Slashdot Mirror

5 days a week for 3/4 of the year is 195 days.

According to NCES, the average school year is 180 days long, so they miss 15 of those days due to holidays or whatever. (Personally, I think it's more than that due to "special" days like teachers' conferences, but let's go with that.)

So... let the school year be 15 days longer to compensate, and let them get their full 195 days in.

Christianity isn't a death cult. There aren't pervasive allegations of priests murdering children. The problem of sexual abuse by clergy is a drop in the bucket compared to sex abuse by teachers.

Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.

Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.

"[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?" she said. "The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."

So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a "Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up" and by asking "Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?"

No, they didn't. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.

As the National Catholic Register's reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state's entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government's discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools. -- Has Media Ignored Sex Abuse In School?

If you think that sex abuse by clergy is an enormous problem, practically demanding blood, what will you do about the much larger problem of abuse by teachers and the education system that covers for them? Or does the outrage and interest fade when the object isn't the church, but agents of the state?

Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That doesn't mean you should take away the water and leave him in a desert.

Since this is a discussion of which is more important sanitation or education, I will point out that leading a horse to a poison well is as bad or worse than leaving him in a desert.

In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.

Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.

Again, though, that's done correctly.

First, learning is not an industrial process. In the papers cited, all students were expected to operate in economically impractical small peer groups, and all students were expected to master the subject at hand.

This presumption of equality of educability is simply wrong, except at the lowest levels of education, where it's reasonable to expect students to have a relatively equal lack of exposure and therefore be at the same relative point in a given curriculum. This speaks to my earlier point of non-divergence of educational level being of great benefit to the teacher, but not such great benefit to the advanced (or potentially advanced, but thwarted) student.

The small group assumption here is not statistically significant in the three major studies cited by the first paper you linked to; in reality, despite having one of the smallest class sizes in the U.S., California tests near the bottom of the nation. In SAT scores, California scores in around #40 (if we include DC and Puerto Rico separately), while Utah, with twice the number of students per class and half as much spending per student (indeed, it's 48th in the nation), scores in around #19.

Lest you complain about teaching to the test, the first, 3rd, and 4th article you linked specifically reference standardized testing results as justification for their educational theories.

If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.

I have to call B.S. on this. While a trained educator, the P.E. teacher in my high school was neither sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P Math class, nor was he sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P. History class, both of which he was asked to substitute in, more as adult supervision than as someone with relevant knowledge of the subject matter which he could impart to the students. Nor would he have been able to teach my A.P. Chemistry class, my A.P. English class, nor my A.P. Art class. Nor A.P. Biology nor A.P. Physics.

Understanding teaching is not good enough for advanced students; neither is teaching to a lesson plan while being unable to answer questions on the subject matter. Otherwise we might as well just replace the entire teaching staff with SRA booklets as soon as we get a kid up to the 4th grade reading level.

Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you g

Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.

In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.

Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.

Again, though, that's done correctly.

If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.

Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you give 100% on every project you've ever done, and that every single hour of every single day of your working career has been spent working to your maximum potential?

Keep your ignorance in check, please, and don't equate sample size to population - it's bad practice.

before WW2 most people could barely read or not read at all and the only job they could get was working on a farm. serving in the military and getting some war booty was more exciting. back in those days graduating high school was a major achievement.

now in the first world the vast majority of people know how to read, have a high school education and a lot have higher education degrees. why would these people want to join the army, crawl through the mud and be shot at or blown up? for minimum wage salary?

this chart indicates literacy hasn't changed that much in the 1900s, and this article suggests it's gotten worse among military applicants. The statistics are based on people who were not allowed to enlist due to lack of basic reading skills. You need to read a lot of notices, manuals, written orders, etc in the military. Believe it or not, some people (I believe most) join because they want to *serve*, not because it's the best they can do financially.

I am not a veteran, but I know many and I respect them and it bothers me when they are characterized as being stupid or greedy, when in my experience they are intelligent and generous.

http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/IBRPlan.jsp

Federal loans only. No private loans.

Gov't spending IS bad regardless of outcome. ALL gov't spending is bad under ALL situations.

Sending First generation and low-income students through college is bad? I always assumed that more education = less money spent in the long run . . . . But I guess that decades of research (just google that) can be wrong. . . .

The productive USA was built without income taxes, without corporate taxes, without payroll taxes, without FDIC, Fed, IRS, FDA, FHA, EPA, CIA, FBI, SS, Medicare, EI, Medicaid, welfare, without dep't of energy, education, agriculture, small business, commerce, interior, HUD, etc.

Do you know why those things exist? To protect citizens. You can say what you want about the Gub'ment being out to get you, but it's true. Private enterprise in the 19th and early 20th century proved one thing, over-and-over, it will cut costs to the point of being dangerous to its workers, just to increase short-term profits. What choice do we have? Are you telling me that we can trust corporations to do what's in our best interests? If you say yes, please google anything with large businesses and the start of the labor movement.

But how does a country become a productive exporter, creditor without gov't building infrastructure? Because it's not true that gov't is needed to build any of it, what IS true is that WEALTH is needed to build infrastructure.There has to be a REASON to build infrastructure, there has to be wealth first, there has to be a promise of making a return - the profit motive is the driver, nothing else.

Okay, what about us who live where it wouldn't be profitable to run power, water or any other essential service? I guess we're just screwed. And Profit as the driver is an incredibly fine line. Today's attitude of bar-the-door short-term profits at the expense of all else doesn't exactly lend itself to developing long-term strategy. You know what does? Slow-moving government.

Infrastructure? How about the Keystone pipeline - the actual PRODUCTIVE infrastructure that private companies want to build, because they believe it's going to be profitable, it's going to make money. Is that the wrong thing today somehow - making money? USA was built by business, not by any government. USA was built by ABSENCE of gov't, people came to USA for freedoms from their totalitarian governments.

Keystone pipeline = 250,000 jobs is what we're told. NO, Keystone pipeline = 250,000 MOSTLY TEMPORARY man-year jobs. So, if it creates 20,000 jobs that last for 6 months, that's 10,000 jobs, correct? Nope. A job is a stable, long-term position. A temporary employment opportunity is what they're counting. It has nothing to do with long-term solutions. Granted, it's better than nothing, but change the discussion from how many jobs it will create by hyperbole, and actually give us a realistic number. I haven't been able to find one. And I'm not willing to trust someone who is driven by PROFIT to do what is in my best interest. No thank you.

The countries today that do the best are those that removed the most government controls from their economy over time, and USA is moving in a completely wrong direction.

Citation please? Are you talking about third world hell-holes? Or the pseudo-socialist Europeans?

You want infrastructure? You can't have infrastructure, there is nothing to build it for, and if there is something to build it for (like an oil pipeline) you are arguing against it, and it's not even a government project. You are not going to have infrastructure, because you don't have production. You are not going to have education and science, because you don't have manufacturing and engineering.

Wat? Are you saying that infrastructure necessarily equals profits and oil? Infrastructure means fixi

How many of your local schools even offer woodworking clases anymore? Why is that?

It's because they had to cancel the classes because there isn't money for new tools or wood, and to make room for more essential courses like science and math, as mandated by federal laws (see NCLB and its impact on time spent on non-core subject courses).

And math? Well, math is just too hard for kids! We can't damage their self-esteem by making them learn something that's HARD! Reading/writing? Unnecessary! I knew the school systems were failing when my son told me that he could opt out of reading and writing to take a movie appreciation class. That's right - instead of learning how to read or how to structure clear, concise sentences, the school would let him watch movies and talk about them. Clearly equivalent!

I'd say this is more of a specific instance for whatever school your son attends, instead of a nationwide thing. I've never seen a change-out from reading comprehension to film appreciation, unless you're talking about the generic 'humanities' requirement at the junior-college level. . . in which case it's not really the schools fault. . .

Anyone who doesn't think that the US is failing to prepare children for leadership clearly wasn't paying attention as George W. Bush ran this country into the ground for 8 years!

Umm no? I'm not defending that ape, I'm just saying that it started a loooooonnnnngggg time before Bush 1 got in office, let alone Bush 2.

According to the NCES, inflation has been most marked and correlated to Pell Grant availability within the for profit, private schools. Public colleges and private, not for profit schools show lower increases and less correlation.

The canard that school loans cause tuition increases is another right-wing canard, true mainly because the for-profits are skewing the numbers. As usual, it is another right-wing smoke-and-mirrors assertion, where the right's solution (the free enterprise, for-profit colleges) actually cause or exacerbate the problem.

in 1910, the literacy rate among whites was 95% If society hadn't been so racist, the literacy rate among blacks would have been a lot higher.

Teachers are not the enemy and it makes me sad to see an anti-education screed on Slashdot.

Let's deconstruct your post.

First off, "officials" -- also known as "teachers" and "local school board members" -- hate the No Child Left Behind Act because it is an unfunded standards-based mandate for additional instruction. The second standards rear their ugly heads in classrooms you start seeing rote learning, AKA "teaching for the test." No one benefits from rote learning. Not even the businesses that depend on the school system to turn out creative and innovative thinkers with a broad knowledge base to draw on. And while it may be responsible for an increase in test scores, students suffer in ways standardize tests can't measure.

Second, school spending. I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, so I'll have to improvise. The federal goverment's per-pupil spending (you may find how influential federal money really is enlightening from a big-picture perspective) has barely kept pace with inflation, and that's without going into all the ways the feds twist the arms of desperately underfunded local school districts with laws like NCLB, which cuts funding to the underperforming schools that need it the most (in the name of "competitiveness"). If you really want to know how much is getting spent per-pupil you should take a look at the detailed breakdown from the Census Bureau (warning, PDF). And yes, salaries are the biggest number in the list. Because the most important resource in education is PEOPLE.

