The problem is with the other 80% of people.

Our education system is something like 100 years behind our actual needs. It has also been systematically starved of resources for decades. It seems to specialize in turning any topic into meaningless pap to be memorized and regurgitated on cue.

We need to make giant leaps forward in our approach to preparing young people for a successful future. Right now, thanks to Bush & Co., we're actually going backwards. And most Americans seem willing to accept that.

egbert: "My mom homeschooled me, and I thank G_d for it."

And a fine job she did too. Still working on filling in the blanks, I see.

Actually we talked to your mother, and she confided that she simply didn't have the heart to tell you that you had been turned down by every public school in your area.

So, according to the study, only about 25% of high schoolers are ready for college. Which is probably right, since the Census Bureau reports that about 28% of the population had attained at least a bachelor's
.
On the anecdotal side, both mine went to a public H.S. in a district that was the result of a court-ordered desegregation plan. There was, to say the least, diversity at the H.S. The older is graduating from a good small college and accepted in a graduate program at Cambridge. The other is going (at retail, unfortunately, damnable Jesuits) to a good large college. Both were ready for college because their teachers were good, we helped at home and they were in lots of activities.

If we want to help kids in school, you can't start in H.S. We need to help teach their parents, as well as the kids, when they're both young.

I think that there are a bunch of reasons why kids aren't doing as well in high school.

1) More kids have both parents working and are left unsupervised between the end of school and when their parents get home. Therefore, homework is not getting done.

2) More things are interefering with academics...not just unsupervised acitivties such as video games and watching TV, but kids are involved in far more extracurricular activities than when I was growing up.

3) But probably most important is that today's high school curriculum is still pretty similar to what it was many years ago, and is becoming less and less relevant to the modern world.

We now live in a multicultural world when everything is linked to everything else. Yet school curricula continue to ignore this fact.

Many districts have eliminated or sharply reduced foreign language requirements despite the fact that it is now more important than ever to be able to communicate with people from other countries, especially in Mandarin, Spanish, and Arabic.

Most districts no longer have a geography requirement.

Most districts still focus their English classes on literary analysis, all while failing to properly teach essential communications skills, such as writing, listening, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension.

In Social Studies, schools still spend a full year on US History, all while often ignoring geogrpahy and economics and only devoting a semester to civics.

In summary, I would argue that one of the main reasons that students are not graduating high school with appropriate skills is because the high school curriculum has become outmoded and irrelevant.

'"Why do I need to learn this, I'm not going to be a mathematician."

This remains a good question.

Other than basic addition and subtraction, multiplication, and division or learning how to properly take interest into account, I still have not used any of the algebra or geometry I've every learned outside the classroom setting.
Posted by: MNPundit on May 15, 2007 at 3:33 PM'

So your saying the only thing you gain from learning algebra and geometry, higher math basically, is higher math skills? Hate to be the one to break this to you but while you thought were doing your useless math homework you were actually learning how to solve complex problems. You were learning how to think logically, how to handle multiple facts, evaluate which are important and which are not and how to apply that information. This is why some people can't really understand all the myriad issues at play in the middle east and search out those who will explain it to them simply, 'they hate us for our freedoms'.

I mean, it's hardly surprising that a national testing organization thinks curriculum standards ought to be higher, and the report doesn't seem to provide any comparison of its results with past studies, so it's impossible to say if things are actually any worse than in the past.

Who cares? The source of concern should not be "things are worse than in the past", but that "things are worse than they ought to be". Particularly, the concern should be that "college preparatory courses do not prepare students for college."

That being said, the impression I get (and not just from this) is that things are worse than they were before if one limits the universe of analysis to nominally college preparatory courses. This doesn't mean that education, overall, is any worse, just that the in the push to universalize "college prep" courses, the name has become meaningless.

Nobody writes term papers anymore?

Well, no. People still write term papers. Its just that the "college prep" classes that have become nearly universal nowadays don't, instead, that's for the AP courses. Essentially, Honors/AP courses have become what "college prep" used to be, and "college prep", in being universalized, has become just a name for what mainstream, non-college-prep courses used to be. It's course title inflation to create the illusion of raising standards.

Just keep these reports in mind the next time a story comes out about how competitive admissions at Ivy League or whatever schools are. Sure these schools get to be really selective. But the total pool is pretty weak. Its pretty easy to rise to the top.

Something else to add to the mix: the fad for "different learning styles." I put it together with poster-making (based in part on the "visual learner" model), teaching to the tests, overcrowding, and other trends to get us to what KP experienced. Most of us in the higher-ed biz have seen the same thing.

I want to blame ed administrators for a lot of this. But they have to come up with "new approaches" all the time in order to justify their jobs, mollify pushy parents, and maintain their control over their faculty (which is really job one in the public schools, isn't it?).

A generation ago I'd have said get the administrators out the way and let the teachers teach. These days, though, a lot of the teachers under 35 probably don't know how. I've gotten a lot of education majors over the years, and for some of them, poster-coloring really pushes their limits.

This newest wrinkle of "different learning styles" really does kill me. There's a germ of reality in it, but the way it's being used-- to beat up on public-school teachers and explain to parents why their kids don't seem to be learning as much as they should-- makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like the very common complaint about TAs with impenetrable accents, it's a way of shifting responsibility away from anybody actually in a position to do anything, while at the same time giving teachers something new to worry about.

As one of our earlier posters said, this is a print- and written-word-based society. It can't really be anything else; ultimately I think that's because nothing else stands up in court (which is why the predatory-lending victims are likely to lose their recent lawsuits). Everybody involved has got to decide that's how it is, and act accordingly. That means, often, taking lumps and taking responsibility.

Schools suck. I don't have any data to show this or the patience to go out and find any, but a person I know told me a really horrible story about his nephew. I'm convinced. Plus, a lot of things have changed since I was in school and that scares me.

Kids don't have time for schoolwork these days, what with all the blowjobs they're getting at school.

I live in Fairfax County, Virginia which is generally considered to have one of the best school systems in the country, and in general I agree with that statement (I volunteer and subsititute teach so I do see the school system from the inside, and I also have children in the 8th, 2nd and 1st grades).

My biggest concern about the school system is that the three types of work that seem to have disappeared are:
* Book reports
* 5-10 page research papers
* Current event quizzes

To me, the tremendous benefit of learning to write book reports is that one learns how to read a lengthy work and then summarize what the most important parts in a 1 page report. This is a valuable skill in any career, and I can not recall my eighth grader doing more than one or two book reports before the 8th grade.

The second type of project that has for the most part disappeared, is the 5-10 page research paper. Even with the advent of the Internet, I personally think it would be okay to tell the students that they can not use the internet for research, that they must use traditional methods. When I have students who ask if they can go on dictionary.com to look up a word, I will tell them no, and insist that they use a dictionary (which they have in the classroom).

I have seen one fourth grade class at Wakefield Forest Elementary have an assignment of a 5-10 page research paper, and I was impressed to see the caliber of work that the students were working on.

The third type of school work that seems to have disappeared is current events quizzes. I remember having a weekly currents event quiz, pretty much from 5th grade on in my public education career (I'm a baby boomer) and this meant that you had to pay at least some attention to the paper or the television news. In order to develop good citizens, it is important that students have an idea of the world around them.

Speaking of good citizenship, one action that I would urge everyone to do is to sign up for your local school's support program at your local grocery stores and other stores that have educational support programs (e.g. Target, etc). This simple act will not cost you one penny more than you are spending now for food and other consumer goods, and it will provide additional resources for the schools in your neighborhood. Most schools do a good job of reaching out to the parents of their students, but it's a challenge to reach out to the broader community.

Regards,
Bill Huddleston

Odd, very odd.

Two quick points then I ramble and reminisce:

1) So you have to be great or all 4 areas? I don't know, but the results seem not terribly surprising given that some people who are great at math or science or art or literature don't care about, or try hard at, or are even not terribly good at other subjects.

2) I agree with everyone who is saying that testing is partly to blame for this. That and selective anecdotes and data from a biased source.

