Reply to Is the education 'crisis' in the USA overblown?

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Is the education 'crisis' in the USA overblown?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How long are you going to be hiding behind that "homogenous population" excuse?
I also truly believe that you can take your advantaged white kids and they will not test as well as their counterparts abroad. I went to high school abroad and college here so I'm speaking from my experience.
Besides all millions national tests, I wish they'd drop the multiple choice for awhile. My kids moves right to left, up and down on the page and still misses to fill in some circles. Doesn't even read all of them, just runs through them. Can't retell a story coherently (2nd grade,WoTP great school), hasn't had to memorize a poem. What do they do in school for 6 hours?! 6 hours is a long time to learn nothing...
[/quote]

I'm not hiding behind anything.  We have challenges they don't have in Finland.  If you can't see that or don't think it matters, then you are naive.

I'm not saying "advantaged white kids" test better than other groups.  I'm saying, we have created an underclass here that doesn't exist in Finland.  And changing that dynamic poses unique challenges.

Your last paragraph isn't even coherent, so I find it deeply ironic that you are blaming the education system for the reality that your kids can't retell a story coherently.

How does attending a high school abroad and college here make you an expert on all American white kids?  It seems to me your education taught you to deal in large brush strokes and you have no sense of nuance, subtle dynamics, complex issues.

As for comparing American students with their counterparts abroad, those discussions aren't useful.  For some countries, like Scandinavian countries, their socioeconomic makeup is vastly different from ours.  For others, like less developed countries, there are huge swaths of poor kids who aren't included in their test results because those kids don't even go to school.

The U.S. is a very large (geographically) and very diverse country.  So comparing us as a block to much smaller, much less diverse countries does not yield any useful insight or solutions to the unique challenges we face.

If you all want to continue that ridiculous approach, then we'll continue to go nowhere.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics