Reply to Why do people say schools in NOVA are competitive and cutthroat when people also say the education system here is bad?

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Reply to "Why do people say schools in NOVA are competitive and cutthroat when people also say the education system here is bad?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NOVA schools can be competitive. The kids taking AP/IB classes at the HS in out area are getting an excellent education. There are some bad teachers but that exists in every school. AP/IB classes have a mandated elements that are the same across the country, you have to teach to that standard if you want kids to do well on the AP/IB exams. The kids in our area tend to do better then the kids across the country because the area has so many parents who know the value of getting high scores and being able to skip classes in college.

There are issues at some of the HS where the regular classes are a joke. the base school my kid is supposed to attend is one where anyone who wants to go to college avoids the gen ed classes and takes all honors. The gen ed classes have many kids in them that are years behind in skills and do not care about completing school. They have been allowed to continue to the next grade because being retained is deemed to be too socially damaging for the kids. These are the kids that teachers have been forced to pass for ages. You will find this population is larger as you see a decline in the income levels at schools. There are studies showing that grades and educational quality drops once you get over a certain threshold of students living in poverty. FCPS has a decent number of ES, MS, and Hs that are considered Title 1, which means a large number of impoverished kids, and those schools tend to perform poorly.

Then you have the hyper competitive families who think that their kids need to do a ton more outside of school and push enrichment, like RSM or AoPS or fully academic summer programs. Not all the kids in those programs are there because the parents are obsessed with high stats, there are kids there because they genuinely like the material and want to be there but a large percentage are there because their parents make them attend. People have been doing this for ages, my parents sent my brothers to summer programs for smart kids in the 1980's because they needed more then they were getting at school, our HS did not have AP/IB classes at the time. It really isn't anything new. The market seems to have exploded though. I remember SAT prep being controversial when I was in HS and Sylvan being a new thing to help struggling kids. Now those are normal and the kids who want more or whose parents want more turn to RSM and AoPS.

The kids in the Honors/AP/IB track in HS are doing well and will be fine at college. They are getting an excellent education. The parents saying that they are so far behind are, many times, parents who come out of the Asian tradition were the kids are in school far longer then our kids are, there are tutoring centers all over the place, and where there are tests to take to be accepted into MS and HS across the country. It is a different tradition with a massive emphasis on education. The European schools do focus more on writing, which is the distinctive element of the IB degree, but are not as far ahead in math and science as you can get in the AP programs in the US. [/quote]

I am an Indian immigrant parent. My kids did not go to AoPS or RSM etc, but I tutored them at home and enriched and accelerated them as best as I could.  My kids could be contributing to the narrative that schools are very competitive.

Here is the thing - I had always imagined that k-12 education in USA will be at least better than what I grew up with in India. Which I am sure it was true when I was in school.  After all, I studied sometimes in ramshackle buildings and with basic textbooks, and not much access to knowledge outside what was in the textbooks.    But in those days - 30-40 years ago - in the USA or in India -  at least all students were taught the 3 R's well.  The older Americans are far better educated than the students nowadays.  Should that not tell us something?

USA students 30 years could do even better than students around the world  if they were motivated because they had access to textbooks, electricity, infrastructure, nutrition and far superior libraries and many resources to do independent projects and tinker in the garage.

But today - most of the world has access to these resources through the internet.  So now there is nothing to stop a poor student in India or Ghana to learn what they want to learn online.  And that is the main problem for US competitiveness.   Now, there is no longer the gatekeeping of knowledge and resources that kept even sub-standard US students employed and rich as adults.

Which means that now I as a parent get a heart-attack when I see that in US schools there is -  a very short school year with lots of long breaks,  a lack of robust curriculum/syllabus/textbooks/tests/final exams, a lack of discipline in classroom, rampant grade inflation, lack of differentiation in students abilities and needs,  and no student is held back to repeat a year if they are deficient in their studies to get intervention and intensive tutoring.

Then I compare it to what my nieces and nephews are studying in India - robotics, coding, at least 3 languages (Hindi, English, Regional Language or World Language), advanced Math, advanced Geometry/Trigonometry, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, History (India, World), Geography, music, art, pe, basic skills - and they have access to all the textbooks, documentaries, internet resources  that an American student has but does not use and I frankly I get anxious.   My kid will not be competitive in USA or India because the US schools are not using the resources that have been provided to them

And also now the Indian student in India gets -  a longer school year (on average the Indian student will go to school for at least 2 years more from K-12 because of more school days in an academic year),  discipline in the classroom,  national exams, all graded tests/exams come back home for the parents to check,  curricullum-syallabus-textbooks are completely mapped and so at any given point the parents know what the kids are learning... and so I get more and more stressed.

