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Why would you assume we'd need to tear down the buildings themselves, tho, lol?
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<p>Have you seen the state of the public schools where I live? They're disgusting. The system is complete crap as well- it would be near impossible to reach the level you're thinking of (note, I go to a private school). You can't possibly hope to raise the standards of education in a school that is literally rotting away.</p>
<p>As for your suggestion as a whole, to do this we would have to have national finals (who is to say that one teacher wouldn't have an easier/harder final than another?). This would be like a huge scale NY State Regents exams... and we all know that those NY teachers teach to those exams. It truly limits what a teacher can teach... the regents have had to be "dumbed down" because of lower achieving students. I learn far more here in NOLA in most my classes than I ever had a chance to learn in a NY school I went to. National testing simply isn't possible without creating such a low standard.</p>
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I don't think mj93 suggested we standardize course offerings.
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<p>He did, actually. </p>
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Every (public) school in the country would have the same GPA scale, the same course offerings, the same tests given at the same intervals, and teachers who all go through the same training.
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<p>Just, pointing that out.</p>
<p>"In social studies and language arts, sure. But I hate our limited science offerings. Grr."</p>
<p>Lol, ok you've got a point... but I'm a more English/social studies person though. I would like AP Chem though...</p>
<p>Oh please.</p>
<p>The fact is - students are genetically different anyways - and they won't all be responsive to the same curricula.</p>
<p>Subjecting everyone to the same standards is totally unpleasant to the slower students and to the faster students.</p>
<p>Actually, come to think of it, the United States has one of the best high school systems (for the most talented students who don't get caught down in the inefficient and pathetic school system) because it has so many subject-based standardized tests (NOT ADMINISTERED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, BUT BY PRIVATE COMPANIES OR BY SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES) that gifted students can take to PROVE their ability OUTSIDE of school (and really, gifted students oftentimes do well irrespective of whatever school they go to because they can find so many resources of their own anyways). [by the way, MANY standardized high school tests ARE dumbed down, BUT MANY of them are NOT dumbed down - just look at the olympiad tests and the APs (APs aren't THAT easy for A LOT of smart students at the 99th percentile - it's just that they have insane curves)]. The problem is that school tends to waste so much of their time and teachers are socialized into FORCING their students to put down their external reading to actually listen to their stupid school material during class (and they're socialized into believing that one curriculum fits all). There just is no flexibility in allowing students to jump from one subject to another. </p>
<p>Equality of opportunity never guarantees equality of outcome. More often than not, it just wastes resources.</p>
<p>Points notwithstanding, high school is really a bunch of fluff crap on top of a bunch of fluff crap - most people won't remember most of the material in there, and its economic value has largely been demolished by the very fact that more students are going there, forcing its standards to decline. Our society is OBSESSED with credentials. It just forces students to gain more and more and more credentials - when in reality - despite the fact that people go through high school - they still display amazing amounts of ignorance after high school (hell, 40% of adults can't even name the senators in their state)</p>
<p>And by the way, most students don't even manage to master 50% of the material in their AP courses anyways (3 is the average score for almost all AP courses, which corresponds with 50% or less of the points in many if not most exams - one of the exceptions, Calc BC, one of the exams where 40% of the students get 5's, only requires 60% of their questions right for 5s)
More teaching isn't necessarily going to do the trick. And coming from a public school myself, I know full well that students won't remember very much from even the best teachers. To be honest, I probably gained more from the teaching than most students did since I somehow have a good memory (and really valued my learning back when I was in school) and since I keep all my notebooks (and when I look back on them, most of the material is already material that I've really learned extremely well. Except French, which I found to be totally uninspiring because I totally hated the way it was taught).</p>
<p>What matters is what students learn in the long run. The only way to assess what they learn the long run is by tests. But if they score just as highly on cheaper laissez-faire styles of schooling (that encourage and reward individual discovery rather than lectures - this is A LOT easier to do online), then this pretty much makes schooling worthless to such students,considering that tests are the only means to evaluate what students learn in schools anyhow.</p>
<p>funny quote i saw a while ago:
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You have no idea of which you speak...I am currently training to become a teacher. The federal government has done everything it could possibly do to screw education.</p>
<p>It's real smart to standardize achievement in an "all-inclusive, least restrictive, classroom environments." You don't know what they are requiring teachers to do. They have made us responsible for social indoctrination of these children. Academics is secondary to social graduation and warm, fuzzy, feminine feelings.
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fn1. Clearly our government's current set of policies is restricted to the assumption that heritable differences (particularly heritable differences between groups) have no influence. "No Child Left Behind" does not acknowledge that some children are smarter than others , and the inability to bring up this fact cripples one side of the argument. The result is an entirely Soviet educational ideology, complete with five year plans for unattainable improvement - which in turn creates all sorts of incentives to doctor statistics. So it is rather dishonest to claim that the revelation of biological differences has no place in the debate. Dogmatic nurturism evokes Stalin and Lysenko just as surely as dogmatic essentialism calls forth Hitler and Mengele.
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<p>It sounds interesting</p>
<p>Has anyone considered it's not the curriculum that counts? High school is about learning how to learn, how to debate, how to write, how to workout math problems you've never seen before. High school is meant to teach you what you need to know when you live alone. If you standardize high school, you will force high school to be taught to the test (even more than it already is). Strong and weak students will all be forced to memorize, not learn. Believe me, there's a differance.</p>