Frightening results of U.S. education survey

Poststructural Pub
1

This is truly scary to me:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/20/literacy.college.students.ap/index.html

“Without ‘proficient’ skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.”

An even more frightening thought:

“Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.” (my emphasis)

No wonder we fall for scams, allow corrupt politicians to lead us around by the nose, etc.

It’s stated in the article that all colleges should examine the rigors of their courses, but I’m afraid that a good percentage of today’s students are lazy - if you made courses harder they simply wouldn’t take them.

What’s the answer? How do we get smarter adults? More parental involvement? I’m no model parent, but I taught my daughter how to balance a checkbook when she was a teenager and helped her set up a budget plan when she was about 21 (she still uses it). And when on long drives I used to ask her “thought” questions–I remember one: which is better, to move wolves into Yellowstone immediately or to allow them to move in by themselves (discussing an article I’d read about the pros and cons of both options).

High school should be tougher: my daughter breezed through with rarely any homework and she never had to write any type of research paper. How can that happen??

Susan

2

I wonder if things are much worse these days than they used to be? I would guess that basic literacy is lower since people do seem to read less these days but, otherwise, I’d be surprised if fewer people today can interpret tables than hitherto.

To be sure, we have scams and cons operating on a national and international level more today than previously and politicians certainly appear to be more actively involved on an everyday basis than in the past. But surely phenomena like medicine shows could only have existed if a large proportion of the population were gullible, although surely many people went to medicine shows for the entertainment rather than out of hope for cure or relief. I guess the gullible today get their news from current affairs programs on commercial television and from shock jocks.

As far as I know, critical thinking is not taught as a subject in either Australian or American schools. I teach it at first year university level and I find that most people who take the subject already have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the basics. I’m sure I was encouraged to think critically at school although I wasn’t given the tools to do so or the vocabulary to express my thoughts until I studied logic and philosophy of language at university. Many people have told me they think that critical thinking should be compulsory at university but that isn’t going to happen.

I was recently charged with adapting the subject for nurses who, on our campus, are actively anti-intellectual. (Bizarre: they all think qualified nurses should get degrees but they are furious when asked to engage in anything vaguely intellectual as a requirement for earning one.) Even though we only used those parts of the subject that had a direct bearing on nursing practice, and most examples were drawn from real life nursing situations, a majority of students looked at me, my tutors, and the subject as though we were both from another planet. It had to be replaced by something dumbed down even further. My late mother, a successful matron in her earlier days, would have been scandalised—she prided herself on her ability to think critically and to act on her conclusions.

3

I don’t know.
But I’ve often felt that there should be a mandatory course in High School in which practical skills such as managing personal finances and comprehending mortgages is taught.

4

I guess I expect a college-educated individual to be smarter than I am (who had one semester of college only). Yes, I’m sure we’ve always been gullible to an extent, but with the high rate of kids who do go to college today, you’d think there’d be fewer fish. How in the world do we expect to compete or live in today’s world-wide society/economy with marginal educations?

We’ll have to depend on the geeks, I guess. There are a couple of high school kids here in Utah who came up with some brilliant idea of how to air condition a car without freon (I don’t recall the details). The idea was so ingenious that they’ve traveled many places in the world to demonstrate their invention and huge corporations have sought them out, trying to buy the rights to the idea. Good for them!

Susan

5

There are courses that teach critical thinking in our high schools, but the kids that take them are typically on the college track. As i recall it was part of the international bacalaurate program, My both daughters took it and I remember wading through Aristotle, Plato and Hegel (small helpings please) during dinner conversation. The teacher was fantastic.

What I have heartburn in is the craze for testing-I know too many schools that teach for testing rather than for content.

6

They shouldn’t have had to do that. There are good reasons why philosophers write the texts and usually give the courses, but critical thinking isn’t really a branch of philosophy. It draws on philosophy, and highly advanced critical thinking is philosophy, but at the undergraduate and school level it isn’t. I use old texts as examples as well as new ones, but I’m just as likely to give my students a passage from Swift as from Locke and I’d avoid Hegel like the plague.

7

In haste, my experience, from teaching university level in the
USA, is that a large minority of our graduates are functionally
illiterate. The name of the game in many colleges/university
has been, for decades now, dumbing down; so as to
keep enrollment up. If people came
out of our universities knowing as much as my generation
did graduating junior highschool, it would be an improvement
for quite a few.

I taught for awhile in university in Austria, and found that
Austrian highschool students have far better command
of reading and writing English than do most American
college grads.

8

The high rate at which kids go to college is the reason there are more fish. Just because something like half the kids go to college doesn’t mean that they all deserve to go, nor that the top half of the population is any smarter than the top half of the population when 10% of them went to college.