I went to what I believe was one of the worst public high schools in a mediocre school district in Texas (not known for education excellence, pre-university level), graduated in 1989, and I never colored anything, and I wrote papers frequently. Including many 8-10 pagers and a couple of longer (20+ page) research papers. I had almost all 'honors' classes -- not necessarily AP classes, but generally these were supposed to be a little more challenging, but as far as I know even regular classes weren't about coloring things. It is probably true that paper-wise most of the challenge came from my own standards, as opposed from teacher grading, though I did have a handful of good teachers. Painting-wise, in junior high I remember doing a plaster model of a cell with mitochondria and various other bits of detail painted on. I ran across it the other day, and it's kind of cool -- hell, maybe these posters and coloring assignments are really bad ass, though I don't know what kind of analysis is going on there, or what kind of skills are being learned.
Maybe short-attention span visual display skill is the right way to go. Sadly. And I'm not really serious. I do recall at a lot of conferences grad student presenters get to put up posters of their papers/research in some lobby or common area and
use those as short intros to attempt to snare people's attention. And I know that our political discourse has been debased to the point that actual debating skills are completely unnecessary, and are overwhelmed by focused messaging, canny advertising, and splashy bullshit. So, maybe papers are out, with Dickens. I'm sure as hell not reading Dickens any more. I read blogs.

Our eighth graders rank third in the world by some reliable measures. The distance between second place and thirteenth in the world in high school physics is 2%ile points. The highest performing school system in the Trends in International Math and Science (TIMMS) is some unknown suburban school in Illinois.

The distance between what my kids' school (a consistent nationally top ranked school) and my cousins' school in Alabama is, like, you know, between a legit Western democracy and a banana republic. The U.S. is all over the map - best in the world, worse than many third world countries, and every stop in between. That is because, of course, the determining factor is the state, not the feds.

I could throw in my personal anecdotes, but let's be weird and talk multi-year national statistics from representative samples.

The short version is:

Nothing much has changed in the last 60 years.

Now many of you may think that there _have_ big changes in educational performance, but that's because you haven't bothered to check out the data.

As for the differences between public and private schools: if you adjust for student characteristics (the inputs) - there aren't any.

'I am astonished that this liberal blog runs stories about the national scandal that are the public schools. For those who believe that what is good for teachers is good for students, this study may make you think again. When there is no accountability, there is non-performance. Why should teachers, who have lifetime tenure, great vacations and health care, long vacations and pretty good pay considering the hours they work, be concerned about what their students learn? Or if they learn? The only reason that otherwise rational people support teachers is that teachers belong to unions and in the liberal lexicon unions are good for teachers. And for the Democrat Party. But the whole mix is deadly for public education in this country.

Posted by: mhr on May 15, 2007 at 6:38 PM'

How would you solve the problem? If liberals can't be trusted to work the problem because all they care about is what keeps them and the democratic party in power who can solve it? Who should we look to for solutions? Conservatives? What's their solution? Haven't ever heard one. All I hear from the right is there's a problem and liberals are either the cause or just will make the situation worse.

'As for the differences between public and private schools: if you adjust for student characteristics (the inputs) - there aren't any. '

There's no difference between public and private schools other than the students? Having gone to both I can tell you there is a huge difference. The rich get a better education by paying out the nose for it. Better teachers, better materials and better environment for learning. There's no way you can argue that kids in public school are getting the same education that's available for upwards of $30000 (it was $19000 when I attended prep school in the late 80's) a year at Phillips Andover or Choate.

My Orange Co., Calif. public school must be an aberration. Halfway through second grade, my son was asked to write essays using topic sentences, supporting sentences, and concluding sentences. He's currently in the 5th grade and learning Algebra that I learned in 9th grade. I find all of this preposterous, and figured it must be about test scores from foreign competitors. It's all about global domination.

Exactly right in regards to the plagiarism. While only a few things I produced in and college I think are worth commercial value, they were mine by God and I am not about to give them to some corporation because some professor can't google a phrase. Most people who cheat, cheat very badly, and the people who cheat so well you can't catch them without an enormous amount of work--well they will probably do very well in life, cheating well on a non-lazy teacher takes some skill. Plus everyone cheats, we're talking 80-90% at some point.

So your saying the only thing yo$Hate to be the one to break this to you but while you thought were doing your useless math homework you were actually learning how to solve complex problems. You were learning how to think logically, how to handle multiple facts, evaluate which are important and which are not and how to apply that information. This is why some people can't really understand all the myriad issues at play in the middle east and search out those who will explain it to them simply, 'they hate us for our freedoms'.

Actually that's more likely because I took Critical Thinking/Logical Fallacies and Sentential Logic in college. The point is, you can learn those things without math. They are not necessarily math specific.

