Quote:
Originally posted by ZTAngel
Well, my personal opinion is that our K-12 system is not great. And that's my personal opinion as well as many other's.
Our university systems are great. Many foreign students go to school at American colleges.
I grew up in the state of Florida where there has been some HUGE problems in the educational system. I have personally seen some horrible things happen over the years. FCATs, vouchers, budget cuts, and government abuse of the teachers. Florida is rated as one of the worst states for education and I base my knowledge off that. As well as the countless studies done of US educational systems vs. the rest of the world.
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The thing is, there's no guarantee that the studies are useful because most don't take into account the differences between educational systems. I did some more research on what I published earlier and got some clarification on the Germany educational system. At age 10, Germans are sorted into the apprenticeship track and the university track. SEVENTY percent are shuffled into the apprenticeship track. The remaining thirty go into the university track. When educational reports compare systems, most of them ONLY use that upper thirty percent of the German system. That would be the equivalent of only counting American students that take AP and honors-level classes for our scores.
In the Swedish and Finnish education systems, school is only mandatory through age 16. Then there is an optional "secondary education" from 16-19 for those who plan to go on to universities. So again, if an educational comparison were to be done on Swedish versus American secondary schooling systems, the report would give an advantage to the Swedish because it only counts those who are planning on attending universities, whereas the American report counts ALL high school students. There are many, many European systems that are set up the same way. Instead of compulsory primary and two sets of compulsory secondary education, there is compulory primary and secondary education PLUS an optional secondary education. Sort of like having mandatory elementary and middle school but with high school being optional.
So the problem isn't so much that our schools are failing us. If you take the top five percent, the creme de la creme of American students, and compare them to the top five percent of German students, Swedish students, Italian students or probably even the Japanese, they're probably going to be remarkably similar. It's just that many European educational systems allow for them to only educate the upper half of students, whereas the American systems require that everyone be educated until they don't want to be anymore. The problem, in my opinion, isn't so much that our schools are failing us as much as it's that we're failing our schools. If we set things up the way the many European systems run, I imagine our scores would be much closer to theirs, if not comparable.
As a future teacher, I could rant about this for hours, but I don't think the rest of you care quite as much as I do.