At the same time as Wombat sort-of pointed out, these results don’t necessarily indicate that this fraction of the population is less competent than it was 50 years ago. Yes, reading skills are likely not as high, but there’s a lot that kids are taught in school that they never were taught before, and that necessarily displaces something that was taught in the days of yore. All those computer skills that kids have now likely come at the expense of some other sort of learning. An older colleague of mine quipped a few months ago that each new tune he learns displaces some essential bit of knowledge from his brain. Not literally true, but there is a grain of truth in it, and I think it applies equally to younger people.

9

while these results are bothering - the thing that “gets” me is the level of all the kids that DON’T go to college - especially those that drop out of highschool.

When you factor these in, we have a huge percentage of people that honestly don’t know how to manage their finances. It totally blows my mind when I read about someone that has $20,000 in credit card debt (and I’m not talking about someone who built that debt during some type of emergency or crisis - but on everyday living).

I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I make a “decent” salary. I would honestly be terrified to be in debt to that amount.

10

A lot of it has to do with schools, and teachers. My first point is that a student is only as good as their teacher. Some teachers require research papers, some don’t. My high school world history teacher taught classes at a college, and gave us frequent 6-8 page college essay reports to do. I wrote more than twenty HEFTY reports in high school. It all depends on how far the teacher is willing to go, and how “good” they can teach. I remember in high school…my Algebra I I passed BARELY…and Algebra II was a breeze. AlgI teacher was…well… :devil: , and my AlgII teacher was :party: . There are those teachers who just give worksheets, and set kids to figure things out for themselves. If teachers don’t get their act together, how can they expect their students to learn? Now my high school has remained faithful throughout the years…teachers don’t push too far, but they never lag behind.

Another problem is all this standardized testing (ACT, SAT, NRT, CPT…etc). Not everybody is a good standardized test taker. Here in FL, we have what’s known as the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) [some states have similar exams] consisting of three parts: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Students take the exam K-11, and if they fail to pass it 3, 4, 8, and 10 grade levels, they can be retained. Last I heard, they were going to also administer a science portion of the FCAT to 12 grade high school students here. I passed the exams fine, but people who are ACTUALLY smarter than I am failed certain sections of it. Its ludacris.

My younger brother is a freshman at my high school, and is VERY ATHLETIC. He was really excited when I told him I could get him into a weightlifting class. And on top of that, he HIGHLY ADMIRES the teacher, as he is somewhat ex-military (as in, he goes on a need-to-go basis), and actually went to war with my older brother not too long ago. Imagine the look on his face when I had to go to him, and tell him that they were going to pull him out of his weightlifting class, to put him into Intensive Math. Not only was he upset, but the PE teacher was upset, as he told me that my little brother was one of his best students. The reason for changing his classes is because he didn’t pass the math portion of the FCAT…by 50 points. They put too much emphasis on these tests. They need to realize that not everyone is going to college…not everyone is going to be book smart. My little brother knows how to build things, and very intelligent in mechanics, he isn’t smart to the point where he can solve a quadratic equation, or determine the molar weight of Nobelium. Everyone has their strongpoints, and I feel tests should be adjusted to find/focus on these strongpoints. (Much like the ASVAB military exam)Argh!

Disclaimer: My lashing out at this has been wanting to come out for some time now. If I have offended any teachers, educators, etc. I apologize. I continue to hold a deep respect for teachers and education, nonetheless. :thumbsup:

I FEEL BETTER NOW…

11

12

This has been on the Internet for quite a while, but it fits here:

Remember when our grandparents, great-grandparents, and such stated that they only had an 8th grade education?
Well, check this out. - - -
Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, KS, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.


8th GRADE FINAL EXAM

Grammar (Time, one hour)

  1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
  2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.
  3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
  4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of lie, lay and run
  5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
  6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
  7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

  1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
  2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
  3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at
    50cts/bushel, deducting 1050lbs. for tare?
  4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
  5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
  6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
  7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
    8 Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
  8. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance
    around which is 640 rods?
  9. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

  1. Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
  2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
  3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
  4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
  5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
  6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
  7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
  8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
  2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
  3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, sub vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
  4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
  5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two
    exceptions under each rule.
  6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
  7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup
  8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
  9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane,
    fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
  10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
  2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
  3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
  4. Describe the mountains of North America.
  5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver,
    Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.
  6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
  7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
  8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
  9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
  10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.




    Also notice that the exam took five hours to complete.
    Gives the saying “she/he only had an 8th grade education” a whole new meaning.
    It is kind of humbling, isn’t it ??

