<p>It is not easy to agree often with Zakaria, but there are times he and CNN call it correctly. The quoted reports are nothing new, and neither is the usual dismissive answers and reactions in the US. The long term implication is that our failing educational system has created and will continue to create a small elite, a shrinking REAL middle class, and a huge lower class of untrained, under-educated, and quasi-illiterate inhabitants. The price we pay for having remained stagnant in a world that has progressed rapidly. But we still have our extreme high self-esteem and those rosy lenses.</p>
<p>Here we go: </p>
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<p>The picture of the United States is deeply troubling. Despite having the second-highest per capita GDP, the country does poorly along almost every dimension. It is below average in literacy and technological proficiency, and it’s third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds. Interestingly, France, Piketty’s country, also fares poorly in most categories.</p>
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<p>Inequalities of skills are also becoming generational and entrenched. The United States had a wide gap between its best performers and worst performers — though it had a smaller percentage in the top range compared with countries such as Japan, Finland and the Netherlands. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents.</p>
<p>The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources. (And no, it isn’t just because of immigrants. About half of the OECD countries now have a larger percentage of foreign-born adults than does the United States)</p>
<p>“The United States had a wide gap between its best performers and worst performers”
Yes, and the gap is not wide just between the best and worst. It is growing among the almost-best and best at an alarming rate.</p>
<p>I agree with some of what is said, but I cannot agree that this is THE cause of “the troubling inequalities of wealth.” H and I are well-educated, hard-working, etc … yet, we are in the number of those pushed downward in terms of our income level. We are not middle class - we are certainly in the top group of earners - but we have been losing ground for a number of years (since before the most recent recession). We are not the only ones experiencing this, and we see less opportunity for our children to move up to the level even we have achieved financially. My simplistic view of the situation is that those at the top are happily amassing their fortunes at the expense of everyone else. Workers are not valued. Yes, I know there is more at play … and it is much more than just poor education (although I don’t discount that we need to do better in that area).</p>
<p>When the percentage of high performing (on standardized tests) kids of low income families attaining college graduation is about the same as that of low performing kids of high income families, it would not be surprising to question how education is now entrenching generational inequality rather than providing opportunity by merit to the next generation.</p>
<p>I am not a big fan of the teachers’ unions, but when you look at the relative power of organized teachers in the countries with top educational performance it’s hard to argue that strong teachers’ unions per se is a major factor in our educational failures. American teachers’ unions can only dream of the power the teachers’ union has in Finland. And places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand have unions at least as powerful as ours, and probably significantly more powerful.</p>
<p>My kid’s teachers no longer teach; they “facilitate” learning. This does not work well at all for many, many students and pushes the best of the bunch to compensate by relying on internet sources. which vary in accuracy and quality, or outside tutoring at a high price. </p>
<p>Three of our children are biologically ours. By all standardized testing accounts, they are in the top one or two percentage points in the country. Our other child is adopted. He thinks quite differently from the rest of the family - the rest of us are a bunch of regurgitators. He’s an innovator. If one of our children will discover a cure for cancer, it will be he. Yet, in third grade, at 9 years old, he is only now able to read Magic Tree House books. Books our other kids could read well before K. Reading only came to this son with many hours of expensive private one on one Wilson Method tutoring. But this boy makes connections and solves problems in ways that elude not only his family, but the country’s current testing system. </p>
<p>What’s more, the common core curriculum almost destroyed his self esteem in second grade. Some of his sample 2nd grade spelling words - business, neighborhood, prophet, and profit. Some of his 2nd grade vocab - feasible, diligent, and tedious. The kid couldn’t get through Go Dog Go without some help and they were expecting him to spell neighborhood and business??? Absurd! Third grade has been an emotional rebuilding year for us and I’m proud to say, our son has risen to the challenge. The sad part is that most children with similar abilities and challenges don’t have access to similar resources and so what happens? I imagine they give up, all while believing they’re stupid. </p>
<p>How about they let kids be grouped and teach them according to their current ability? How about they let the teachers and parents figure out what these kids need to learn and the government stays out of it? The educational system needs a massive overhaul and individual teachers and schools need more freedom to develop curriculum. </p>
<p>In practice, such tracking often has resulted in tracking by race/SES/etc. factors other than academic ability and motivation. In addition, getting the government completely out of education would likely mean that many poor families would not send their kids to school at all, due to the cost of tuition at private K-12 schools (and, as with colleges, only a few of them would be wealthy enough to offer generous financial aid).</p>
<p>^^^The reason I mentioned biology above is that I’m pointing out that there are genetic propensities to learning styles. And the current system ignores them.</p>
<p>You are missing one key ingredient. In the case of Finland, the government has taken full control of the national education. The government decides on curriculum and most importantly on the requirements for vertical promotions. In other countries, the constitution protects the freedom of education, which gives parents the choice of schooling. The unions, have a voice, but one that involves finite matters of labor. It is a mistake to believe that unions control the education. In many cases, the social benefits available to teachers hardly justify antagonistic relations as the jobs are well paid and respected and eminently sought after and difficult to get because of high educational requirements. Compare that to our country where the pool of teachers is culled from the bottom of the educational ladder and protected later by whimsical policies and extorted CBA.</p>
<p>In our country, the federal government has abdicated the power to state and local entities, and de facto abdicated how to run schools to the service providers and their unions. In the US, the teachers’ union wield colossal political power and rely on quasi monopolistic practices to maintaining its leadership and political leaning. </p>