We also need to talk about per-pupil spending in general, where the fundamental inequality inherent in education funding is most readily apparent. You can't just say that one area's per-pupil funding level is adequate for another's thanks to things like cost-of-living and property values. Most schools are funded at a local level, which opens you up to all kinds of funding issues brought on by things like population density and the economy. You know who was hurt the most by the recent foreclosure crisis? Here's a hint, it wasn't the homeowners, it was the school districts that depend on their property taxes.

You know what else bothers me? That all the amounts discussed in the above links are counted in the millions of dollars per year. We blow billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. It really shows you where the nation's priorities lie.

Teachers are not the enemy and it makes me sad to see an anti-education screed on Slashdot.

Let's deconstruct your post.

First off, "officials" -- also known as "teachers" and "local school board members" -- hate the No Child Left Behind Act because it is an unfunded standards-based mandate for additional instruction. The second standards rear their ugly heads in classrooms you start seeing rote learning, AKA "teaching for the test." No one benefits from rote learning. Not even the businesses that depend on the school system to turn out creative and innovative thinkers with a broad knowledge base to draw on. And while it may be responsible for an increase in test scores, students suffer in ways standardize tests can't measure.

Second, school spending. I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, so I'll have to improvise. The federal goverment's per-pupil spending (you may find how influential federal money really is enlightening from a big-picture perspective) has barely kept pace with inflation, and that's without going into all the ways the feds twist the arms of desperately underfunded local school districts with laws like NCLB, which cuts funding to the underperforming schools that need it the most (in the name of "competitiveness"). If you really want to know how much is getting spent per-pupil you should take a look at the detailed breakdown from the Census Bureau (warning, PDF). And yes, salaries are the biggest number in the list. Because the most important resource in education is PEOPLE.

We also need to talk about per-pupil spending in general, where the fundamental inequality inherent in education funding is most readily apparent. You can't just say that one area's per-pupil funding level is adequate for another's thanks to things like cost-of-living and property values. Most schools are funded at a local level, which opens you up to all kinds of funding issues brought on by things like population density and the economy. You know who was hurt the most by the recent foreclosure crisis? Here's a hint, it wasn't the homeowners, it was the school districts that depend on their property taxes.

You know what else bothers me? That all the amounts discussed in the above links are counted in the millions of dollars per year. We blow billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. It really shows you where the nation's priorities lie.

hmm.... Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

The hypothesis that charter schools can provide better education has been tested and disproven (if you believe in standardized testing). http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/

I don't know what private schools you're talking about. In New York City, most private schools have tuition of $30,000 or more, compared to (I think) a cost of about $8,000 per student in the public schools.

There are a few private schools that are cheaper. They're usually selective. It's easy and cheap to teach good students. The problem, and the big expense, comes from teaching students who have handicaps, learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other problems. The factor most strongly associated with school achievement, according to all the researchers, is family income. Rich kids are (ironically) cheaper to teach. Poor kids are expensive to teach. The low-cost private schools don't take kids with handicaps, learning disabilities, and certainly not behavior problems. If they had to teach the same students, their costs would be as high.

They also cut their expenses by paying their teachers less, and as a result teachers don't stay for more than 2-3 years (as Steve Brill found out in that book of his). Almost everybody who studies education agrees that teachers are much better in their second year, and generally experienced teachers are better. So they have poorer teachers. That may be why they score worse in the NAEP tests.

If anybody really wants the facts on this, they should do a Google search for Diane Ravitch. She started out as an assistant secretary of education for George H.W. Bush, and believed in all this charter school, privatization and anti-union stuff. Then she looked at the facts and saw that it didn't work, and was actually producing worse schools. She explains it better than I can.

The one exception to private schools were the Catholic schools. They had (1) Nuns who were willing to spend their lives working on subsistence wages, living in dormitories, dedicated to education (2) Lots of real estate, which is the other big cost of education (3) No taxes. Unfortunately, the free ride is over. When's the last time you met a Catholic girl (under age 50) who wanted to be a nun?

I'm perfectly happy to see the private sector compete with government services. Privatization doesn't seem to be be the panacea that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand predicted. The private sector is better in certain competitive markets, like manufacturing computer components. but not in other markets, like health care or public education. Even the public colleges, like City College of New York and the University of California, were the equal of any of the private colleges, until the budget cuts.

It was a fairly basic, conceptual-level question.

