How America Keeps Its Citizens Uneducated

@Mr.Vanvandenburg "Students come to the USA from all over to study and get PhDs at research labs in USA universities."

I would including undergraduate education in that. There are about 1.1 million undergraduate foreign students in USA and about 0.5 million at the graduate level.

None of that means universities at both levels could not be improved, but on the international stage they are darn good.

Seems to be general agreement here that primary and secondary education could be improved a lot.

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@ETC(SS) "We lead the world in money spent per student on education." More about that at:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/10/education-spending-highest-school-brazil-chile-italy-mexico/

 

(Bold added by me).

Just who is doing the sending? The federal government?
The DoEd does basically that. They send the money to the states.
They don’t determine curriculums.

Here is what their role is: Federal Role in Education | U.S. Department of Education
Better check quick before Musk or Trump take it down.

Please note, I agree completely that our educational system gets very poor results.
I also agree it needs to be fixed. I just don’t agree that this is the way to do it.

 

I made an acquaintance many years ago with a visiting professor from China. We have a tiny college in our local town - at that time we lived near the College and one spring day while washing my car I heard someone say hi from the road and it was the Professor taking a walk around town and just engaging people as he took his walk. His views on America were insightful and helped me see our country from a different perspective. I would see him many times after that on his walks past our house and would always look forward to talks with him.

I am curious if you have had experiences with the American Education System and if you would be interested in sharing them and sharing what the education system is like in China?

 

"I am curious if you have had experiences with the American Education System" More than a few But I shall try to be uncharacteristically brief. In primary school in California, to the extent I could assess as a 6 to 11 year old, my teachers knew the basics well. Except for science by a few of them.

Watching an early US orbital flight on TV in class, the rocket appear to go up and down on screen. I asked teacher about that, answer was "that's gravity pulling the rocket back down". This later got an eye roll from my father, an engineer, and sense: "The camera operator was tilting upwards and did not get it always right". No general conclusion can be drawn other than - teacher, say what you know and if you don't know, say that. Don't make stuff up.

Overall assessment of my teachers from K-12 was almost entirely positive. More than a few were charismatic and in this context I think that means they really liked what they were doing. None of them were 'bad'. Your mileage may have varied ...

Much later (circa 2000) I was in California and (more or less on a lark) I took the qualifying exam for secondary school teachers there. By that time I was a full-blown egghead, and actually 'testing the test' as to its assessment of skills. I thought it was well designed. Also, I passed

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I have not had much direct experience with primary and secondary education in China. I have done some 'classroom things', but they are difficult to generalize from because of being a novelty, and my own personality as an entertainer.

But some things are obvious. Chinese writing is, briefly, hard. Learning to draw thousands of characters (ideograms) to the satisfaction of teachers takes up much education space in the early years. In later years, everything is directed towards scoring well on the gaokao exam after secondary school years; results of which largely define students' future paths. Together these mean that 12 years are mostly aimed at meeting defined requirements. There is room for creativity, but mostly on the artistic side.

Colleges in China, opposite to rest of world, seem to me to be less rigorous and demanding than earlier years had been. This is the most damning indictment I'd make, and may explain why parents want their children to go abroad.

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For me this counts as brief.

 

must be the difference between cali and mass

 

Thank you your sharing you experiences.

 

2019 was six years ago.
My Spidey senses inform me that we're spending MORE money since then.
IIRC the 'nation's report card' is a bi-annual thing - and things are getting worse NOT better.

I'm not very concerned about US universities because most of the students that attend these are adults.
They can get tattoos, marry, swap genders and all manner of body fluids, drink, drive, and sometimes grow up to be productive citizens.

CHILDREN do not have the same agency.
WE are supposed to be concerned about taking care of them.

Just did.


The Nation's Report Card

Show me a better way and I will be all over it.

Note that I have not ever (to my knowledge) said that we should spend LESS money!
I would happily DOUBLE the amount of money that we spend on the education system if we could improve our standing to JUST the upper 50 percentile.
I'm against school vouchers, and one of the more loathsome arguments that some electric car drivers sometimes make is that they should be excused from their fair share of road maintenance taxes because they do not buy fuel.

The DoE does 'send money to the states' perhaps but that's ONLY because they first take it from the citizens, and the (federal) DoE takes a fairly big bite out of it first AND often threatens to withhold the REST of it for very arbitrary reasons that do not seem to be performance based - BECUASE WE ARE FAILING OUR STUDENTS!!
We have 52 laboratories of Democracy.
Why not get out of their way and let THEM run the schools???
My own beloved home state has 92 counties and.....(shockingly!) most of them have their own school districts who are more aware of the individual challenges and opportunities of each.
In fact?
My there are OVER 350 school districts in my home state.
That's a lot of administrative grunt even before you get to the state level.


The FDOE need to be eradicated - and the money kept at the state level perhaps.
500 people.......10 for each state, could be hired in a monitor role to assess which states get better - AND which need more regulatory involvement.

 

I think it’s all over when looking at more advanced students. In Calif schools have lanes. Seniors in the honors lane are studying first year college level material. They even had lanes when I went. Also the C lane students feel bad maybe, which isn't good, but having lanes doesn’t slow down students who want to learn more or faster. These students compete nationwide to go to colleges.
Eliminating the dept of education is temporary. We aren’t going backwards. I view it as only more of elected’s I can do anything I want and not lose any votes, a power driven mentality. Not based on any reasoning.

 

Unfortunately, no. It was done away with years ago.

 

"My Spidey senses inform me that we're spending MORE money since then." Tune them with this:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2024_c00cad36-en/full-report.html

Download full report, and see table C1.1 on page 255. I could clip it out and post here of course.

If people are interested in how educational outcomes differ among countries including USA, there is a lot to learn from this 498 page report.

While believing what one believes is true is low effort and probably comfortable, it does not always lead to highest accuracy. If your teachers led you to this, they did indeed fail you.

 

Largest Year-to-Year Increase for Public School Spending Per Pupil

 

New Largest Year-to-Year Increase for Public School Spending Per Pupil

This link is blocked by dot,gov for my region, blocked by USA not china. I can only hope that free readers use this information to inform their ideas.

 

China says the US of blocking data from them.

 

Perhaps I can get away with revealing it's a press release based on FY'22 data, showing an 8.9% increase in average per-pupil spending for FY'22 over FY'21. Not adjusted for inflation or cost-of-living differences between geographical areas.

If I remember right, inflation did hit 9.1% or thereabouts around mid-2022.

Highest per-pupil spenders were NY, DC, NJ, VT, CT, and lowest were UT, ID, AZ, OK, MS.

Highest % of revenue coming from fed $ in MS, SD, MT, AK, AR; smallest in NY, NJ, CT, NH, and MA.

 

Yes, internet blocking goes both ways, I doubt being the first to report this. I doubt having capacity or time to explain what I know to readers here. I am to a small degree dissuaded by ankle biters hosted happily by PriusChat.

 

People in the US are seldom dissuaded by what folks from China say either.

 

Good for you ... I hope.

 

I’m not sure why parents are deemed incapable of making kids a sandwich, or it’s the states’ (or provinces’) responsibility.

 

Part of it may come to the question, if the parent can't or won't, does the state want to punish the child for his or her ill-considered choice of parent?

Does the state want to reap all the disadvantages of having a poorly-educated future citizen, for the sake of saying "take that, you sandwichless parent, you!"?

 

@ChapmanF described the issue well.
Basically, it’s been found that children that aren’t hungry learn more/better.
As I understand it, there are income level requirements, so it is targeted.