<p>"How about they let kids be grouped and teach them according to their current ability? How about they let the teachers and parents figure out what these kids need to learn and the government stays out of it? " </p>
<p>I don’t think it is the government. It’s the parents, and the school board/administration which bows to their political pressure. I’m not talking about uninvolved parents, though that is certainly a big problem with younger kids who need a lot of parent support and informal education to perform their best. I’m talking about parents who would never, ever, agree to a system where kids are placed according to where the teachers think they need to be. If the government doesn’t insist that Johnny learn something because it’s not on the test, then the school isn’t going to teach it. If the school can make parents happy by teaching remedial classes and labeling them “honors” so that every single child can be an honors student, they’ll do that. Parents don’t want their kids wasting time with something they won’t get a gold star for. And they <em>certainly</em> don’t want their child left behind the Jones’s kid. Parents are the biggest obstacle to improving the curriculum or the rigor of the program. And our school has obligingly dumbed it down several times over the past decade.</p>
<p>How about… the government stays out of it? The educational system needs a massive overhaul and individual teachers and schools need more freedom to develop curriculum."</p>
<p>All the nations with high-performing school children have schools that are run by the federal government, with curriculum set up by the federal government. I think that the problem in the US is that there is TOO MUCH freedom to develop curriculum, and too many people who have a personal/financial stake in change for change’s sake. </p>
<p>“Parents are the biggest obstacle to improving the curriculum or the rigor of the program” </p>
<p>Really? Do you have any sources to back that statement? I think curriculum issues in our schools are multi-faceted and there’s plenty of blame to go around; picking on the parents (just like picking on teachers) is simplistic. </p>
<p>Canadian schools are provincially run, and there are curricular differences between provinces. However, the variation within provinces is small enough that Canadian universities do not require additional standardized testing for applicants from Canadian high schools – the universities do not feel that they need standardized tests to control for variations in curricular quality and grade inflation. (But Canadian universities do require applicants from US high schools to submit standardized tests.)</p>
<p>The problem is that the good local school districts in the US do not want to be subjected to federal diktat. Common Core means dumbing down. It means that for the bottom two-thirds of students in the public schools to score well on tests like PISA, the top third will be subjected to Gradgrindian idiocy, lowest-common-denominator rote learning. Zakaria’s piece is pro-Common Core. I once taught in a very good NJ public school system. We had to spend two months prepping for standardized tests to retain the district’s property values. Those two months could have been spent on actual learning, but that’s okay, because the kids from those families read books over the summer. But no one fooled themselves that the kids were actually learning anything during those weeks where we prepped for HSPA.</p>
<p>Some Common Core may be dumbing down; I’ve seen Common Core school materials that are thorough, age-appropriate and challenging. Just because one school system’s Common Core approach appears not to be successful doesn’t mean Common Core in itself is a bad idea. </p>
<p>BTW, again, most nations have Common Core, or their nation’s version of it. And they seem to be producing kids who outscore ours in the sciences, math, geography and other fields. </p>
<p>When my husband was a college professor, he found it incredibly difficult to teach the required Freshman Seminar courses in his (humanities) department. He had freshmen who’d never been exposed to Greek mythology, for example. Others had never read Mark Twain. Yet in another class no one, not one single freshman, could name a famous French person - in any field. (Finally, after much prodding someone mentioned Napoleon. Close enough.) </p>
<p>With Common Core it is much easier to gauge what students were exposed to and what they weren’t. </p>
<p>Common core is probably an upgrade compared to the previous standards in most schools. Of course, there will be some grumbling, both (for obvious reasons) grumbling from low performing schools who fear being revealed as such even more when a common standard is used in most states, and (somewhat more legitimate) grumbling from high performing schools who see it as a distraction (high performing schools means those who standards are already higher than the common core standards).</p>
<p>I would also like to point out that nations whose children outscore ours tend to track kids. We as a society don’t like tracking, feeling (probably correctly) that (at least in the US) ‘track’ all too often is linked with ‘class’ and that’s not what we want from our public education. As a result, many observers say all our public education tends to be ‘dumbed down’ except in areas that are wealthy enough, and have parents who are discerning enough about education, to offer AP, accelerated programs, etc. </p>
<p>In other words, we let capitalism track our kids, not the school system </p>
<p>I’m not surprised by that at all. They’re all dead white guys, so they’re “part of the problem”. You’d be appalled, and so would I, at the significant people that they would be able to name. </p>
<p>My understanding of Finland is that it is not a tightly controlled system at all – they have tons of teacher autonomy, far more than we would tolerate. The deal there is that their teachers are the people who in our society are investment bankers and social media entrepreneurs. If the smartest guy in the world is willing to spend time with little Matti, no one is going to tell him what they should be talking about.</p>
<p>And, yes, in Canada there is little to no federal government involvement in education. It’s all provincial, with a fair amount of local variation, too. But other high-performing countries are centrally controlled. There isn’t one, simple, magic-bullet structure that works. And the structure doesn’t teach a single kid – the same structure that works one place can fail miserably in another.</p>
<p>Like everyone else, I am ambivalent about the Common Core. But I think (hope) it can be enough of an improvement for most of the world that it justifies a slight deleterious effect on the very best schools. (Heck, the school where I originally sent my own kids didn’t even offer AP classes, because the faculty thought they were too dumbed-down for the school, and they were right.) The knee-jerk calls to get the federal government out of education and leave things to the states, local districts, and schools are hilarious. What do you think got us into this mess in the first place?</p>
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