School Daze 1
At Psychology Today Blogs, Alfie Kohn contests the claims that our schools are failing. He argues that, in many cases, the claims are little more sales pitches for educational snake-oil.
A couple of nuggets:
And later on, discussing science scores:
But even with older students, there may be less to the bad news than meets the eye. As an article in Scientific American noted a few years back, most countries’ science scores were actually pretty similar.[2] That’s worth keeping in mind whenever a new batch of numbers is released. If there’s little (or even no) statistically significant difference among, say, the nations placing third through tenth, it would be irresponsible to cite those rankings as if they were meaningful.
Follow the link for some facts, with citations.
Addendum:
And be sure to see the George Smith’s comment, below.
May 3, 2013 at 3:04 pm
There’s no shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, never has been while I’ve been alive. Fact is, academia and the private sector won’t place a lot of such graduates. So my take is that the constant whining about falling behind in “training” people for the science and math jobs of the alleged new global economy are a combination of things. When you hear it from the president, or someone similar, it’s a spiel emitted by someone who doesn’t know the first thing about science, and has never actually had any American scholastic training in it, anywhere at anytime. But it’s something to say because it sounds concerned. Today, when you hear poobahs from the private sector go on about it it’s because they’re either selling new training services or are business owners who want community colleges to set up on-the-job training courses for their particular businesses in which the student pays for the course, essentially paying to start in a job he may or may not get at the company upon graduation. At the higher end it’s an excuse the tech billionaires use to pester the president about allowing in more foreign worker visas so they can pay lower salaries to a revolving door of employees.