Finally on entitlement, I have always operated under the principal that college professors were put on this earth to serve me in graduating with good scores. Hence my response to what happened to the student who was floored (and actually a similar experience happened to me a year ago) "Okay, let's go over in detail what's wrong and let me have your suggestions about what would be the right thing to put there?. You've got office hours until X right?"

People who claim that younger worker are incompetent (because they can't write, can't analyze, etc.) are obnoxiously self-aggrandizing. Experience is the primary determinant of competence. Younger workers lack the experience of older ones.

I had particularly difficult circuits class last year. This year I was the TA. I sat in on lectures and was often amazed by how little people knew. But I've got the self-awareness to understand that I was once equally ignorant.

The folks on this thread who bellow on about declining standards are but the current generation of pompous asses. The same existed in their grandfather's time and some of the youth they now deride will eventually hold the same opinions.

"If you impose tests the impetus to teach to the lowest common denominator can overwhelm the willingness to risk teaching more challenging, less test centered content. Testing might make students less not better prepared."

Oh BULLSHIT. Most countries in the world have centralized educational establishments and standardized testing.
Anyone claiming this as an excuse is either a moron or has some agenda with little basis in reality.

'So your saying the only thing yo$Hate to be the one to break this to you but while you thought were doing your useless math homework you were actually learning how to solve complex problems. You were learning how to think logically, how to handle multiple facts, evaluate which are important and which are not and how to apply that information. This is why some people can't really understand all the myriad issues at play in the middle east and search out those who will explain it to them simply, 'they hate us for our freedoms'.

Actually that's more likely because I took Critical Thinking/Logical Fallacies and Sentential Logic in college. The point is, you can learn those things without math. They are not necessarily math specific.

Posted by: MNPundit on May 15, 2007 at 7:47 PM'

I never said they were math specific or that they couldn't be learned elsewhere. I said you learn them doing math. I was explaining that there were reasons to do math other than learning to work with numbers. What you took in college has no bearing on a discussion of what skills you develop doing math in high school. And please don't misinterpret what I said earlier to mean I think you are logical or anaylitical. I was being general about what students get from math not saying specifically what YOU got from math. Sorry for the confusion. I bet word problems gave you fits.

" There's no way you can argue that kids in public school are getting the same education"

Sure I can. Adjusted for student quality, the results are not different. True for college as well. If you want to predict GRE scores from pre-college SAT scores and college attended, you can ignore college attended. It has no effect.
So what do you get for your money if you send your kid to the Ivy League? Nothing measurable.

Not too surprising when you look at those old Coleman Report numbers: differences in spending account for 4% of the variation in performance.
Insignificant.

Public schools rule ok, as far as performance goes.

This is a sobering thread, and I can agree with much of it from my own experience. But the 26% qualified in all four areas may be more obvious than it looks: the curricula studied included only three years of math. I've been advising incoming students at a public university for years, and I can tell you that anyone who enters college having taken no math since their junior year in high school (which is the usual case if one takes only 3 years of math) is not going to place well into college level math courses. Even if the student understood it well enough at the time, math has a short half-life if you don't use it, as members of this thread doubtless know.

Students' writing is indeed abominable (before my stint as an advisor, I taught freshman
English and sophomore literature), but I attribute at least some of that to the fact that they know absolutely nothing about grammar or parts of speech. I don't expect sophistication, but when they have no idea what the term "direct object" of a verb even means, having never heard it before, it makes discussion of specific grammatical faults difficult. Occasionally, I had students tell me in some desperation that they wanted to learn these things, but no one would teach them. Self-expression looms larger in writing instruction these days than anything approaching formal correctness, alas.

More of the writing problem stems, I think, from general unfamiliarity with what good writing--or even mainstream writing--looks and sounds like. Thanks in part to technological diversions, students don't read actual (or good on-line) texts, so they don't realize how little they know about language. I used to encourage them to read the newspaper regularly, but I received mostly blank stares.

I'm late to this debate, but I have to ask: if things are so bad now, when was the proverbial "golden age?" I graduated high school in the mid-70's. I was in the top of my class in a well regarded high school for my state. My kids today, attending a well regarded school in a different state, are way ahead of me in terms of learning. My freshman daughter is doing the math I had as a senior. She is reading and writing about the classics in English. When she slacked off this term, she paid the price grade-wise [&, I hope, learned a lesson].

