1. There are still places in the US where our _current_ standards are world class ( boston is given as an example )
2. This quote
""" The first draft, released in May, explicitly included evolution and climate change. A second draft will be available for comment this fall. """
Why, why as your drafting standards for something that could help all americans do you intentionally politicise it. You have now turned this from something everyone would agree with ( We need to educate our children better ) to something that people will draw up battle lines off of. I understand that people see the denayal of these two aspects as a marker of an anti-science mindset, but the solution is not to just draw the line in the sand and use the tynnary of the majority as a hammer to force your changes through.
Prediction, this will turn political and nothing profitable will get done and a majority of america will continue to see its education standards fall.
I up-voted you, but there is nothing political about evolution or climate change outside the US. If you want a world class science education you need to actually you know teach science. And science is based on two and only two ideas, everything is on the table AND reality dictates your views though experimentation. Sacrifice either of them to political grandstanding and you are doing something else.
PS: Biology is so closely tied to evolution at this point that I can't help but wonder what's left once you discard it. Global warming is less important, but it's rather hard to avoid that topic for 12 years.
Pretty much only taxonomy, anatomy and cellular biology remain once you take away evolution from a biology class (before university level at least). All of them are important and insightful, but of those 3 I think only anatomy is on par in importance with evolution as far as someone who's not going to study science for a living is concerned.
Recent updates to Taxonomy have used DNA testing along with genetic drift to move things around a fair bit. So, in the modern context it's really more a map of evolutionary change than a list of animals with their traits.
Which leaves Anatomy and Cellular biology, but again only when looking at individual species. Even just showing the 'fish' like stage of a human embryo brings up rather difficult questions without evolutionary context. As is a lot of the stranger parts of Anatomy and Cellular biology.
PS: By 'fish' I mean when you basically have head + spine and before leg's show up.
But were not talking about ourside the US were talking about the US, and unfortuinitly it is political. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that roughly half the population won't disregard everything your working on to get two bullet points off your list is just stupid.
Also this idea that science is underpinned by evolution and cliement science is laughable. I guess chemestry and physics don't count ?
Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that roughly half the population won't disregard everything your working on to get two bullet points off your list is just stupid.
Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending important topics like evolution and climate change don't exist seems worse.
Climate science IS chemistry and physics. More specifically Climate science is mostly Spectroscopy and Thermodynamics and if it's off the table you can't really talk about them. Nor can you can't talk about convection currents which means you can talk about the gas laws which means you can talk about heat engines.
PS: And no I am not kidding, if you actually understand why a mass spectrometer works then climate change is obvious.
You may not be able to teach climate science without Spectroscopy and Thermodynamics but the converse isn't true. We aren't going to produce better engineers and physicists because we threw in a few weeks on thermohaline circulation.
You're overestimating the anti-science critics. You can teach all the spectroscopy and thermodynamics you want and they won't care, because they don't know what that stuff is.
It's purely the words "climate change" that they'll attack. And picking that fight is not a winning solution.
The winning solution is to show children how awesome science is, give them the fundamental tools to participate in it, and let them see for themselves the validity of conclusions like climate change.
We're in the mess we're in because too many people's science education was purely focussed on the conclusions of science without the methods of science. When "science class" means memorizing facts it's no different than catechism, and truth becomes a question of one authority vs another.
The conclusions of science are of secondary importance to the process of science.
The theory of evolution has pretty much zero value in competing globally, the way I see it (although it's good to know). Global competition is a major contributor to climate change.
The theory of evolution has pretty much zero value in competing globally, the way I see it
This is absurdly myopic. Evolution affects not just all the life-sciences, but also the mathematics of evolution is finding new applications in software and engineering all the time.
I've done genetic algorithms. Yes they employ the concept of evolution but it's something that can be understood in under an hour, purely from a programming perspective. Knowing the theory of evolution isn't required for someone to be skilled at machine learning algorithms. That's not to say schools shouldn't teach the theory of evolution; they should, alongside relativity and other things that can open one's mind but have virtually zero value for competing globally.