A graphic of the periodic table was displayed, with the elements Ar, Cl, He, N, and Zn highlighted. The text of the question asked which element would have chemical properties most similar to Ar. As long as you know that the table is arranged so that elements in vertical columns share similar chemical properties, you'll get it correct.

link

But that's exactly my point! We didn't even cover that much in my grade school and middle school science classes. It would have been just as easy for me in eighth grade to think "Well, it's right next to Chlorine, so it's probably similar to the one it's next to." And even if I had answered it correctly, it simply would have been dumb luck.

The only factor that really counts is the economic status of the parents.

There's also the Educational level of the parents, specifically the mother.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ786885&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ786885

It was a fairly basic, conceptual-level question.

A graphic of the periodic table was displayed, with the elements Ar, Cl, He, N, and Zn highlighted. The text of the question asked which element would have chemical properties most similar to Ar. As long as you know that the table is arranged so that elements in vertical columns share similar chemical properties, you'll get it correct.

link

5 sample questions here:

http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2011/sample_quest.asp

all questions for grades 4,8,12 here:

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrlsx/search.aspx?subject=science

5/5 for me

Our per-pupil spending on public schools has quadrupled since 1962 (inflation-adjusted, the nominal increase is over 25 times). Yet, only 30% of 8th-graders nation-wide can read properly, and about as many have a firm grasp of science. Obviously, we aren't spending enough money, are we?

You can look at questions here: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrlsx/search.aspx?subject=science
Also, there's a little sample test: http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2011/sample_quest.asp

There appears to be at least two inaccuracies in this article.

1) Defaulting on Federal Stafford loans do affect the school for a period of time. Schools who participate in Federal Student Aid (FSA) are beholding to a concept of the "Cohort Default Rate". The basic premise is this: The U.S. Department of Education (ED) monitors the number of loans that a school has in default relative to the total number of loans made to the school for a rolling three year period. If this ratio passes a certain point, ED begins applying an ever increasing set of penalties on the school. If the cohort default rate passes a certain point, the school loses its ability to issue FSA. Also, Federal Perkins Loans are subject to this as well, on top of the fact that schools partially fund Perkins loans with their own money.

More information can be gleaned here: http://ifap.ed.gov/DefaultManagement/CDRGuideMaster.html

2) There has been argument for at least the 13 years I worked as a contractor to ED that transcripts are school property. Mark Kantrowitz, noted FSA researcher and commentator, has posted an excellent article on his website describing the subject here: http://www.finaid.org/educators/withholdingtranscripts.phtml

If you read the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), there is one section of the regulations that may be useful as leverage in dealing with a case of withholding transcripts. Mark deals with this section in his article. If you are experiencing this issue, I highly suggest you read the article, as well as the reg itself and make your argument from there. I have semi-successfully made the argument on behalf of clients previously during my time as a contractor, so please note your mileage may vary. The larger schools may offer a compromise (which the reg allows) while the smaller schools may cave in due to how much it'll cost them to offer the compromise.

Good luck.

Depends on your state. In my state (Massachusetts) there's a heavy emphasis on reasoning skills. Consequently we're at or near the top of the heap in terms of the percentage of 8th graders who test as "advanced" in mathematics (17% vs. 7% for the country as a whole), for reading comprehension (5% vs. 2% for the nation as a whole) and science (5% vs 2.9% nation-wide) . My daughter just returned from an exchange program in Hamburg, Germany, and reports that gymnasium students there don't work nearly as long and hard, and our students don't lag in anything but free time. She's taking 10th grade geometry, and every week there are at least one or two problems that are extremely difficult for *me*, and I was good enough at math to go to MIT. Granted it's honors math, but still.

If you want to see how your state ranks in mathematics or reading, you can go here.. If students in your state are ignorant, illiterate or intellectually passive, don't blame American culture. Blame the people running your state. Chances are they're looking for someone to blame, too.

It can be done well and with those people I have no complaint, but, in my experience,

As a college educated individual in a STEM discipline, I'd feel perfectly confident with homeschooling in science or math courses. Have me try to teach a history class and the results would be comical at best. The idea that John Q. Public, with nothing more than a textbook for the class, can be as effective at education as someone with Masters (required in my state, YMMV) is indicative of the dismissive attitude we tend to take towards education.

Some notable stats: among homeschooling fathers, ~32% have "Some College/No Degree" or less. Mothers do slightly worse with ~33% having the same education level. If we include through BA/BS (which is unlikely to be in something relevant to teaching) the numbers are even more stark. At a time when we are demanding more of our teachers, are we also going to say that a few classes at the community college is sufficient to teach high school calculus?

Source

Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading.

But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html [ed.gov] and not all trading is a good fit in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan.

Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

The tech / vol / community schools do offer night, on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. The tech Feld does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.

It is an issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.

You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better overall plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.

Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading. But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html
and not all trading is a good in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan. Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

tech / vol / community schools do offer night , on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. Tech does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.

It is a issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.

You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better over all plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.

