The education deformers use the United States ranking on international tests to fuel their fire for change, it’s actually money, as in them making some, but lets just go with their talking point.
Sadly they always leave out two things.
The first is poverty an area where the United States is truly leading the league. Over twenty percent of our school-aged children live in poverty and another twenty percent just above it. As Bill Maher pointed out on his HBO show Real Time when you factor out poverty our scores rush to the top of the list. Poverty is also the number one quantifiable factor for determining success in school. Kids that live in poverty don’t do as well as those that don’t.
From Jersey Jazzman blog: The United States has shamefully allowed far more of its children to live in poverty than most other developed nations; further, we have allowed inequity to grow so large that it actually affects the gap in test scores between the very wealthy and the middle class.
The second thing they leave out is best practices. Best practices is an education term that says schools and teachers should replicate that which is working best. Well friends the education deformers don’t want to emulate what the other successful nations are doing, which is investing in their teachers and public education system and avoiding standardized tests. Instead they want to dismantle and privatize our education system and test our kids to death. Charter schools, demonizing teachers and standardized tests, the opposite of best practices are the big tricks in their bag-of-tricks.
So how are we doing when compared against the rest of the world? Well in the aggregate not so good which means education deformers like Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates can continue with their misinformation tour leaving out important facts. But at the end of the day it begs the question why aren’t we trying to do what the most successful countries are doing? Oh that’s right, money, as in we don’t want to spend it and the people making the decisions want to make lots off of it.
To get a better idea how ed deformers distort facts follow the link below:
