Nations Report Card For Science

quakeaddict writes: "The US Dept of Education released the Nations Report Card for Science. Compared to 1996, it seems as if we as a nation are doing worse.The site also has cool tools to see how various states performed in other subjects.. There is also a very cool interactive tool that provides a wealth of information about how well kids did in all the subjects crossed with all sorts of questions (e.g. What was Johnnys score if he says he watched 1, 2 or 3 hours of TV a day etc...)."

Comments

Re:Theory of evolution critical to this

[OmegaDan]

The evolution debacle is just a hash mark on the thermometer of ignorance ...

The real truth is, theres an uneducated underclass in the US. Its the *underclass* thats getting larger and dragging down test scores.

Ignorance breeds ignorace, and ignorance breeds quickly. There is alot of things wrong with our educational system -- but one thing people don't want to admit is the old addage is true for education *garbage in, garbage out.* In america we have the freedom to be ignorant, and people are excercising that option en masse (sp?). Teachers are not miracle workers, they can't make up for bad parents, and a bad socio-economic condition. Plus, we've handicaped teachers in every way, they're not allowed to discipline students, teach science like evolution, or in some cases in a langauge that students understand! In california it is now *illegal* to teach classes in anything but english ...

One of my family members (we have 5 teachers in my immediate family) assigned a report to his class, a particular black girl drew the subject "apples." When it was due the girl had nothing to turn in, he called her mother, and she came down to the school and screamed her head off about the assignment being racist because "black people don't eat apples." she also said, "she'd be happy to do a report on sweet potatos because black people eat those." *TRUE STORY*

Teachers have to deal with the *shit* of society, and someones is going to reply to me and ask why private schools can give consistent good educations -- its because private schools can *kick students out*, they don't have to take the crack babies, the ADD kids, the kid who my mother taught who had a habit of sitting under the lunch benches asking girls to touch his penis (in the second grade!).