Posted on 12/06/2013 10:31:03 AM PST by Kaslin
The scores are in from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, which, every three years, tests 15-year-olds from the world's most advanced countries.
For the United States, the report card is dismal. The U.S. ranking has fallen to 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math.
Florida, one of America's diverse mega-states, competed separately in the PISA exam, and scored below the U.S. average.
In the academic Olympics, the American superpower is a mediocrity.
Ranked one through seven in test scores in reading, science and math were Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Taiwan, South Korea, Macau-China, Japan. Also well ahead of the United States is Vietnam.
By and large, Western Europe has moved out in front of us and our close competitors are the Slovak Republic and Russian Federation.
Fifteen-year-olds in two ex-Soviet republics, Estonia and Latvia, also posted grades in math and science superior to those of America's young.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls the PISA test scores a "brutal truth" that "must serve as a wake-up call" for the country.
Excuse me, but how many wake-up calls do we need?
In October 1957, we got our first when the brutalitarian and backward superpower built by Josef Stalin beat America into space.
Two months later, our answer to Sputnik, a three-pound satellite, was to be launched by a Vanguard rocket from Cape Canaveral, to get us back in the race. It got four feet off the ground, when the rocket exploded.
Egg all over our face, we were rescued from national humiliation by the Redstone Arsenal rocket crew of Wernher von Braun who built the V-2s that had rained down on London. Von Braun put an 80-pound Explorer into orbit, and we were back in the game.
While the first manned space flight was made by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, America, under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, took command and put an American on the moon in July 1969.
Meanwhile, the country was on fire over the issue of education.
In LBJ's Great Society legislation in 1965 came the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which poured enormous amounts into our pubic schools.
In 1983, came "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform," the report of President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Conclusion: America's schools, even then, thirty years ago, were failing the nation.
Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, we got another surge in spending with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
How can a lack of money explain our declining test scores when America continues to spend more per capita on education than almost any other country? Yet, the more we spend, the lower the test scores we get back in global competition?
Some insist the persistence of poverty in an affluent America is the cause of these declining test scores.
Yet, have we not fought a 50-year war on poverty since LBJ's Great Society? And not only have countless trillions of dollars been spent, the poor in America receive benefits of which the world's poor could only dream.
America's poor receive free food, free health care and free education for their children from Head Start to K-12. The poor get subsidized housing and subsidized incomes. They are exempt from federal income taxes. State programs and private charities pick up where the feds leave off.
Yet, if poverty explains the dismal performance of America's students, why are they being lapped by Vietnamese 15-year-olds?
Do the Vietnamese have a higher per capita income than we?
Is there less poverty and more emphasis on education in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City than New York City and Washington, D.C.?
Is home environment behind the disparity in test scores?
Forty percent of American children are born out of wedlock, but for Hispanics it is 53 percent and for African-Americans 73 percent.
Looking again at those PISA test scores, other than East Asia -- China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam -- hardly any other nation of Southeast or South Asia, the Arab or Muslim world, Africa or Latin America, is in the top forty in academic performance.
And, in these test scores from a diverse world, we can see mirrored the academic performance within our own diverse nation.
Just as East Asians and Europeans excel in the PISA tests, so, too, do Americans of East Asian and European descent dominate test scores and excel in educational achievement, while our Hispanic and African-American students trail.
At top universities like Berkeley, Stanford and in the Ivy League, too, Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student bodies.
Yet, Hispanic and African-Americans are more than 30 percent of the U.S. population and 35 percent of those in our public schools.
Increasingly, these minorities will represent the nation in international academic competitions.
Where, then, are the grounds for optimism that we can turn this around?
And if we cannot, ought we not accept the inevitable?
“cant count muzzy countries in with the rest they make stupid people seem smart”
Alas, all too true. These are nations where they shoot schoolgirls who are trying to teach people to read.
As long as Ebonics is a recognized speech pattern and considered acceptable English, we’re going nowhere as a nation very fast.
I’d like to see the scores related to $ spent per point.