I'm with BobPM & other posters who suggest that this whole thing is way overblown. Based on my experience in the 1970's, I doubt that 19% of my peers were ready for college level work in all 4 core subjects. That's why we have to put this data in historical perspective.

Also, I think we have to resist the temptation to assume that, just because something is harder, it must be better educationally. If you force a third grader to do fifth-grade math before she has learned fourth-grade math, it will be harder, but it won't be educationally sound. Our high schoolers are already under tremendous pressure in the college admissions rat race, spending hours doing sports, extra-curricular and volunteer activities to impress admissions officers. My high school kids work plenty hard at their school work. There's only so much you can ask of an adolescent.

Given how little you apparently have to know to now become President of the United States, why would any child be compelled to study hard?

Children learn more by watching the "grown ups", than they do from writing any term paper...

David in NY: LOL at five paragraph essays. I wasn't holding these up as the model of education or anything. I am just questioning the hell-in-a-handbasket attitude, since she is doing the same stuff I did.

Okay, let me summarize the consensus about education in America:

1. Kids today are not being challenged in school.
2. Kids today are tackling much more rigorous and challenging material in school than their parents ever did.
3. Rigorous testing is the only way to improve schools and student performance
4. Rigorous testing is destroying kids chance of having any actual learning experiences.
5. Teachers are being strait-jacketed by the demands to teach to the test.
6. Teachers have way too much leeway; they are allowed and even encouraged to invent unproven "innovative" teaching methods.
7. There is no hope of getting a quality education in a public school.
8. After adjusting for differences in student backgrounds, public schools do just as well at educating children as the much more expensive private schools.
9. Liberals are responsible for the decline in schools because they place the demands of teachers over the needs of students.
10. Conservatives are responsible for the decline in schools because of their stinginess in funding and because of their overreliance on standardized testing.
11. Rigorous mathematics training is one of the most important things that a school can offer students.
12. Mathematics beyond arithmetic and simple algebra is a complete waste of time for the vast majority of students.
13. Because children are not being adequately educated, they lack the skills needed to compete in the global economy.
14. The idea that education will protect our children from job insecurity and stagnant median salaries is a myth.

So if we all agree on these points, we should be able to fix what's wrong with education these days...

MN:

If you are still reading, the law has a neat way of letting more than one person own intellectual property at the same time. It's called licensing. The software company would have an unrestricted license (read: "ownership right")to use the student's paper solely for the purpose of enhancing its anti-cheating software. It couldn't make money by, for instance, selling using the student's paper for publication to others (for instance, as a "sample" for use in a textbook on writing). Most software companies overreach (like this one). But there is almost always a less restrictive solution which, in this case, would leave the student's rights in tact and still create value for the software company. It drives me batty that so many people can only think in absolutes.

Chalk it up in part to a decrease in the cost of TVs and video games, which itself is a result of the large amount of manufacturing of consumer goods going oversees.

One assumption here seems to be that "coloring posters" is somehow making students less well equipped to succeed. It's funny how when people wax idealistic about education, they suddenly forget how realistic Dilbert is.

A saying that I have heard more than once at work is "The way to get ahead is to be able to give a good presentation." "Presentation" in this context means a powerpoint presentation with a few clear charts and no confusing details. Judging from my experience with consultants this is also good advice for them.

I'm a big believer in the intrinsic value of education to the individual and to society, but let's not fall into the trap of assuming that for most people, the ability to use and understand numerical or verbal nuance is some sort of key to professional success.

One assumption here seems to be that "coloring posters" is somehow making students less well equipped to succeed. It's funny how when people wax idealistic about education, they suddenly forget how realistic Dilbert is.

A saying that I have heard more than once at work is "The way to get ahead is to be able to give a good presentation." "Presentation" in this context means a powerpoint presentation with a few clear charts and no confusing details. Judging from my experience with consultants this is also good advice for them.

I'm a big believer in the intrinsic value of education to the individual and to society, but let's not fall into the trap of assuming that for most people, the ability to use and understand numerical or verbal nuance is some sort of key to professional success.

It is established wisdom that a college education is necessary for success in the U.S.

Couldn't be further from the truth.

Most jobs in the U.S., including some very good ones, do not require a college education. Small businesses, for example, like the ones you see strung out in strip malls. Practically all so-called blue collar jobs require no college education.