No Child Left Behind legally prohibits teachers from doing their job. Period.

Please explain. My default response was that you are wrong, and I have some familiartiy with this law. Maybe I've missed something though. It was a poor attempt to fix the end result of poorly crafted government incentives instead of fixing the incentives, and is flawed in numerous ways, but it doesn't actually prohibit teachers from teach AFAIK.

Even as written, it could have been implemented better. Instead of tracking, say, 5th graders from year to year to guage AYP, schools could have grouped students by year of starting school and retired groups from tracking when the numbers got too low. Which would have been far more sensible as you'd mostly be comparing the same kids to the same kids, and could show progress no matter how bad the students were as long each student was improving from year to year. That was a suggestion I heard back when it was being debated, but of course no one actually does it that way. Could have missed a clause in there, I've only skimmed the thing.

Only 44% of the residences which can get cable TV actually buy it. In comparison, 68% of US households have broadband access. (3% are still on dialup.) That's impressive reach for an industry that barely existed a decade ago.

Bear in mind that a significant fraction of the US population barely reads. 14% of the US adult population has "below basic literacy skills." They are not likely to find a computer very useful. Another 15% of Internet penetration and everyone who can read will be connected.

Measured by a different study, the most connected major countries are at 80%, +- 2%. The US and Japan are at 78%, Germany is at 80%, Korea is at 81%, and the UK is at 82%.

Next time before spewing "facts", please check where they come from!
When I try to google Mercatus, the first auto complete is Koch brothers...
The idea that we spend on average ~$90k/yr/child is hilarious. We only spend that much money on prison inmates.
The real number is ~$10k including the school lunch program, buses, and janitors.
That's comparable to the overhead cost of a class A building for a relatively low paid employee... Ok seems about right.
Oh you want to educate them too? Then throw in an "overpaid" teacher who makes 40-60k/year (gets summer off but grades at night/weekends).

Simple check. There are 12 years between 18-6 ages. The average life expectation is 72 years. So very roughly 1/6th of the population is of public school age.
There are over $300m us citizens and so there are ~50m school age students. If we were spending $100k/student/year on it would be $5T/year or half the GDP. FAIL!
Oh wait, you mean they ballooned the number by adding up 10 years together and it's actually less than $10k/yr?
You mean they only use 10 years so that they can make countries that stop education at 15 look better?

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Ok 5% of GDP I'll accept that, but it's still well below what many other countries spend so no big surprise.

How much do other countries actually spend?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.PRIM.PC.ZS

So we are ahead of Bhutan and Cameroon, but well behind Columbia. Congratulations!
Hmm... actual data that hasn't been so twisted by insane ideology that it at least passes a smell test.
Please learn to use the Internet.

Lets start this out with a question. Has our education system gotten 3.5 times better since the 1960s? No, while you ponder that, have a look at this:

Here are the links I used to put this together:
#1) Near the bottom, this page ranks several nations on Reading/Math/Scientific literacy. I just took the 3 scores, added them up, and took the average to get my ranking. (http://www.siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf011210.htm)

#2) How much do nations spend per student? Not all the nations listed in the first part are listed. There are a few notable exceptions, unfortunately. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_sec_sch_stu-spending-per-secondary-school-student)

Putting this together, I came up with this list of countries, ranked on their Education:

1. Finland - ?
2. Korea - ?
3. Japan - $5,890.00
4. New Zealand - ?
5. Canada - ?
6. Australia - $5,830.00
7. Ireland - $3,934.00
8 United Kingdom - $5,230.00
9. Austria - $8,163.00
10. Sweden - $5,648.00
11. France - $6,605.00
12. Belgium - ?
13. United States - $7,764.00
14. Iceland - ?
15. Switzerland - $9,348.00
16. Norway - $7,343.00
17. Czech Republic - $3,182.00
18. Denmark - $7,200.00
19. Spain - $4,274.00
20. Italy - $6,458.00

It doesn't LOOK like spending lots of money is the key... once again, spending it wisely, seems to be the key for the best education.

So, back to my original question, has our education gotten better, or worse, since the 1960s? Have a look at this URL, that adjusts how much we spend per student, since the 60s. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

Does that make you think that we need to look at paying more for education helps? I am ALL for cutting admin costs, quit cutting teacher's salary, cut superintendent and district level offices. Usually, they are overly-filled with bureaucrats, and not in it for the kids. I DO think that teacher unions are a problem as well. Ultimately, it is the parents, and what WE allow. Who WE vote in...

I'm going to guess you're part of a teacher's union...

Where you should blame are the fucking Retardicans who demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a fucking dime of taxes to support it.

Per the US Department of Education, AFTER adjusting for inflation annual per student spending is about 3.7 times what it was in the sixties and student performance hasn't improved.

I'm going to guess you're part of a teacher's union...