I could probably stumble through this and pass, but I sure wouldn’t get an A!

13

Shadow, you’ve touched on one of my sore points, which I had initially included in my post above, but deleted before I sent it in. You’ve provided a good lead-in, so I’ll say it: to build stuff, we not only need engineers to design it, we need machinists, welders, etc. to build it. We have all this testing crap, and sink tons of money into it at the expense of, among other things, vocational-technical education. This is to some extent responsible for offshore outsourcing. A relative of mine was a comptroller at a plant where they had TEN open positions for skilled machinists. After a year they’d filled two positions. Needless to say, he had to outsource their tool and die making, most of it from other countries, because other domestic suppliers also had machinist shortages.

A lot of the kids going to college these days would have gone into skilled labor positions 30 years ago. Fact of the matter is, a machinist doesn’t have to be Einstein, but does have to be pretty intelligent. And if every single kid with brains insists on college and whatever career befits a college grad, then we’re in more trouble than many people realize.

14

The reverse is also true, to a degree.

15

After thinking about this: To me, whether or not a person attends college is beside the point. A high school graduate should be able to understand the arguments in newspaper editorials. They should be able to interpret credit card offers. It seems to me that the problem lies in the lower grades, not in the colleges themselves (although any kid who is in college should certainly be expanding on their critical thinking and math skills).

I skimmed an article the other day about students in Utah who don’t pass the basic skills tests they’re supposed to pass in order to graduate. Apparently they still graduate, but with a “note” that they didn’t pass the skills tests. Lovely. Very helpful, I’m sure. Most job applications ask if you graduated or not. They don’t add: “Is there anything else you want to tell us about that?”

For years Utah has been at the bottom of the list–50th–in spending per student. You’d think every state in the U.S. would see the importance of education and be scrambling to be #1. We have just been notified that we have a huge budget surplus and lawmakers are wondering what to do with it. Duh.

Susan

16

The universities feed the problem this way:

As they dumb down and teach less, often less than grade schools
used to, they graduate illiterates/incompetents. What do these
people major in? Well, usually business or education.
So the teachers in the grade schools are often
barely literate. So the students entering the universities
are illiterate, and so it goes…

The problem probably isn’t money. It’s often noted
that the best schools often have much less funding
than the worst. If a large number of
teachers are illiterate, say, or nearly so, you need to get
them out. But there is a powerful teachers union which
has fought teacher-competency tests tooth and nail,
for the obvious reason that lots of its members
can’t pass.

Forgive me for saying something quasi-political, but
it’s where the discussion leads. We need to break the
hold of the unions and, especially, to make schools
accountable. The best way of doing this is to put market
forces on the school, IMO. This involves enabling parents
to move kids from failing schools to successful schools.
Businesses cannot afford incompetents; publically funded
institutions can, especailly when the consumer has no
choice.

Underlying this all, I think a good deal of the problem
originated with the GI Bill after WWII, when many
thousands of GIs when to college/university funded
by the government. This led to universities growing
and building a lot; it continued through the 50s and
60s, when the government was heavily funding
higher education to beat the Soviets into space
(remember Sputnik). When the economic funding
dried up in the early 70s, the universities needed
to keep up enrollment to maintain their now much larger
size, and that meant lowering standards to keep and
attract more students. As everybody was now expected
to go to college, lots of people went who couldn’t do
the work and the universities dumbed down to keep
them in. This meant that lots of graduates were
incompetent, and, as mentioned above, lots of the
incompetents went into education (one of the least
demanding programs).

Another problem was open enrollment–in order to offset the
bad consequences of segregation, many public universities
enacted the provision that anybody graduating a highschool
in the state could enter university. This meant that in the
late 70s and early 80s, many universities were inundated
with students who could write only their name. At my university,
UNO, we lost 50 percent of the freshman class the first year,
every year. Huge resources were devoted to remedial
education, which failed almost entirely. By the time open
enrollment ended many universities were used to
dealing with entirely illiterate students and had recognized
the economic advantage of keeping them.

In Thailand every young man is supposed to become a monk
for a couple of years; the idea is to uplift society. The consequence
is to virtually demolish monasticism. Monks running around with
ghetto blasters, smoking cigarettes, visiting brothels.
Universal college education doesn’t educate the public;
it drags down the university (and lower education too) so that the public is
less educated than it was before.

17

How many of the remaining 50% went the distance?

I have always believed that education, at whatever level, should be open to all.
Those who can cut it will, those who can’t won’t.
Money, which generally means a good background in education, should not be a factor in choosing who gets a shot at higher education. Many highly intelligent folk have come through scholarship programs without a penny to their name.

Slan,
D.