A significant number of young people attend colleges that are little more than degree mills and can be expected to adjust their standards downward as necessary to remain attractive to students of little academic merit. At best, such institutions permit young people to grow up a bit before they go to work to earn a living.

Of course, a nation such as the United States requires a certain number of well schooled and well education individuals. The better colleges are there for these students. Nearly every state now has a least one good comprehensive state college with scholarships available for its best students supplemented by financial aid packages. Every state also has a plethora of second and third rate public and private colleges that attract and serve those who need only minimal schooling beyond high school, if that.

As it stands now, every merit student in the U.S. is well taken care of by quite good colleges and this is something of which we can be proud.

As far as the other students, they have the opportunity at lesser colleges to get the paper they desire for the sort of work they can handle.

The many, many who do not go on to college because they are not up to it or who attend only for a short period also can expect to get pretty much the same deal as did their parents and grandparents, not always a bad deal.

My daughter is a senior in a public high school. She has written many term papers. And her teachers are stricter than my college professors were about staying on topic.
Perhaps this is like so many areas and we are heading in two directions at once. Part of the nation exercises more, eats better, and is in better shape far later in life than ever before. At the same time, intense obesity and diabetes are rising. Educational standards may be falling in many schools, but in the upper middle class schools where students facing ever-intensifying competition to get into the top colleges, academic standards are high and rising.

Square this with the recent NY Times piece on how highly qualified kids no longer have a chance of getting into Harvard.

I think my daughters got better educations than I did, but they were lucky to have gifted programs.

In Los Angeles County, harbinger of America's demographic future, only about 1 student out of 6, public or private, scores at least 1000 on the SAT (500 per test segment), and that's under the easier post-1995 scoring system (1000 now is the equivalent of an old school 890). In the LAUSD, only 1 of 12 scores 1000.

The farther below 1000 you score, the more likely is it that you have something better to do with your life than dither around in college for a few years before giving up. But no politician ever talks about the opportunity cost of subsidizing students who aren't college material to waste their time in colleges.

Instead, we see John Edwards today promoting his "College for Everyone" plan.

I blame Beavis and Butt-Head.

As other commenters have pointed out, the ACT is testing organization that sells tests. They sell at least 3 different kinds of tests that they say measures "college readiness". The ACT is for 11th and 12th graders for college admissions, but they have versions that can be administered to 8th and 10th graders too. They are graciously identifying a problem and at the same time, they happen to have a solution. If school systems buy the ACTs products, then parents, students, and educators will be able to track whether children are in step with "college readiness" standards.

Its useful comparing the benchmarks between the 8th grade Explore test, the 10th grade PLAN test, and the ACT. The Science score has the narrowest spread, a score of 20 in 8th grade is college ready, 21 in 10th, 24 on the ACT. That's 4 points, for Math its 5, English 5, for Reading its 6. The score an 8th grader has to score on the science section to be college ready is 3 points higher than for Math, 5 points higher than reading, and 7 points higher than what is needed in English. I'm not an expert, but looking at those numbers my first instinct would be to think "wow, it looks like you have to go into high school with a pretty solid grounding in science to be college ready for science".

The other thing that is worth checking out is what factor grades play in this equation. For Algebra 2, for example, most students who earned an A or a B were college ready while most students who earned a C, D, or F were not ready. The report does compare how grades are related for Physics as well, but not other subjects. Clearly they have this data. The question that interest me is, "are the grades a student earns a good prediction of college readiness?" To put it bluntly, no one should be suprised if a student with a C average in high school and takes the bare minimum courses to be eligible for university is not ready for college. Yet the report does not discuss this in detail. I wonder if the fact that they are selling college readiness measurements has anything to do with their reluctance to discuss in detail the college readiness measurements that schools send home quarterly (report cards).

Finally, I'd like to point out that despite all the griping about coloring posters on this thread, Reading and English scores are not particularly low. It is Science scores that are low. That's the problem.

The science scores are not that low - compared to the rest of the world, if we are honest with statistics, they're fairly high, actually. If we're honest with our statistics.

Here's a major disconnect in the media storylines on education. The sky is falling in high schools, but it's harder than ever to get into even "second-tier" colleges. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/education/16admissions.html?hp.

>>So what do you get for your money if you send your kid to the Ivy League? Nothing measurable.

