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.

Top to the race

Reformation in schools. That is the primary reason that we are here today, well reason why I’m writing and that you’re reading this. Our school system that is in place right now is failing to prepare the children of these states for the outside world. Everyone can cite their own reasons and statistics to point at something that is wrong in the system. Like say the lagging test scores behind different countries in the world or the lagging graduation rates in some cities. Behind all of it we can all still agree on one unifying claim…that we need change in our schools.

Though there is one problem, I am a product of those schooling systems. I went through them all and came out the other side. Right now I am a junior at the University of Minnesota obtaining a double major in Communications and Psychology. I must have missed that memo about not doing well enough.

I just don’t get it. Nobody tried to get me to study hard or prepare for tests. I had to find my own reasons to make sure I got grades. This new race to the top fund is throwing billions of dollars at states to try and reform their system of education. I am curious to see what they have in store. How do you motivate people to want to study and do well on tests? It surely isn’t an issue of money, unless you literally hand money over to students for studying and doing well on tests. Motivation is not something that just happens with reform, it is found in each person in every walk of life. If you want to make it there are avenues and steps to take no matter where you live.

I did exceptionally well in high school like so many of my peers here at college but I never could say that I tried back then. That may be my most exceptional trait. I could breeze through high school without reading or studying and still pass with good enough grades to get into college. But when I read about all these new initiatives that people want to pass all I hear about is how we need to try and force these kids to do well on standardized tests and make sure they get to college.

What I hear about in my situation is that I was privileged with my upbringing and had all of these wonderful opportunities to succeed. I’m not sure when the last time those people went to high school was. There was nothing put in place to keep me or my fellow students in line. There was not the constant reminder that we need this diploma to do things in the world. All that was ever around me was the feeling of want. I wanted to get my diploma so I could move onto college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life but I knew that college was a step in the right direction. No amount of money will sustain change if it isn’t made from within first.

WHY WERE FALLING BEHIND???

Why is that American education is falling it’s student? How about the fact that we are spending more many on education then other countries and were still behind and being out perform by those countries that spend less money than us. You can look at any research that has been done about education within the last decades and the results will show that America’s education ranking is decreasing. That is why I thinking plans such as Race to the Top will create changes in the America’s education system and maybe within the next couple decades we are able to find the perfect education system that will allow our future children to compete against other foreign countries.


As I was blogging through other blogs I came across this Democratic website (www.democratics.org) and toward the top of the page there was a short paragraph that discusses how Democratic party’s goals is forth expanding opportunity in education and ways of doing this is providing every child with a world class education, and it went on say that we as democratic party want to meet our responsibilities to America’s children by ensuring that ours school have resources that will allow student to succeed and meet high standards. This is the kind of energy we need in order for education to improve in America.


Just to understand what is that those countries who are ranked at the top do. I did some research and came across couple researches but this research called WHY WERE FALLING BEHIND, got my interest. The researches basically focus on nine nations that outranked American consistently, on the Programmer for International Student Assessment (PISA). The nations included Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, and our neighbor Canada. As I mention earlier blog post the research focus on areas such as reading, math, and science and base on the standard testing this research concluded that American student are far behind in other nations when it comes to performing the three areas Mathematic, Reading and Science. Below is quote from the common core which is the company that did the research WHY WERE FALLING BEHIND.

While American students are spending
endless hours preparing to take tests of their
basic reading and math skills, their peers
in high-performing nations are reading
poetry and novels, conducting experiments
in chemistry and physics, making music, and
studying important historical issues. We are
the only leading industrialized nation that
considers the mastery of basic skills to be the
goal of K–12 education.

On Your Mark...

Hello All,
Let me start out by giving a brief introduction of myself. My name is DesJohnna Gray, I am a 22 year old student at the University of MN. I have never created, responded to or even read a blog before (I know I'm a little behind the times). Nevertheless, I am excited to make this blog as interesting as possible despite the fact it centers around politics...yuck! While I may not like politics I understand that education is super important and something that effects all of us. The future of our country depends on nurturing and growing strong minds. We do not need another Bush running this country...scary thought...anyway lets get into this Racing To The Top topic and create some good discussions!

P.S. My next post will address an article I found on WhiteHouse.Gov To get to the article just click on the title of this post above; On Your Mark, and it will take you to it. Check it out!

Racing in Circles

Hello Bloggers, ready to Race to the Top? I'd recommend reading the heading or other articles if you don't already know what that means. I am conflicted over how to interpret Race to the Top. On one hand, money to education is a wonderful idea...though I would much prefer it to be aimed at higher education. Now on the other hand, the way the program is being utilized is not fair. Each state had to apply for the money and then the government starts weeding out ones that don't fit their criterion. I am going to have a lot of have diving into this topic and weaving my knife of criticism through the gut of this program. Prepare for the worst to come.

Andrew Neiss