Global competition - currently - is a major contributor to climate change.
The societies that learn how to be competitive without contributing to climate change will leapfrog every single other society in technology and wellbeing.
I get your point and agree. By politicizing the standard (even if that's laughable in other countries) it virtually guarantees that half the population will be against it. It becomes a waste of time.
But except for the wastage I'm not concerned. I don't want my kids focusing too much on chemistry or physics in school anyway. There are few jobs in those types of science and plenty of competition for those jobs, so it's only entertainment value for my kids. I'd like the schools to focus on Python and web development first. That's not going to happen, of course, so it's Codecademy and similar sites to fill the gap.
Accepting "education is for a job" in the first place: you're lining your kids up to chase the biggest growth area of the last 20 years, when biotech is likely to be the most successful area in the next 20?
Or bioinfomatics or computational biology, where they're understanding current biology, not engineering new stuff?
You've discarded all of fundamental science, in favour of teaching your kids programming. Programming's important, but a physics degree _definitely_ teaches programming along with _how the universe works_. And stats. Lots and lots of stats. ",)
I'm just saying; you come across as a little short sighted, here.
It's certainly possible that biotech can be employed for the greater good. But I'm confident there will be a ton of competition for that relative sliver of jobs. I know several people with physics degrees. None of them do physics for a living. None could find a decent job doing it. Whereas programming is a very safe bet over the next 20 years, and is better taught by Python courses than physics.
I'd like schools to favor programming over physics and chemistry, but not ignore physics and chemistry altogether.
So you think schools should teach programming over fundamental science? As a very learned person said, "[physics] runs the shit that runs the shit that runs the shit that runs your shit!"
If you don't know physics, you don't know why there are fundamental limits to Moore's Law that we are rapidly approaching, for an example.
I took two years of physics classes. Virtually none of it applied to life. For example what good did it do me to calculate the trajectory of a projectile (multiple times, for homework, pop quiz, test, semi-final, and final)? We could've spent a fraction of the time on the concept and then been shown the equation for possible future reference, never to actually do a calculation. It would've served me much better to spend most of that time learning programming. I could've grasped fundamental limits to Moore's Law without ever doing a calculation of a projectile.
Nowadays physics is a hobby of mine, having entertainment value only. I can fully appreciate that "[physics] runs the shit..." but that doesn't pay the bills or get me to retirement.
Ballistics is occasionally interestingly counterintuitive, but perhaps that was overkill.
Bully for you. But it's the idea of prioritizing what is essentially a technician's job (yes, we call ourselves engineers; in reality, most of us are craftsmen) over knowing how the world works, and having some of the mental tools to figure stuff out that's confusing me.
Also, physics really rubbed in abstraction as a concept: "here's the atom, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it. Then this discovery was made. Here's the nucleus, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it..."
I do want schools to teach physics at a high level. As long as they'll get bogged down in minutia (as was my experience, and from what I've seen it's still the case) I'd rather they teach programming. Better they do Python functions than ballistics calculations. It's highly likely my kids will exit high school without having heard about relativity or quantum mechanics, except from me or info elsewhere.
How are we going to feed an ever-growing population?
How are we going to treat debilitating diseases that plague much of the world, in a cost-effective manner?
How are we going to improve the quality of life for all the people who are living longer lives?
How might we address unforeseen medical and nutritional crises?
You have a very short-sighted attitude. Which is not to even mention the impact that tying your approval of your children to the field in which they choose to work will have on them.
Simple: don't have an ever-growing population. It can't ever grow in any case, so it's better to work toward stabilizing and then reducing it. Through attrition of course.
With a population significantly less than today's level, biotech isn't really needed. Without modern biotech people can live to be 80+ on average. That's good enough in my book. I support death (even my own, at 80+!), to keep the population fresh and keep the dictators dying. Overall, I'm confident the benefits of no biotech outweigh the negatives.
I don't think I could help being disappointed if a kid of mine chose to work in a job that did great harm to others, be it cigarettes or GMO food. That's kind of natural to feel that way.
