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This isn't even news. It's recycling some old claims made by Andreas Scheicher, et al. at the OECD's education department. The 65% figure or anything similar to it has yet to be supported by any evidence whatsoever -- I know several experts in education who have tried & failed to even find a citation of the figure. Re:

"...there is a need for skills such as judgement, decision-making, and analysis and evaluation of systems."

This doesn't make sense unless we teach people sufficient knowledge to support these skills, i.e. What do you want them to judge, make-decisions, analyse, & evaluate? What kinds of foundational knowledge do we need in order to be able to make use of these skills? Currently, our primary, secondary, & post-secondary educational institutions are doing a great job of providing students with a broad range of useful foundational knowledge as well as analytical & critical thinking skills.

Not mentioned in the article but implicit is the need for "21st century skills." They're often not actually listed or defined when these claims are made but when they are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century BCE skills. (See: http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...)

Another fallacy is that we need to teach school children to write code, e.g. code.org. So far, research shows that learning to code requires that students already have problem solving & logical reasoning skills that are sufficiently well-developed for them to transfer to the abstract concepts involved in writing code. Additionally, there's no evidence of any benefits to other areas of study or thinking that learning to code can provide. In other words, coding requires knowledge & skills learned from elsewhere & doesn't provide any benefits to elsewhere, i.e. it's a specialist cul-de-sac and end result of learning that's a waste of time in primary & secondary education. There are more useful & important things to be learned.

Re: so called "soft skills" like being able to communicate your ideas to others clearly & to participate in & manage teams, it turns out that the best communicators, participators, & managers are those who have a great deal of expertise & experience in their specific professional domain, & those skills don't necessarily transfer from one domain to another, e.g. a great sports coach doesn't necessarily make a great software team leader.

Just same examples here and here since like so many here you don't understand what professional adult obligations are. I'm tired of idiots grandstanding without knowing such basic things.

Try both here and here you fucking idiot.

Seems that teachers aren't paid based on their performance, but seniority:

http://www.educationworld.com/...
http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...

Now "seniority" can include advanced degrees and continuing education, but the argument can be made that both of those don't necessarily contribute to performance. I admit that trying to gauge performance for education is difficult, but I was just trying to point out that currently teachers' aren't paid for it.

1. Primary schools are biased against women in STEM.
2. Primary school funding/quality in the US is stupid lopsided against minorities & the poor.

Working to change High School programs is better than working to change college admissions criteria or setting hiring quotas, but until the primary school funding disparity is fixed, there is no such thing as equal opportunities.

We can't (and shouldn't) demonize or try to change cultural influences on how children are raised. If people want to raise their children in a way that is counterproductive to succeeding (financially) in a capitalist democratic society... that is their choice. Hippies can live in barns with the chickens... or whatever other stereotype you want to believe in. That is what being free is all about: making choices that other people think are stupid. Equal opportunities can only be considered upon, and must be limited to, what society has chosen the government to be responsible for: education, law, (health?), defense, water, power, etc.

It is just as absurd to think you can fix the race & sex disparity problem at the high school level as it is to think you can cure a cold by wiping your nose.

I have this one book called "Math Wonders - To inspire teachers and students", which i can recommend. More of this educational books you can find under http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/index.jsp/ .

Me personally, I find the study of some history around the mathematicians is very appealing to learn about the math itself. For example the story about "Gauss" where the teacher asked the students - 8 to 10 years old - to calculate the sum of all numbers between 1 and 100 to keep them busy while he does something. And Gauss figured out so quickly it is 51 pairs with the sum of 100 creating the formula Sum_(n=1)(^x) = x*(x+1) / 2.

Try this... I know it must happen on other sites, but I was "fortunate" to find this.

1) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ Firefox. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Works.

2) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ IE. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus (albeit drawn differently). Works.

3) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ NS8. Note that IE engine is being used. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Get caught in a recursive site-provided "Page Not Found" loop. Change engine to Firefox for site. Same issue. ...there are problems with NS8, let's face it.

Try this... I know it must happen on other sites, but I was "fortunate" to find this.

1) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ Firefox. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Works.

2) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ IE. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus (albeit drawn differently). Works.

3) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ NS8. Note that IE engine is being used. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Get caught in a recursive site-provided "Page Not Found" loop. Change engine to Firefox for site. Same issue. ...there are problems with NS8, let's face it.

Try this... I know it must happen on other sites, but I was "fortunate" to find this.

1) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ Firefox. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Works.

2) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ IE. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus (albeit drawn differently). Works.

3) Navigate to http://www.ascd.org/ w/ NS8. Note that IE engine is being used. Move through the site via the dropdown DHTML menus. Get caught in a recursive site-provided "Page Not Found" loop. Change engine to Firefox for site. Same issue. ...there are problems with NS8, let's face it.

Rider: A provision added to a bill so it may "ride" to approval on the strength of the bill. Generally, riders are placed on appropriations bills. Also known as "pork barrel" legislation.

Because the Democrats still want gun manufacturers to be held liable for gun deaths, they attached some provisions which further restricted which guns you could own, which of course the NRA wasn't about to support. To answer your question about deliberate undercutting, however, that's exactly what the purpose was for the Democrats because they knew that rider would make the bill fail.

As for the comment on representative democracy, I don't think shooting down bills that would otherwise pass by riding irrelevant legislation designed to defeat them is really a good example of representative democracy.

I don't think the original post in this thread is off-topic at all. Here's why:

teachers in category 2 are delighted by this kind of challenge.

I'm afraid the current push for standardized testing and the over-administration of teachers is quickly clearing our schools of this kind of teacher.

My mom has just retired early (59) out of frustration because she can no longer teach in a way that's meaningful. She taught for 35 years as a public kindergarten teacher. She worked at school from 8 am until 5 pm, at-home lesson planning at least an hour and a half every night, and at least 3 or 4 hours every Sunday (my entire childhood). She had her kids doing creative mathematics and writing their own (albeit short) stories and illustrating their books by the end of the year.

Then the mandatory standardized testing started a few years back and the district locked down all of the ways she can teach. She has to teach only from textbooks and workbooks and give these five year olds frequent standardized tests. The kids must earn a letter grade at the end of the year. There are classroom observers that come in frequently that will downgrade the school if she isn't teaching according to this new curriculum. No more story reading. No more creative mathematics and learning about patterns with unifix cubes. No more buddy projects with the 4th graders who would come in for additional creative learning time. It's all gone. My mom's students always loved school at the end of the year and couldn't wait for first grade. Now they all hate school and much of my mom's job is keeping them on task when they're bored out of their skulls.

My mom was the most dedicated teacher I have ever known. She easily worked 55 hours a week for the duration of her career and has a masters in early childhood education and a certificate in bilingual education. Teachers like my mom are no longer welcome in the public school classrooms of America.

It's pretty clear that we're in the midst of the corporatization of our public school systems. Textbook conglomerates like Houton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill are making an absolute fortune off of the recent changes. Not surprisingly, they were also the companies who sponsored the educational studies that were used by legislators to push for these changes. Is it any wonder that a company like Apple would get pushed out of such an environment?