Where you should blame are the fucking Retardicans who demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a fucking dime of taxes to support it.

Per the US Department of Education, AFTER adjusting for inflation annual per student spending is about 3.7 times what it was in the sixties and student performance hasn't improved.

Good question. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

I haven't checked the fact checker.

Oh bull. US students regularly perform at-or-above average for European students in math.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf

PDF warning, actual data warning, etc.

Maybe it's different in the U.S. but don't teachers usually need to have a post-secondary degree and a teacher's certificate? What's the median salary for people with a college degree? According to this chart, the median income for men aged 25-34 was 32,900 with a high school diploma and 51,000 with a college degree in 2009. According to "The Teaching Penalty", teachers earn on average about 12% less than their counterparts with the same education, making their average wage in that age group about $45,000, although the Wikipedia article that you linked puts the entry wage at $32,000. Those are substantial wage gaps. And according to both of those sources, you need seniority (years of teaching full time) to increase that wage.

If Americans want the best and brightest teaching in their schools the least they'll need to do is increase the average wage for new teachers to the average that similarly educated professional are paid. That's about a $6,000 wage increase just to meet the average. To actually get the best and the brightest, schools would likely have to pay substantially more than that minimum amount.

That's ignoring the social stigma that is probably telling many people who might consider teaching that they shouldn't do so. The old saying "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" is just one manifestation of the bias against education and educators. Of course, paying teacher more than the average salary for similarly educated professionals would likely start to undo that some of that stigma.

Note: When increasing those wages it would also be a good idea to make sure that in concession for increased wages, that the teachers give up some of the red tape that protects teachers from dismissal. Thus, two birds could be killed with one stone.

Vouchers would allow kids who want to learn but are stuck in a shitty school to move to another school without having to pay all of the extra money for a private school.

You're putting the blame/credit on the school again. Private schools do not necessarily outperform public schools. They certainly cost more, though.

The ultimate problem is, IMHO, we are employing a 19th century educational model to a 21st century world. The educational system we use is very much build in the model of the industrial revolution which necessitated it, and even then it only sought to supply the bare minimum required to produce a competent worker (basic literacy and rudimentary math skills - aka "Reading, Writing and 'Rithmetic") If you wanted a real education, you got yourself an apprentice position and/or attended a university.

Public or private, they are both using the same outdated methodologies. Khan Academy and MITx are promising but still imperfect strategies, but with proper community support (ie a classroom with an involved teacher) could be a great improvement over what we have now.

We also need to put an end to standardized testing wherever possible, and instead focus on demonstrating practical skill rather than rote memorization and mechanical problem solving. The test problems used to evaluate students in school look absolutely nothing like real world problems, so it should be no surprise that students are inadequately prepared.

Bitch all you want about teacher's unions and vouchers and whatever. Won't make a damn bit of difference. The entire methodology needs to be torn down and rebuilt.
=Smidge=

The average prose and document literacy scores of U.S. adults were not measurably different in 2003 from 1992, but the average quantitative literacy score increased 8 points between these years.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69

One issue is the large "winnowing out" of STEM majors in college:

Among students who majored in liberal arts, business or other fields, 73% of white students and about 63% of black and Latino students finished their degrees in five years.

Forty-one percent of American students who start off majoring in science, math, engineering or technology fields graduate from those programs within six years.

The question is whether this "winnowing" is due to lack of preparation of the students before college, or simply a non-educational strategy of signaling that the students who "survive" are of high quality, in which case the institution should consider not calling itself a "higher learning" institution but a "better signaling" institution.

Students in general are choosing non-STEM majors. Top US graduating majors are 1) Business 2) Social sciences and history 3) Health professions and related clinical sciences 4) Education 5) Psychology 6) Visual and performing arts.

I feel pretty bad for anyone who took out loans for majors #2 or #6 and think they can pay them back...#5 will have a rough time as well. Education doesn't pay well on day 1, but if you can stick it out for 10 years and sneak a graduate degree you can do OK, depending on your union contract.

One other issue is that while more women than men are now attending college (57% women/43% men), women are even more likely to choose non-STEM majors. In Business, the female/male ratio is nearly 50/50, but in the #2 top major group of Social Sciences, it is 64/36 in favor of women. In #3 Health, it is 76/24. In #4 Education, it is 77/23.

In CS the female/male ratio is 30/70, in Engineering it is 17/83.

Physical sciences are closer to even (47/53) while Math is slightly more female (58/48).

I'm feeling a little snarky, so I ask how is that possible? Shouldn't those teachers be in school? I know that that is a ridiculous response, so I'll try harder.

I understand that it is your experience that many parents of home schooled kids are teachers. I cannot disprove that or even provide a good statistic about the relation between teachers and homeschooling. I would, however, point out two possible issues. A teacher who has a difficulty with the system themselves, not necessarily related to the education, could be more likely to home school. Also your own views may cause confirmation bias.
According to the Department of Education, in nearly 60% of the households that home school neither parent has more than "some" college education. I'm not positive, but don't you need a bachelor's to teach?