18

I don’t know the answer to your question, I’m afraid, though
a good number probably didn’t finish. It was quite an experience.
I would lecture my intro course, the students laughed at the jokes
and seemed enthusiastic, then I would give the first exam and
most of the papers would come back blank, except for the
student’s name. It was, after that, an awful experience, knowing
that I was mowing down minority kids, who had been passed
along year after year through highschool, learning nothing,
and now been given the opportunity to run at the machine
guns. I think my colleagues and I went a good distance
toward crippling once and for all the self-esteem of quite a few
African American students, who never realized that they
had been taught nothing in highschool.

The alternative was to dumb down, not to require writing,
to eliminate language requirements, and so on, then send
our illiterate graduates back into the high schools and
grade schools to teach.

I agree that everybody should have an opportunity at a good
education, but I don’t think that warrants what we did. There can
be a terrific human cost to the strategy: ‘Let em all in; those
who can cut it will, those who can’t won’t.’

19

In the mid-sixties I was a graduate assistant in geology at a large university in Arizona. I attended the lectures along with the students, and it was my responsibility to grade all of the test papers and conduct the lab classes. At that time all of the test questions required written answers asking the students to give examples, to compare and contrast, and to analyze. If the student wasn’t able to express themselves in writing, there was no way that they could possibly make any score on the tests. Most of my students did OK on the tests, but, as could be expected, some were completely unprepared for college. My guess is that most of the later group of students were not able to continue college, mainly because they didn’t know how to write. From what I have read on this thread, I wonder how many students currently in college would be able to do well on such tests that required answering in writing instead of asking multiple choice questions?

However, just this year I was meeting with a lawyer in my home town in Indiana. The lawyer’s wife was on the local school board, and she had obviously shared with him what was discussed at a school board meeting. The topic of the school board meeting was that several of the teachers were giving grades that the parents thought were too low. After all, intrance into college was very competitive, and how could you expect their sons and daughters to do well if they were receiving a “B” instead of an “A”. I understand that the teachers in discussion were instructed to give higher grades if they wanted to keep their teaching positions.

20

Just adding to the commentary by Jim and others…
IMHO I believe that we would have fewer people in college (i.e. the ones who really should be going into vocational training instead) if our elementary schools were better prepared to give a better start to our children.
Like Jim said, there needs to be some serious accountability, but not so much from the govornment, but from the people; if you are a parent it is your duty as well as your govornments’ to see to our schools’ function, from finance down to staffing.
I would dissagree with one point of Jim’s previous post where he says that money is not a factor (and maybe I’m misunderstanding, but this is how I read it). My wife has been a special education elementary teacher for five years in one of the school districts here in Utah. It is the least funded and poorest of the Salt Lake Valley districts, and boy-hell does it show. Nearly every single student is well behind the state average. There are nearly zero programs for assisting children who need it, very little Phys-ed, a miniscule school library program, no budget whatsoever for anything outside core curriculum, not that it matters anyway because the text books they’re currently using are from the '60s, and the teaching staff are so underpaid and overworked (smallest class size at my wifes school is around 36) that the schools can only hire entry level teachers who move on to better paying jobs inside of a year or two.
On top of that, only one district in Utah has a fully functioning vocational education program, but it’s conglomerate for the whole district and kids have to drive there themselves during school hours.
Add on top of that ZERO benefits for the teaching staff, school administrators have a basic and partial heath coverage plan that covers emergency room visits.
Like Susan pointed out, the state of Utah has round about 1 billion in surplus this year (up from the 600 million from last year)… If Utah’s track record holds true, less than one-half of 1% will be spent on the schools here locally.

If the quality of education during the K-12 levels of schooling were bolstered and better funded (and, yes, vocational education included at the location of each school) most of the kids who can’t or won’t be “book smart” not only will have a future, but a better chance at attaining success.
Just in my life I’ve seen the education system take a nose dive in my state (granted, I sure aint the oldest guy on the board, but I sure aint the youngest either :stuck_out_tongue: ). Where I went to High School we had auto shop, metal shop, body shop, welding shop, wood shop, and advanced courses of the above (which is where I learned what I know about auto mechanics, and where I began my first business. Auto repair of any kind is extremely lucerative in Utah, because they just don’t teach it in school as much as they used to). My youngest sister is eleven years younger than me and is a sophomore at the same high school as I was (and by nature of association, is quite the motorhead too) and wanted to take auto shop, but found out that they only take 15 students (one class) per semester. It used to be that there were seven classes tought per semester and one advanced course that lasted the entire school year.
Forget our problems with the college system.
Our K-12 is where we ought, IMHO, to focus our resources.