Our public education system is broken. . .
September 17, 2009
If you don’t agree how do you explain the fact that 75% of Oklahoma high school students can’t name the first president of the United States. The study was conducted by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The group gave more than a thousand students ten questions from the U.S. Citizenship test. 92% of immigrants from Africa, India and China are able pass the test. Only 3% (yes t-h-r-e-e percent) of Oklahoma students would have passed the citizenship test. Before you say that this is just a problem with Oklahoma you should realize that the results were the same in Arizona and other states.
Not only are our schools failing to teach our children basic facts, they are failing to teach our children civility. Watch this video of students on a bus cheering as one student attacks another student. What is the answer? For our family the answer was simple – we send our children to private schools. If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be – Jefferson.
The United States spends more money on education than all other industrialized nations according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In fact we spend more than double the average on a per-student basis. Interestingly, the US has the biggest gap between high and low performing students in an industrialized nation – this gap is a result of private and public schools. The public schools fail, the private schools succeed.
What is answer? More money? In the public school system more money doesn’t make a bit of difference. It is a travesty that we live in a country where only the rich can get an education. I don’t have the answer, just the question…
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I agree, costs for education have skyrocketed; and the value hasn’t gone up. Kids join gangs when they can’t get their head wrapped around the schoolwork. So, they lose interest and skip school, and the schools don’t keep an eye on everyone.
I remember only a few years ago a young Mexican boy was skipping school quite a bit, and a few of us told the parents, and it didn’t seem to make a difference. Then one day, I injured myself and was home from work recovering, and it was then that lent itself to tutoring this boy, and coming to find out that he just needed that little bit more of attention, and his life turned around. The school was amazed an honored him for work well done when he graduated from elementary school. He is doing really well in his first year of high school.
My injury was a torn meniscus, and that healed. One day I was walking near the school, and the principle saw me, and stopped to ask if I would volunteer to tutor more children, and I said that I would see if ever there would be time again. Since I work most of the time.
It would be wonderful if people who are out of work, or their hours are cut, or if they ever thought about volunteering…the schools are a great place to perform that task. It changes lives!
Thank you
Comment by Viral Nurse — September 17, 2009 @ 10:02 pm
Moreso than just public v private. I think that in the USA in general, children of successful parents are successful in school, regardless of what school they go to.
There are plenty of *GREAT* public schools in Dallas. Highland Park, the plano schools, southlake.
However, as you noted, there are also plenty of terrible public schools in Dallas.
The great public schools, the great private schools all have a majority of upper middle class parents. That is the only common thread I can see.
There must be a solution to remedy this though. In other countries like you said, there isn’t such a huge divide between upper class students and the lower class. Maybe it has something to do with college in other countries being free or at least much cheaper than it is in the USA so that the dream of college is much more attainable? But I doubt that is the whole reason or even 10% of the reason.
I would like to see much more experimentation with public education so hopefully we can find something that works!.
Comment by Brian — September 17, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
[...] meme is spreading through the blogosphere with the consensus being that our education system is failing and our students are dumber than a bag of [...]
Pingback by 77% Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name 1st President? — September 18, 2009 @ 6:28 am
Every time one of these “survey” stories comes up, I think back to my own experience in high school (I’m 42). We would get asked to take surveys, and I for one would resent the waste of my time. Since I went to school in Northern Virginia, we had surveys coming in from government agencies, universities, etc.
My favorite was one having to do with drugs. The grad student running the survey made the mistake of leaving us alone while we filled out the forms. We conspired to say we were taking every drug on the list, and then to add a few more. I’m sure the results showed that 75 percent of the class was addicted to Demerol and smoked a bale of pot per day.
If I had been given a waste-of-my-time survey asking “Who was the first president of the United States?” I would probably have written: “Your Mom.”
If you’re looking at who-knows-what numbers and it’s a survey, not a test score, I don’t buy into it. There’s no incentive to answer the question correctly, so some of the dumb kids maybe don’t know and many of the smart kids don’t care enough to give a right answer. They don’t have any skin in the game, so why play?
Comment by Brewdog — September 18, 2009 @ 7:54 am
+1 Brewdog. Plus, this was a telephone survey, with the correct answer chosen by pushing a number button. If that was me, I’d have just pushed one button ten times and hung up.
Comment by Nelson — September 18, 2009 @ 9:39 am
Good subject – If you read ‘Outliers’ By Gladwell, it goes into the differences between Western Education and Eastern Education. He isn’t exactly conservative, but it’s a great read. It tries to answer why Asian students are so much better at math and science than Americans. (at least the perception). It also tries to answer why ‘rich kids’ in good areas have a better education than ‘poor’ kids. To boil it down the answer is not money. It is proven that more dollars spend will not effect the test scores. When school is out for the summer ‘rich parents’ take thier kids to the museums and buy them books to read. For the most part, they stay engaged during the break. In most of Asia, they don’t even take a summer break. Poor kids get to relax and play – IE lapse in stimulation. Thier parents don’t have the resources to stimulate them. In fact, it goes on to make the case that Humans don’t need 3 months ‘off’ for resting and that is a western idea that really slows retention.
The bottom line is that school should be hard and it should be more like the real working world – long hours (8-5)and fewer breaks. I guess that means we need to pay teachers more, but I’m sure we can save the money spent from fighting teenage crime. More time in school means less time for kids to make stupid mistakes, right?
Comment by skip — September 21, 2009 @ 5:48 pm