Federal law prohibits sharing student data. See the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

I think that whoever wrote this summary is being unfairly critical of charter schools, and even more unfair to those rich donors who are actually *trying* to help (as opposed to those who just hoard their money and or just their wealth to buy new Ferraris).

If you read TFA http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 you'll see what the problem is. These billionaires aren't simply giving money to local innovative schools. They're using their money in a heavy-handed way to shape policy for the public schools used by less-affluent, less-powerful taxpayers.

They promote bad policy, and when the evaluations show they don't work, they ignore the evaluations and keep promoting the bad policy -- in public schools as well.

They've affected federal policy, under No Child Left Behind, so that schools can't get this federal money unless they accept the whole package of "reforms," many of which turned out not to work, such as destroying large neighborhood schools and replacing them with small schools, high stakes testing, and promoting charter schools (which according to major nationwide evaluations http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/ using the tests they love so much, are worse on average than public schools).

TFA http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 doesn't have a problem with billionaires helping poor kids get an education.

The problem is that billionaires don't free up resources for public schools. As a result of their lobbying, public schools actually lose money, for example through penalties under No Child Left Behind, if they don't implement these "reforms" many of which have been proven not to work.

As TFA says, the billionaires are trying to change the public schools that only get tax money. They're doing it by using their money not so much for direct teaching but for setting up "think tanks", lobbying, and even paying public school educators in ways that might be considered bribery.

My biggest problem is that they're implementing fad solutions, like charter schools, financial bonuses, etc. that haven't been shown to work -- and have sometimes been shown not to work.

For example, some charter schools have been evaluated by the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/ in rigorous studies, and overall they did worse than public schools.

Tell me -- if the evidence demonstrates that something doesn't work, why would you want to roll it out across the whole school system?

Actually, it would have helped if the poster realized that this is by GDP and not really the dollar amount. So much for how smart the Slashdot crowd is. Most can't even read from what I've just seen. Also note that I used the same site. So much for your assumed bias.
 
  More information that is slightly dated but we can see the trend.
 
  And yet more
 
  And even more. You'll note that even with the budget cuts we're still spending more than we did in 2008. Certainly not stone age figures.
 
So there you have it. Point proven. The education problems in the United States are not a funding problem. We have a social problem that people simply refuse to address. I can't imagine why, with all the data out there, we continue to bang our heads against a wall that simply doesn't exist. I suspect laziness to be totally honest. As Americans we have this idea that the solution to problems is to throw money or bullets at it. We see this with The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terrorism and The War on Ignorance. All of these things have brought us down a notch and none of them have made any progress in their stated goals. Instead of knee-jerk reactions please join me in wanting a solid solution with long term benefits for all involved. These problems are being "solved" by misrepresentation of the true underlying issues. It's costing all of us in time, money and quality of life. The approaches taken by our collective "leadership" have done nothing but throw up more schism to people who are wanting the same end results. We can take the time and come to a common ground, common sense solution. We can be better than we were. Why don't we do it?
 
Thank you for your time.

In all probability, homeless people will follow the same distribution curve as everyone else. That would imply that 2% of all homeless people have an IQ of 148 or above (UK's IQ scale, use your local Mensa entry requirement to figure out what's equal to that) and that 30.9% would be able to complete a degree program if given the opportunity.

The Great Source of Wisdom says that there's up to 2 million people in the US who are homeless at any given time, some on a more permanent basis than others. It's a fair bet that even the transients aren't really able to get into a university though.

That would give you 40,000 people of Mensa-level intelligence and around 618,000 people who would be able to complete further education. Finding one person of either level of ability shouldn't be that hard or even unusual - 40,000 people can't be easy to miss and well over half a million should be blatantly obvious.

Now, the median income of people with a bachelor's degree was 40K in 2009. That's the 25% tax bracket. So, the government is losing 10K per year per person who could have a degree but doesn't, which works out to $6.18 billion just from lost income tax revenue. That's ignoring anything such people might invent or contribute to society (and it's clear from even the one example that these are people who are just as able to contribute as anyone) along with all the money the government could collect from businesses as a result of such contributions. That's a hell of a lot of money to be throwing away. I like pragmatic socialism (note the "pragmatic" part) and social justice, so naturally I want fewer homeless people for those reasons. Particularly because I'm pragmatic - that's over half a million potential innovations that won't happen, over half a million potential entrepreneurs that won't get to start anything... Yes, there will always be homeless and the country can't afford to take care of everyone, we all know that, but this goes well beyond what is sane or rational. The desire to be seen as anti-socialist has become moronic and self-destructive.