Is membership in the world's most important social club measurable? I dunno. Maybe not. But it is a lot more important in real terms than the "education" you get there.

I wonder if today's kids know what "anecdotal evidence" is and how worthless it is from a scientific standpoint. If they do, then I guess they really are leaps and bounds ahead of most people on this thread.

My 16-year-old daughter and her friends are at least as literate, worldly, articulate and prepared as my friends and I were at the same age. Of course, there was a lot of noise then about what a terrible job the schools were doing. The buzzwords were different, but it was the same going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket theme.

It's worth paying attention to what the schools are doing, but we've been crying wolf about this for as long as I can remember, and except for our elected officials, we're not much dumber than we used to be.

Absolutely dead-on, mert7878. And no one disputes that America's higher education system is the best in the world and is regarded such by the rest of the world. That could not have happened if the K - 12 system were is decrepit as the no-nothings would expect you to believe. (I personally think the K -12 system to be less dysfunctional than higher ed.)

One big problem with both No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and probably all the state accountability systems - nothing for the high achievers. And Bush cut the Javits gifted-talented/high achiever budget by 67%. (I know, what a surprise.) Once you pass the test, that's all that matters.

So, say that passing is 70%. What do teachers or schools get for any movement from, say, 1 - 69. Nothing. And what do school get for any movement from 70 - 99? You guessed it: Nothing. This is a form of slow-term national suicide.

Another tid-bit, talk to school administrators from, say, Singapore. Oh yes, they'll tell you, our kids do well on the tests and can run the numbers. But they have no sense of creation the way American kids do; the Singapore administrators admire what our kids can do that their own kids cannot.

I can only chime in in a small way here. My first grader, in a public school that is only considered average (according to the testing stats) is doing work that I did in 2nd and even 3rd grade. She learned to read in kindergarten, is now reading chapter books and is doing far more advanced math than I ever encountered. And the school system I attended was considered very good! She loves school, works her heinie off and is learning a ton. Maybe the learning stops suddenly in middle school?

"Is membership in the world's most important social club measurable?"

Sure: but in monetary terms, the measureable value is small. It's clear that the payoff for an Ivy education, in terms of future income, is almost zero if you adjust for student characteristics.

Selective schools have smart graduates because they only admit smart freshmen. There is little sign of any measurable value added - compared to other schools.

Isn't it neat that almost everyone in this forum - not the worst - has no idea of and no _interest_ in the quantitative data on this subject? Even when they could google it in a New York minute?

Wonderingmama - depends on the school. Generally, middle school of 6 - 8 has not worked out like policy-makers had hoped. There are exceptions, though, and I see them. And learning can certainly take off at any time even if it had stagnated. Generally, though, a lot of kids have a hard time jumping from the concrete to the abstract. I know in my (high performing) state that eighth grade results have been stagnant, across the whole range, upper-middle class to rural or urban poverty.

Just to add some more anecdotal evidence. Recently I taught Western Civ in a community college. I required that the students hand in a six page minimum paper. In order to research and write the paper I took them to the library to learn about finding peer-reviewed history and related books and periodicals. I provided timelines for choosing the topic, finding sources, taking notes, and writing and revising to hand in the completed paper. I gave them points toward their grade for completing each step and told them I would give them guidance if they had problems. This caused an uproar among the students because I was requiring too much work. I still got plargiarism, some inadvertent that could be, and was, corrected, and some that was intentional. I also required the students to read the textbook. I gave tests that required them to write sentences and even a paragraph or two. More uproar. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore. I won't go into the ridiculous statements that were made by both students and administration. My only consolation was that the better students responded well and were mostly supportive. That only amounted to about 10%.

Boiled down, what I am saying is that in dealing with HS grads and others out of HS, they rejected working in the class, could not and would not write or even read. They wanted tests that emphasized multiple choice and matching. Anything else was an imposition.

Hmm. I'm of about eight minds on this.

One, more homework is not the answer -- I highly recommend THE HOMEWORK MYTH: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing by Alfie Kohn.

Two, adults have always thought that kids were not working hard enough, and that the schools are bad -- doesn't Cicero or Martial complain about 'children these days'? -- so I always add salt to these things.

but Three, I teach in an inner city school, and we don't have enough text books to go around, and the suburband schools around us give laptops to their students, and the comparison stings. But of course, you can't just throw money at the problem...