Death doesn't really need your support, although it might appreciate the fanbase as it is usually not that popular on the whole, apart from with goths, although it tends to find them a bit embarrassing.
Point of information: the world population is currently predicted to peak at 11 billion, due to the rest of the world going through demographic transition. So not ever-growing - though 11 billion is definitely enough to cause problems...
Because "We're going to make a spec that is intentionally vague on the one section that some people will bend over backwards to willfully misapply" is bad politics and "We're going to tighten standards across the board, but remain silent on two fundamental and well understood cornerstone concepts because they're likely to make people mad" is terrible policy.
Besides, the people who are opposed to teaching evolution and/or climate science are going to take a microscope to any new science teaching standard, so we may as well be up front about the goals and get the fight over with at the frontend.
So is our goal to push more teaching of evolution and global warming or is it to make science standards better ? By specifically calling out hot button buzz words your priming the pump for a political fight.
Evolution is not scientifically controversial and you can't teach biology without it. The political fight on this is not some recent invention of educators, but is just the current battle in a religious propaganda war for the right to dictate reality that has been going on since before the time of Galileo. Not mentioning key subjects to keep the religious happy is not a responsible approach for people who want sciences to be taught properly in school.
But education (at least the way we do it now) is a political phenomenon. Science has little to do with it.
Too many scientifically-minded people ignore this reality and cling to the idealistic notion that schools will teach the best ideas, so we simply need to show our ideas are best. No. Schools are politically controlled and will teach what political power dictates.
So long as scientifically literate people think we're above politics, we'll keep losing.
(Personally, I'd rather continue to see a growing number of people empowered to opt out of politically controlled education entirely.)
I'm not ignoring the politics, but science does have an obviously large part to play when it comes to teaching science, irrespective of the politics.
Also, to insist on evolution and climate science to be taught in a way that practitioners in those disciplines would at least recognise, is not pretending to be above politics, it is trying to meet the politics head on.
Because evolution and climate change are well documented theories backed by studies conducted using accepted methods. Although they are considered theories, they are theories in the same sense that we have the theory of gravity.
Just because certain religions or political parties try to deny facts does not mean that scientists and engineers can pretend that the truth is something other than what it is.
Anyone with a little bit of education in sciences, and philosophy of science, should be aware that the theory of gravity and the theories that make up what is known as evolution, have a very different theoretical background.
The theory of gravity has put people on the Moon and a rover on Mars. The theory of evolution creates plausible scenarios of why we see what we see.
There's much politics in the plausibility part. And there's a lot of politics in putting gravity and evolution on the same shelf.
It's sad to see how someone, even scientists, are considered to be anti-science for even doubting evolution.
>>It's sad to see how someone, even scientists, are considered to be anti-science for even doubting evolution.<<
There are no viable alternative scientific models that compete with the theory of evolution in terms of explaining change across successive generations of biological organisms. There are theological models, but those by definition do not have any scientific evidence. Which is why doubting evolution is considered anti-scientific - rightly so, in my opinion.
The amount of hard evidence we have for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming at this point that doubting it has two possible reasons: the person either does not understand science in general and evolution in particular, or they are driven by a religious agenda. Incidentally, both of these are very common in America due to shoddy science education (esp. with regards to imparting critical thinking skills in children) and the influence of religion in politics (and therefore education).
It would be fundamentalism if I was close-minded about it. I am not. If there are any alternative scientific theories that are supported by as much evidence as the theory of evolution is, I would love to hear about them.
A prerequisite for a theory to be scientific is to be built on a naturalistic background. The mere fact that one asks for a scientific explanation, says much about their _ideological_ background.
But _a priori_ we can not impose any restrictions on what will explain something. We are part of what exists. We can have no expectation on what exists, why and how it works.
Some things may have a scientific explanation, some others may not. We don't get to decide. We can't restrict ourself to accepting only one kind of explanation.
If they were to leave out evolution & climate change, it would bring any statistics into disrepute. If they did it and the statistics showed some of the best science education in the world it would be laughable if a large percentage of students were taught the world is only 6,000 years old. It would reek of soviet era bullshit statistics that everyone else laughs at.
There isn't always 2 sides to every story. Sometimes there's 1.
Better standards are good, but without change in other areas, they won't have much effect. If kids are failing to meet the current standards, how do you expect them to meet newer, more rigorous ones? I am sure Massachusetts and Minnesota's education systems have other things going for them besides standards.
I'm sorry but, using my mother as an example, in a single year, my mother elevated inner-city students in English from very low scores to very high scores. I'd need to ask her for specifics; but, the change was incredible. I believe they were getting near highest marks in the area. She demanded a LOT from the students, a truly incredible amount of writing and work. She was very, very hard on her students; but at the same time rewarded achievement greatly and taught in an effective, repetitive way. Years down the road, her old students have repeatedly come back to her, thanking her for her work with them. It is all about the teachers.
If people are sufficiently interested in her method, I might be able to get her to log in to my account (or one of her own), and expound upon her methods of training and relating to the children.
We need better teachers AND a better system AND better parents. We can't just put all of the expectations on the teachers and expect any sort of change. We do need teachers who are willing to be tough (like it sounds like your mother was) yet caring, but that requires a system that rewards teachers not based on seniority but on merit (sorry unions) but also doesn't encourage teachers to artificially raise grades or teach to specific tests. This means we'd have to invest more in evaluating progress in students, instead of just throwing standardized tests at kids. We also need parents who allow teachers to be tough (no complaining because your kid fails!) _and_ who are supportive yet disciplined back on the homefront.
Ab-so-lute-ly. We agree on pretty much all fronts. (I don't know my mother's stance on unions; and I don't have a stance on unions since I haven't given it any thought).
Since I haven't seen many willing parents (indeed in some situations, the parent isn't a positive or even present factor at all), I've only raised up the factor that I've actually seen make a positive change. It's actually the same way for me with computer science. A good first introduction made all the difference in the world.
> She demanded a LOT from the students, a truly incredible amount of writing and work.
Guys. Do me a favor; if this is the solution, leave education broken. I'm serious, I'm amazed I haven't already burned out on school work. Even a little bit more and I probably would have by now.
Changing standards is meaningless unless you dismantle the current structure of public education. Ever since its founding the Department of Education has not noticeably improved the outcomes of students nationwide. Nor has the many fold increased spending. Yes change will require rethinking having a teachers union
Where we have gone wrong is that school systems are saddled with far too many non-teaching positions and new school buildings tend way too many times to be symbols of the politicians who had them built.
There are plenty of states without teachers' unions, and guess what- the kids don't perform any better there.
Non-teaching positions are the results of regulations and laws to 'protect' the interests of students. Until someone makes hard decisions that pare back some of those mandated 'services' they're not going to go away.
You bring up an interesting data point. I wasn't even aware there were states with no teachers unions, that is a bit surprising. Do you know which ones? Without looking up the states and the stats, I'll take your word for it. I have no expectation that labor unions increase or decrease teaching quality, so if true as we'll assume, this is not particularly surprising.
I would expect, though I haven't checked, that these areas with teachers unions have better pay and benefits for teachers. Is that true, from the data you have analyzed?
These results can obscure as much as they reveal. The demographics of the US differ from European countries - the US has proportionally more students from lower scoring ethnic groups, as compared to most European countries.
If you look only at non-immigrants in European countries, and whites in the US, the US looks quite a bit more competitive.[1] Not to mention, Massachusetts and Minnesota have more of the higher scoring groups (principally whites) and fewer of the lower scoring groups (Hispanics and blacks) than the US as a whole.
It's important to understand where the differences in scores lie, and not just mash it all together and shout cliches like "More money!" Though it does seem like Finland's got something special.
Being a former board of education member for a large city, I can say with some experience that "standards" alone will do nothing. Education is so messed up beyond recognition today.
There's so much incredible bureaucracy. So much. Unimaginable. Federal, state, local. School districts have centralized to the point that it's nearly impossible to implement changes unless it's some sort of "one size fits all" scheme. Local schools are hamstrung by work rules, union rules, tenure rules, and then on top of that state and local education "standards."
Then there are socio-economic issues. Parents who themselves never learned to read. Kids living in areas where the person to look up to is a drug dealer. Cultures of dependence and reliance on government handouts. Many (if not most) urban school districts have dropout rates of over 50%.
Even where there is not that sort of culture, there are parents who think that the schools are babysitters and any kid who does something wrong much have done so because it's the <i>school's</i> fault.
And of course, teachers unions, licensing rules, pay scales, and lack of individual accountability contribute as well.
It's such an enormous problem that there's no single answer. I think that decentralizing education would go a long way toward helping to spur innovation. Charter schools, vouchers, and removing attendance boundaries help too.
Centralization has really hurt education and the only answer that seems to be proposed is <i>more centralization.</i>
One problem with this article is that it attempts to exonerate some American districts (that happen to be some of the most affluent urban regions in the country) by pointing out they can compete favorably with the world's top nations. That is an Apples to Oranges comparison. They're being compared to those entire nations including all children from their affluent urban suburbs to their impoverished backwoods one-room schools. If you compared Boston's math performance to only the richest urban areas of Finland, South Korea, or Canada you'd find the disparity as stark as ever.
I think this points out the need for a "crowdsourced" set of standards.
I put crowdsourced in quotes because it needs to be done carefully. We need a body of standards that is subject to continuous improvement by subject-matter experts, and expert teachers. It needs to be set up so that popular opinions can be expressed, but simple votes do not override expert conclusions.
This body of standards should be mapped to each state's standards. Teachers could work from the crowdsourced standards, but fulfill reporting requirements on their state standards. This is what good teachers in states with poor standards do anyways. Teachers work from a set of high-quality standards, but report on their own state's standards.
62 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread1. There are still places in the US where our _current_ standards are world class ( boston is given as an example )
2. This quote """ The first draft, released in May, explicitly included evolution and climate change. A second draft will be available for comment this fall. """
Why, why as your drafting standards for something that could help all americans do you intentionally politicise it. You have now turned this from something everyone would agree with ( We need to educate our children better ) to something that people will draw up battle lines off of. I understand that people see the denayal of these two aspects as a marker of an anti-science mindset, but the solution is not to just draw the line in the sand and use the tynnary of the majority as a hammer to force your changes through.
Prediction, this will turn political and nothing profitable will get done and a majority of america will continue to see its education standards fall.
PS: Biology is so closely tied to evolution at this point that I can't help but wonder what's left once you discard it. Global warming is less important, but it's rather hard to avoid that topic for 12 years.
Which leaves Anatomy and Cellular biology, but again only when looking at individual species. Even just showing the 'fish' like stage of a human embryo brings up rather difficult questions without evolutionary context. As is a lot of the stranger parts of Anatomy and Cellular biology.
PS: By 'fish' I mean when you basically have head + spine and before leg's show up.
Also this idea that science is underpinned by evolution and cliement science is laughable. I guess chemestry and physics don't count ?
Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending important topics like evolution and climate change don't exist seems worse.
PS: And no I am not kidding, if you actually understand why a mass spectrometer works then climate change is obvious.
Please elaborate.
It's purely the words "climate change" that they'll attack. And picking that fight is not a winning solution.
The winning solution is to show children how awesome science is, give them the fundamental tools to participate in it, and let them see for themselves the validity of conclusions like climate change.
We're in the mess we're in because too many people's science education was purely focussed on the conclusions of science without the methods of science. When "science class" means memorizing facts it's no different than catechism, and truth becomes a question of one authority vs another.
The conclusions of science are of secondary importance to the process of science.
This is absurdly myopic. Evolution affects not just all the life-sciences, but also the mathematics of evolution is finding new applications in software and engineering all the time.
The societies that learn how to be competitive without contributing to climate change will leapfrog every single other society in technology and wellbeing.