Nobody can help everybody, but $6bln aught to be more than enough to cover the costs of helping far, far more than we are.

In the early to mid 1900's, science and math were basically dead in America.

What an odd thing to say. Having actually done research on that period in question, I can refute the claim. For starters, the US was among the world leaders in research during this time. Many US universities such as John Hopkins, Caltech, Stanford, Duke, MIT, etc because "world class" research institutes during this time. Second, it's a steady pattern of improvement from before 1900 to after the Second World War. For example, there was a big change in high school graduation from 1900 to 1940:

The beginning of the 20th century brought sustained increases in enrollment rates [in school] for both white and minority children. The overall enrollment rates for 5- to 19-year-olds rose from 51 percent in 1900 to 75 percent in 1940. The difference in the white and black enrollment rates narrowed from 23 points in 1900 to 7 points in 1940.

Eventual education attainment doesn't show much improvement, but it does show improvement:

In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education. Only 6 percent of males and 4 percent of females had completed 4 years of college. The median years of school attained by the adult population, 25 years old and over, had registered only a scant rise from 8.1 to 8.6 years over a 30 year period from 1910 to 1940.

Keep in mind that the US population also increased by over 40% over that time. So even in a period of relative stagnation in educational attainment, there probably was a substantial increase in the number of students.

The presence of US-based scientists became more well-known. For example, US experimentalists grew prominent in the hard sciences such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

Let's consider your example of the Sputnik satellite. Robert Goddard, a US physicist was a prominent rocketry researcher (who flew the first liquid-fueled rockets) prior to the Second World War. The German research into rocketry borrowed heavily from him at first, eventually culminating with the V-2 rocket, used frequently in the last year or so of the Second World War in Europe but not to great effect. In turn, I gather the Russian effort that yield Sputnik among many other wonders, depended on the V-2 R&D to start their rocketry program (though I gather they didn't rely on German researchers to the extent that the US did).

My point here is that key research that kicked off the Space Age and perhaps in turn the modern surge of scientific progress came from a guy in the US during this alleged "dead" period of science.

Another example comes from the field of geology. At the beginning of the 20th century, the prevailing theory of geology was a variation of uniformitarianism, that is, the same conditions that hold today, held in the past. The prime contender was catastrophism, a more or less religion-derived theory that the history of Earth was created by a series of massive disasters more or less described in the Bible, particularly the Great Flood.

So it was with considerable disdain that geologists greeted evidence of massive flooding (peaking at about 15 times the flow rate of all the rivers in the world) in eastern Washington state in the 1920s. It took something like 40 years for vindication (when they actually had a conference out in the area, walking literally through the evidence). But the research started during the "dead" period.

There are multiple alternatives to the public education system we have today. You propose a false dichotomy when you say that the choice is either what we have now or "everyone home-schooling". The best answer is for parents to have options and not be forced into sending their kids to a specific public school as is now the case.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p465n3166123272m/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681936
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681933
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED378635&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED378635

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/homeschooled_applicants
http://www.naturemoms.com/homeschool-and-college-acceptance.html
http://www.homeschool.com/articles/College05/default.asp#

Not quite. Any non-profit org will do. Even private ones.

http://studentaid.ed.gov/students/attachments/siteresources/LoanForgivenessv5_051511.pdf

So yes, working in a university as a professor or IT staff will qualify.

Why are there so many studies out there based on the premise that we need to promote female equality and seemingly none based on the premise that we need to promote equality regardless of gender?

When 57 percentage of the people enrolled in college are women(and just 43% are men) and when more women than men have been graduating from college for over 20 years now, wouldn't it be reasonable to have some studies that look at improving males' education instead of going on the decades-old assumption that women are being underserved?

If you'd read the article more carefully, you would realize that you can take the actual assessment here:

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrlsx/landing.aspx

Clearly, the person has a LOT of paper credibility (the token diplomas and degrees), and he claims he can manage people and figures (and can make enough money doing this to have a large house and a vacation home in the Bahamas).

It makes one wonder why Managers get paid so much when they don't even have the math skills to manage, and yet they have the arrogance to claim that they can manage.

Personally, I stopped taking Math in grade 10 (I just couldn't handle it), and I got a perfect score on the sample questions. I've never had anything more than minimum wage jobs. Maybe if I was less competent I could become a respected elected official and highly paid manager as well.

First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.

Not so much. If you follow the links you'll find up here: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrlsx/landing.aspx

Here's a sample question from the 12th grade mathematics test, specifically one marked "hard":

"The postal rate is 25 cents for the first ounce and 20 cents for each additional ounce or part of an ounce. What would it cost to mail a package that weighs 6.8 ounces?"

So in short, on top of all the other things you detail in your post which IMHO is spot on, the guy really is operating below a functional level when it comes to mathematics. Given this and those things, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's probably not really that great at much else either.