I completely agree with the urgency of the educational crisis we are all in right now. Our children are lagging behind in so many vitally important areas compared to the rest of the world. The grandparents and great(^nth) grandparents would be so ashamed of our lack of intellectual prowess. Why we have hardly made any progress with education over the past few decades and if anything we are only falling more behind. If you haven’t yet, you should all watch the movie Idiocracy. It foretells of a world in our not too distant future where all of the intellectually lacking individuals continuously reproduce until America is reduced to a society of Neanderthals.

I would like to see information to the contrary. It’s not like the average GPA has been rising over the years. Or even that the average IQ has risen over the years, cough Flynn effect cough. Well racing to the top wants to make sure that we raise the smartest kids in the world gosh darn it. Stagnation is just not a word we believe in with education. We’re falling behind world wide standards on success. Damn you PISA assessment, we’re trying to get smarter but we just can’t find the motivation. We just need those few extra spots and that will solve all our problems in this country, if our 15 year old children only score higher in mathematics and science we can fix health care, social security and all the violent issues in the world.

The $4.35 billion is just not enough to combat this issue. We need to fund this program more to make sure that we show the world that we have the smartest kids with the highest graduation rate in the world. Only after spending billions more on fixing these test scores can we find a way to fix the economy and pay for health care. The children are our only hope for the future.

Paying the Future

Re-re-refutation time. I feel that I may be too hard on the idea of putting billions of dollars into education. Even if I have never seen a specific plan for what the money is to be used for except ‘reform’. The first and largest recipient of money is Tennessee at $500 million. I wonder if they have a plan for how to allocate all that money because after reading this time article I believe I may have found a way to improve kids reading skills at the least. To read up on the evidence I’m citing I recommend reading the article Is Cash The Answer? Bear with me on the title here.

Long story short this Harvard educated guy paid $6.3 million to 18,000 kids to see how it worked in different contexts. The experiments that showed the best results were paying second graders to read books at $2 a pop and paying sixth, seventh and eighth graders for five different things like attendance and behavior. Who would have ever guessed that you just had to pay kids to get them to read! According to Wikipedia Tennessee has about 6 million residents and I’m just going throw out another number saying that there are about 2 million children that Race to the top is trying to effect. That $500 million could easily go to just simply paying the children to do what we want. Why should we waste money on reforming a system at the prospect of possibly making change rather than just throwing the money at the children? Hell, $500 million could easily pay for every kid in the United States to at least read one book. Reading is shown to help improve reading comprehension. I think we found our reformation, paying them. It is just so simple that it can’t possibly be misinterpreted.

Edumacation

These PISA reports are starting to get on my nerves. If you don’t know what the PISA reports are I recommend going over to the Wikipedia page, Programme for International Student Assessment. No, I don’t just hate it because it makes people interpret American education as this giant machine that devours money and spits out mediocre results, it’s because it makes people interpret American education as a giant money guzzling machine that doesn’t produce results. Wait…I guess that is pretty much the same thing. If you actually checked the link you would see that the United States is ranked 15th in reading literacy, 24th in mathematics and 21st in Science of the 29ish countries ranked on the list. Now let’s break this PISA thing down:

First of all, I mentioned that it is a hungry wolf ready to devour all money that comes within 100 feet of it. That actually isn’t too far off. America spends more on each student than anywhere in the world. We spend over $11,000 per student here and Switzerland is the only other country in the same ballpark we are and they rank 17th, 7th and 11th respectively in the above mentioned categories. So, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation to spending and getting the test results that the public seems to ache for. What is race to the top doing again? Oh right throw billions of dollars at the problem at some outside chance that something meaningful is found.

The next issue I am putting my sights on is the results section of this assessment. There are over 203 sovereign states in the world and this assessment only includes 30. Oh, so you think that we should really only judge ourselves versus the upper echelon educators, fine be like that. I find it hard to believe that the United States is lacking behind in most of those areas too overall. At the extremes, the United States still produces/d the greatest mathematic and scientific minds in the world. I hope I will not have to qualify that statement later…come on.

All right, there is one last part of this assessment that isn’t really ever mentioned and that is the goal of American education or rather ideas. If you’ve grown up in America and have been educated here, assuming that you’re reading this that is pretty likely, you know how our classrooms are structured. What I mean is that there is an open forum for questions to be asked and creativity to be formed. The open forum type of teaching is in sharp contrast with cultures like the Japanese who are silent during class. The Japanese also rank higher in every category. I understand that correlation doesn’t prove causation but it is a factor still. In America there has and will always be a stress on the creative side of everyone. I will again assert that America has nurtured some of the greatest entertainers in the world. Should we sacrifice creativity for gaining a few spots on this test so we can stick it to the world? Or maybe Race to the top will unearth some magical line that perfectly incorporates all of it. I won’t hold my breath though.