Telling the admin, parents, teachers about how US schools are falling behind and other countries are producing well educated students  falls on deaf ears.  Their response ranges from - "Oh, your kid will become depressed and stressed and commit suicide", "Why don't you go back to India", "childhood is for having fun and being care-free"
... I feel that I am sucked into the film  "Idiocracy".

So what do I  do?   My kids continue to go to the public school and I teach them at home or a tutoring center so that they remain competitive globally.  Which also means that I have  sacrificed my leisure hours and my lifestyle to tutor my kids because their school day is a waste of time. Unfortunately, private schools are worse.

[b]Yes, US schools are substandard and bad compared to other first world countries (and even an emerging market like India).[/b]  Yes, many kids do very well because their parents are teaching them or they are getting tutored outside of schools.  Especially parents who have access to education material from other countries like Singapore,  Japan, UK, Switzerland, China,  S Korea, India etc.  They cherry pick what they want to teach their kids and go from there.  And there are many people from the countries above so they know the ground reality of what the kids in these countries are learning.  [b]So,  Yes, this area is very competitive (because many expats & immigrants who are well educated or know that US schools sucks get their kids educated outside the school day). [/b][/quote]

[b]Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs? [/b]

I know that there are schools across the globe that are really impressive with what kids do, to include in the US. Most of those schools are schools for kids who have tested into them and not the day to day schools. One area that US schools are very different then schools in Europe and Asia, maybe other places but those two continents are the ones I am more familiar with, is that we don’t test in ES and MS to determine what schools kids attend for MS and HS. Let’s be real, the kids who do not score high enough in those countries end up at schools that teach the basics and more trade materials.

Parents who want their kids to move up in society and who have the means, using tutoring at home or through outside centers, the cram schools, to get their kids through those tests and into the college prep programs. I know that Singapore, as one example, has entire shopping malls that are all tutoring programs. China has been cracking down on tutoring programs because they are expensive and cited as a reason why parents are not having more kids, the cost of educating them is too high. I believe that there is a similar culture in India. I don’t hear as much of it out of Europe but there is a lot of pressure and stress on those tests in their 5th year. We don’t have that in the US.

All kids attend the same schools and have the opportunity to take those more advanced classes. It used to be that it was ok for kids to drop from AP to Honors or Honors to Gen Ed because not every kid is cut out for those higher level classes. But now that there is such a huge emphasis on graduating everyone we are passing kids who don’t turn in work and who are grade levels behind so those Gen Ed classes are becoming more remedial in some schools. I would say that there are places where the optic is more on the graduation rate and less on what kids are learning and that is problematic. But I think that the overall approach to education in the US is more healthy then it is in Asia and that the examples of amazing HS and the like are wonderful but more rare cases then the norm.

I went to school in the 80’s and 90’s. People then complained about kids in the US not speaking other languages while kids in Europe and Asia spoke two or more. That has always been a complaint. The reality is that kids in Europe are surrounded by people speaking other languages so you have more of a need to learn a second or third language. The romance languages are similar enough that it is not a huge feat to speak a bunch of romance languages. Most will learn English but, having lived in Europe, most speak English the way Americans who took HS Spanish speak Spanish. Where they live and interacting with the larger world requires you learn different languages, that isn’t the case in the US so there isn’t the pressure to learn 2-3 languages.

The difference is that there is less of a cultural predisposition to grinding out education in the US then there is in other parts of the world. Kids can grow into adults with good jobs without attending the top MS or HS or University. That is not the case in many parts of Asia. And, honestly, there are plenty of reports of dissatisfied Chinese, Korean, and Japanese kids who ground through school, got into the top universities, graduated and don’t have the jobs that they expected. [/quote]

[i][b]Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs? [/b][/i]

Of course not.  This is not typical education in India because India is still very much a 3rd world emerging market.  However, millions of people are coming out of abject poverty and the middle class is expanding.   Comparing all of India to all of US will be akin to comparing schools in Appalachia to magnet schools in DMV.

But, there are enough India private schools and some public schools that are providing an excellent education to the children of wealthy, UMC andMC families comparable to the best schools here..  These numbers are large enough that they can be the workforce for the world

There are no magnet programs that I know of in India, unike China who have had the "super genius" schools for talented kids that has given them such a headstart in AI and space tech. https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c...5b-b049-5dc1430863d5

India does not have private prep schools for magnet K-12 schools -   but they have coaching classes for entrance to med schools, engineering schools, all levels of state, federal jobs, US SAT/TOEFL/GRE/GMAT etc.   In India, the vast majority of rural or poor children don't have access to resources to get any or a  decent education.  But, even that is changing through exposure in social media, TV and movies.

My point is only that there are huge resources available in the US for education.  We need to invest just a little more and give a very good education to all children easily.  We cannot keep on destroying whatever is good in education in the name of reinventing the wheels, but we need serious fixes in education. 
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