But except for the wastage I'm not concerned. I don't want my kids focusing too much on chemistry or physics in school anyway. There are few jobs in those types of science and plenty of competition for those jobs, so it's only entertainment value for my kids. I'd like the schools to focus on Python and web development first. That's not going to happen, of course, so it's Codecademy and similar sites to fill the gap.
Or bioinfomatics or computational biology, where they're understanding current biology, not engineering new stuff?
You've discarded all of fundamental science, in favour of teaching your kids programming. Programming's important, but a physics degree _definitely_ teaches programming along with _how the universe works_. And stats. Lots and lots of stats. ",)
I'm just saying; you come across as a little short sighted, here.
I'd like schools to favor programming over physics and chemistry, but not ignore physics and chemistry altogether.
If you don't know physics, you don't know why there are fundamental limits to Moore's Law that we are rapidly approaching, for an example.
Nowadays physics is a hobby of mine, having entertainment value only. I can fully appreciate that "[physics] runs the shit..." but that doesn't pay the bills or get me to retirement.
Bully for you. But it's the idea of prioritizing what is essentially a technician's job (yes, we call ourselves engineers; in reality, most of us are craftsmen) over knowing how the world works, and having some of the mental tools to figure stuff out that's confusing me.
Also, physics really rubbed in abstraction as a concept: "here's the atom, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it. Then this discovery was made. Here's the nucleus, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it..."
Then you will be really annoyed when you work out what viruses get up to all on their own. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
How are we going to treat debilitating diseases that plague much of the world, in a cost-effective manner?
How are we going to improve the quality of life for all the people who are living longer lives?
How might we address unforeseen medical and nutritional crises?
You have a very short-sighted attitude. Which is not to even mention the impact that tying your approval of your children to the field in which they choose to work will have on them.
With a population significantly less than today's level, biotech isn't really needed. Without modern biotech people can live to be 80+ on average. That's good enough in my book. I support death (even my own, at 80+!), to keep the population fresh and keep the dictators dying. Overall, I'm confident the benefits of no biotech outweigh the negatives.
I don't think I could help being disappointed if a kid of mine chose to work in a job that did great harm to others, be it cigarettes or GMO food. That's kind of natural to feel that way.
Death doesn't really need your support, although it might appreciate the fanbase as it is usually not that popular on the whole, apart from with goths, although it tends to find them a bit embarrassing.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Projections_of_...)
Besides, the people who are opposed to teaching evolution and/or climate science are going to take a microscope to any new science teaching standard, so we may as well be up front about the goals and get the fight over with at the frontend.
Too many scientifically-minded people ignore this reality and cling to the idealistic notion that schools will teach the best ideas, so we simply need to show our ideas are best. No. Schools are politically controlled and will teach what political power dictates.
So long as scientifically literate people think we're above politics, we'll keep losing.
(Personally, I'd rather continue to see a growing number of people empowered to opt out of politically controlled education entirely.)
Also, to insist on evolution and climate science to be taught in a way that practitioners in those disciplines would at least recognise, is not pretending to be above politics, it is trying to meet the politics head on.
Just because certain religions or political parties try to deny facts does not mean that scientists and engineers can pretend that the truth is something other than what it is.
The theory of gravity has put people on the Moon and a rover on Mars. The theory of evolution creates plausible scenarios of why we see what we see.
There's much politics in the plausibility part. And there's a lot of politics in putting gravity and evolution on the same shelf.
It's sad to see how someone, even scientists, are considered to be anti-science for even doubting evolution.
There are no viable alternative scientific models that compete with the theory of evolution in terms of explaining change across successive generations of biological organisms. There are theological models, but those by definition do not have any scientific evidence. Which is why doubting evolution is considered anti-scientific - rightly so, in my opinion.
The amount of hard evidence we have for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming at this point that doubting it has two possible reasons: the person either does not understand science in general and evolution in particular, or they are driven by a religious agenda. Incidentally, both of these are very common in America due to shoddy science education (esp. with regards to imparting critical thinking skills in children) and the influence of religion in politics (and therefore education).
