A Right Denied is a slide deck from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It’s full of stats that paint a pretty bleak picture about education in the United States. Some of the slides explain that there are internal inequities, where students in certain areas (or of certain races!) get worse educations than others. There are other sides that point out how the countries’ students do terribly in mathematics and science education compared to their international counterparts.
#1 by Richard Eid on 11/24/2010 - 22:07
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Do you think it comes down to money like everything else or are there more difficult problems to solve? It’s the US. We can throw money at anything we want, so even during these “tough” economic times I don’t consider money to be a large problem.
Bill Maher covered this on his HBO show a few weeks back. The arguments were weak, though I’m not fully educated on the subject. They blamed the problem on funding, which is extremely low in the impoverished areas they mentioned. Do you think it’s as easy as throwing money at the problem?
I think children from these areas don’t see a bright future for themselves, so they see no reason to work towards a better future in the meantime. It’s hard to put myself in their shoes because I didn’t grow up in that environment, but I think society is trying to sell them the wrong dream today. I don’t feel this is a problem that money can solve.
#2 by Mike Blaszczak on 11/28/2010 - 09:17
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I don’t think money solves it. The stats show that the US spends more per student than any other country, but has some of the worst test scores. Other countries spend far less than the US and do better.
Disconnecting from the goal is a part of the problem; giving up. Another problem is that our culture doesn’t seem to value academic achievement.