"Our top universities are competitive (which is what I've been saying all along.) Not our lower school systems."
Not only just our top universities, you have to get fairly low on the university rating before a lot of the non-American universities start to show up. Oh there are some, like Oxford and Cambridge, but American universities as a whole do quite well. Which is one reason I don't get all that worked up about how badly the lower schools do, it seems like those that go beyond the lower schools do ok.
Don't get me wrong, I think that public schools in particular can do a much better job. The kids are capable of it, and some go into shock when they first go beyond high school, colleges and universities don't handhold like the lower schools do. A factor is money, colleges and universities cost a lot more per student than lower schools do. But money isn't everything. My youngest goes to an excellent private school that is very cheap, a little under $5k a year. It's very small, about 120 students for K-12, and the teachers get peanuts, about $18k a year. But it has a very rigorous curriculum and the students learn a lot. It's a bit too much on classical style education, I'd like to see more math and science and less Greek, Latin, French and Spanish (all the students learn all of them by grade 12). Still, they all go to at least Calculus by graduation. The students consistently rank higher than much better funded schools and almost all of them go to college.
So they don't have the latest books, the computers are all donated and sometimes the paint and carpet is a little worn. But the teachers expect the kids to perform, and darn it, they do. Even the kids with Down's Syndrome perform better than many credit them as being able to do. They also expect them to behave, and amazingly enough, they do. Most public schools that I know of fail because they don't expect the students to achieve, and oddly enough, most don't. But they can. And many of those who go beyond the lower schools do. |