But _a priori_ we can not impose any restrictions on what will explain something. We are part of what exists. We can have no expectation on what exists, why and how it works.
Some things may have a scientific explanation, some others may not. We don't get to decide. We can't restrict ourself to accepting only one kind of explanation.
There isn't always 2 sides to every story. Sometimes there's 1.
I'm sorry but, using my mother as an example, in a single year, my mother elevated inner-city students in English from very low scores to very high scores. I'd need to ask her for specifics; but, the change was incredible. I believe they were getting near highest marks in the area. She demanded a LOT from the students, a truly incredible amount of writing and work. She was very, very hard on her students; but at the same time rewarded achievement greatly and taught in an effective, repetitive way. Years down the road, her old students have repeatedly come back to her, thanking her for her work with them. It is all about the teachers.
If people are sufficiently interested in her method, I might be able to get her to log in to my account (or one of her own), and expound upon her methods of training and relating to the children.
Since I haven't seen many willing parents (indeed in some situations, the parent isn't a positive or even present factor at all), I've only raised up the factor that I've actually seen make a positive change. It's actually the same way for me with computer science. A good first introduction made all the difference in the world.
Guys. Do me a favor; if this is the solution, leave education broken. I'm serious, I'm amazed I haven't already burned out on school work. Even a little bit more and I probably would have by now.
Where we have gone wrong is that school systems are saddled with far too many non-teaching positions and new school buildings tend way too many times to be symbols of the politicians who had them built.
Non-teaching positions are the results of regulations and laws to 'protect' the interests of students. Until someone makes hard decisions that pare back some of those mandated 'services' they're not going to go away.
You bring up an interesting data point. I wasn't even aware there were states with no teachers unions, that is a bit surprising. Do you know which ones? Without looking up the states and the stats, I'll take your word for it. I have no expectation that labor unions increase or decrease teaching quality, so if true as we'll assume, this is not particularly surprising.
I would expect, though I haven't checked, that these areas with teachers unions have better pay and benefits for teachers. Is that true, from the data you have analyzed?
If you look only at non-immigrants in European countries, and whites in the US, the US looks quite a bit more competitive.[1] Not to mention, Massachusetts and Minnesota have more of the higher scoring groups (principally whites) and fewer of the lower scoring groups (Hispanics and blacks) than the US as a whole.
It's important to understand where the differences in scores lie, and not just mash it all together and shout cliches like "More money!" Though it does seem like Finland's got something special.
[1] super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html
There's so much incredible bureaucracy. So much. Unimaginable. Federal, state, local. School districts have centralized to the point that it's nearly impossible to implement changes unless it's some sort of "one size fits all" scheme. Local schools are hamstrung by work rules, union rules, tenure rules, and then on top of that state and local education "standards."
Then there are socio-economic issues. Parents who themselves never learned to read. Kids living in areas where the person to look up to is a drug dealer. Cultures of dependence and reliance on government handouts. Many (if not most) urban school districts have dropout rates of over 50%.
Even where there is not that sort of culture, there are parents who think that the schools are babysitters and any kid who does something wrong much have done so because it's the <i>school's</i> fault.
And of course, teachers unions, licensing rules, pay scales, and lack of individual accountability contribute as well.
It's such an enormous problem that there's no single answer. I think that decentralizing education would go a long way toward helping to spur innovation. Charter schools, vouchers, and removing attendance boundaries help too.
Centralization has really hurt education and the only answer that seems to be proposed is <i>more centralization.</i>
I put crowdsourced in quotes because it needs to be done carefully. We need a body of standards that is subject to continuous improvement by subject-matter experts, and expert teachers. It needs to be set up so that popular opinions can be expressed, but simple votes do not override expert conclusions.
This body of standards should be mapped to each state's standards. Teachers could work from the crowdsourced standards, but fulfill reporting requirements on their state standards. This is what good teachers in states with poor standards do anyways. Teachers work from a set of high-quality standards, but report on their own state's standards.