Steve, You better look up the law...
He won't even look up a link I provided him proving that RU-486 isn't a "morning-after pill."
It might not be "fair" to give him a tougher homework assignment ... LOL
Don't be ridiculous. Its not the liberals on this thread who fail to support their positions.
As for education, the truth is the states where we fail to keep up with international standards are the red states. They trail not only the rest of the US but most of the industrialized nations. And that is a direct result of the way the states operate from day to day.......the level of incompetency, poor educational facilities, corrupt gov'ts and the ridiculous myths on which their belief systems rest. So stop lumping the rest of us in with you all.
In addition to the issues the authors cite below, there is another significant factor which they do not mention. The US has a sizeable immigrant population where English is not the first language. I would not be surprised if we have the highest percentage of any industrialized nations. That also will place a downward pressure on scores.
*************************************************************
International Comparisons
How do U.S. schools stack up?
And are world rankings really fair and accurate?
By Kevin Bushweller
Balderdash." That's the blunt response of psychologists David Berliner and Bruce Biddle to the widely circulated notion that the United States is falling behind the other industrialized nations of the world in education.
In their 1996 book The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools, Berliner and Biddle say politicians and others distort reality when they draw conclusions about American education on the basis of international comparisons of student performance. Critics of American education, they say, fail to consider the vast differences between U.S. and foreign schools.
"To condemn public education based on international comparisons is silly," Berliner told The American School Board Journal. "It doesn't make any sense."
Even so, international comparisons are an integral part of the debate about the condition of American schools--a debate that attracts a great deal of attention in the local and national news media. Politicians, reporters, and parents, as a result, are likely to bombard school board members and school administrators with challenging questions about how U.S. students stack up against their peers around the world. (The charts on these pages show a few examples of these world rankings.) As a school leader, you need to understand the uses and limitations of the tests on which these comparisons are based, because the results are often used as political justifications for major changes in public education policy and funding.
The trouble with averages
Berliner says the trouble with putting stock in U.S. averages on measures of student performance is that the nation is running two different school systems--one that is doing quite well educating middle-class and wealthy students, who are well represented in some states, and another that is failing miserably with poor students, many of whom are clustered in other states. A U.S. average, he says, overshadows the fact that students in some states are doing very well compared to their foreign peers.
Take mathematics. In The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle point out that the average math achievement of eighth-graders in high-achieving states is about the same as that of students in high-achieving countries such as Taiwan and Korea. But the math achievement levels of eighth-graders in poor-achieving states are about the same as those of the low-achieving countries of the world, such as Jordan.
Yet those differences are not usually emphasized when the national debate about public education takes center stage in Washington, Berliner says. Rather, politicians and the public compare student achievement in foreign nations that have a national curriculum and national tests with overall achievement in the United States, with its 50 separate state education systems. A case in point was the widely cited 1983 report A Nation at Risk, which called for major reforms in education because American students never ranked higher than third, and came in last several times, on 19 international academic comparisons. And international comparisons continue to drive many education policy decisions at the national level.
There are signs of change, however. Researchers know it's more valid to compare like with like--for example, to compare areas that have similar poverty rates, per-capita incomes, and unemployment percentages. And because such figures vary considerably among states, some researchers are trying to provide state-by-state data in their international comparisons.
A report released in July by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) does just that. Education in States and Nations provides a plethora of data comparing each state with such countries as Canada, China, England, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Taiwan. The results are revealing: On a mathematics test for 13-year-olds, for example, U.S. students on the whole ranked 14th. Students in Taiwan and Korea ranked first and second, respectively, with average scores more than 20 points higher than those of U.S. students. But students in Iowa and North Dakota did just as well as the Korean students, and those in Minnesota scored only one point lower. And the scores of students in other states--including Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin--were in the upper half of the international ranking. (The District of Columbia, on the other hand, would have come in dead last on an international comparison, 12 points behind Jordan, and Mississippi would have tied for last.)
asbj.com |