We would rank dead last.
I’d bet a whole lot that there is very little evidence that spending more money equates to better scores.
Thank you. I’ll come back to this later today. I appreciate the post.
You're more than welcome. Sure Earl Warren had an 'R' next to his name and he may have even been a Conservative at one point in his life. By upon ascending to the Supreme Court, he slid so far to the left that the term "commie" is no exaggeration.
As for Brown, the correct outcome would have been to simply find race-based discrimination wrong, overturning Plessy, and leave it at that. The destruction of neighborhood schools and forced busing is the legacy of the Warren Court. The widespread knockout game and wilding can likewise be ultimately attributed to Warren and his men in black.
No, but Obama and his Marxist minions are certainly f*cking up the West; i.e., the United States.
Look on the bright side, our kids can put a condom on a cucumber with the best of them!
“In LBJ’s Great Society legislation in 1965 came the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which poured enormous amounts into our pubic schools.”
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The sentence above, which I cut and pasted from the article, contains one of the most hilarious typos I have ever seen.
“I will say, young members of my family have attended public schools in our area, and seem to be rather well educated.”
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I certainly hope they are and wish you and yours well but I was an eighth grader in the public schools of South Carolina when Sputnik went up and supposedly woke us up to the horrid situation in the public schools. I can say from conversations I have had with young people who have recently graduated with a liberal arts degree from the university twelve miles from my home that NONE of the ones I have met could pass my public high school final circa 1962. I am not even in any doubt on this, they would all fail it. I estimate that the math test would be the only part they might NOT fail but they would probably need a calculator to pass that, most young people don’t seem to know how to work even simple arithmetic with paper and pencil now.
Of course those who study computer science or some other subjects learn things that did not exist in my youth but they too would flunk my high school final in English, History, Civics, Literature, possibly Biology as well. None of them seem to understand the use of pronouns, most are prone to use double negatives, it is astounding how often the meaning of their sentences is exactly opposite of what they intend to say, not one is capable of dealing with homophones. Asking them to differentiate between to, two and too is two times too much to ask. As far as their, there and they’re are concerned they’re convinced that their selection of one of these three words is neither here nor there. Don’t even talk about History or Civics, they are so abysmally ignorant (even the ones who majored in History) that they may as well have never heard of the subjects.
LOL!
all the other high performing nations kick out the idiots.
That’s what my brother says. He’s a teacher.
I agree with most of your post, and am not convinced you’re wrong on the Knockout Game at all. The courts have become activist. I’m not knowledgeable about Warren and the Warren Court, as previously stated.
It really is strange what effect being appointed to the court does to a person. All of a sudden you see things through a different filter.
Chief Justice Roberts has come up with some terrible decisions. I don’t think anyone saw those coming either.
Justices try to do their best, but the issues seem so weighty to them, that I think they get some sort of edifice complex at times and don’t settle down and see things simply and clearly.
Roberts was out of his freaken mind when he approved of Obamacare calling the fines a tax, when the Obama team themselves argued these were not taxes.
Roberts in effect ruled against the Obama team’s argument to give them the victory they wanted.
Say WHAT? Geez Louise...
I’m not sure I could have passed the tests you were required to. I was very restless in school from an early age on. I will say that when it came time for the SATs, I ranked in excess of the 70 percentile in most subjects, above 90 in a couple.
To be honest, what I learned was mostly by osmosis, so I was never quite sure if that testing was a sound confirmation of my smarts, or an overall damnation of the system or the rest of the students of the day.
There are times that I post when I’m tired and I use a form of “to” or “there” improperly. I come by later and wince.
My grammar can slip if I’m not careful. You’ll probably find some errors even in this post. My biggest failing is my spelling.
I’m not sure why, but I never was very good at spelling.
Take care.
Ouch!
Discipline brings progress.
The new age has no discipline. It’s kinda obvious.
(At least in sports...)
But I'll bet none of them are homophobes!
And, it seems according to your last sentence, at lot of them post on FR!
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