What I had for breakfast: Belief = Blame

Quickly added: When I say "belief" I do not mean "belief in god." I mean belief as a way of "reasoning"...

We need to take back the words the religious have hijacked and turned to nefarious uses. I believe in algebra. I have faith in gravity. The Declaration of Independence is scripture.

I grew up in Appalachia, thinking my k-12 education sorely lacking. Then I moved to California and couldn't believe how ignorant the natives were.

In the US, we need academic standards for K-12 that are uniform across the country. Anything less, it turns out, is classist and possibly racist, inefficient and ineffective. Think about it. It is good education to have nation-wide curriculum standards that specify to grade.

I agree. I wrote a post a while ago on this very subject -- comparing my experience with education in the U.S. and my experience with education in France -- with a particular emphasis on racism and classism as well as overall educational quality: European Dream

Be careful what you ask for.

Would you want uniform K-12 education standards if they're set by the Texas Board of Education? Is it a matter of faith that the Federal government would never get them wrong? Even after eight years of the Bush misadministration?

@2: "Then I moved to California and couldn't believe how ignorant the natives were."

As a native Californian, I completely agree. California's education system has been on downhill slide for a couple decades.

There are several factors: Proposition 13 comes to mind as well as the fact that most folks don't value education. As a teacher's spouse, I see the lack of parental interest and it's negative effect on children daily.

And yes, there are some lousy teachers out there. If you know a teacher, ask them how much time they spend at the start of a new year reteaching last year's material to get the kids up to speed. At one school, my wife averaged about three months of the year to reteach basic math facts.

I think nationwide standards would be good if we could keep religious agendas out of them. The problem I see with standards (especially in California) is there is a propensity to teach to the standards test. In an effort to continually raise scores (thanks to No Child Left Behind), a lot of districts focus on the contents of the standardized test at the expense of the subjects that are not tested as thoroughly.

I see a dismal future for California's education system, with the idiots in Sacramento who don't have the foresight to see that education is the only thing that will keep the state going. Instead, they keep cutting the education budget and creating a cesspool for our kids to learn in.

I see a dismal future for California's education system, with the idiots in Sacramento who don't have the foresight to see that education is the only thing that will keep the state going.

California has been doing very well for a long time just hiring educated people from outside the State. The best of both worlds: get all the benefits of education without spending anything on it.

Come to think of it, that's the whole USA to some degree.

Um not so sure I agree with uniformity because the range of abilities we are dealing with. The standards are so low now. Grade specific uniformity means than the 20% at the bottom of the bell curve will fail and the 20% at the top will be playing gameboy under the desk because they already know everything being presented. Better to track by ability.

High school should be vocational education with employers coming to the school to offer students internships and positions upon graduation just like colleges do. Low IQ students don't need literature classes just life skills. Only students who score above a certain level on standardized tests should be in college prep classes. It is very defeating to a teacher to have to teach Romeo and Juliet to a sweet, sincere hardworking young man who has a 3rd grade reading level and whose life literally depends on being in a more appropriate learning environment including an appropriate curriculum, but someone at the Department of Education dreams of "better" education for all.

Schools have kids of vastly different abilities. Uniform performance has no basis in reality. Fabulous teachers won't be able to teach 80 IQ kids algebra or Shakespeare. The more of those students you have, the lower performing your school will be. No standards from educators no matter how well meaning will change that. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/gap.htm

The parents of higher ability students demand schools offer programs to meet their students' needs, programs like AP classes. Public schools who don't offer these programs lose high ability students to private schools, magnet schools and neighboring districts. Then the school's overall performance ratings fall.

Want better results? Start with higher ability kids.

Want to serve students' needs? Give them the free appropriate public education mandated by law.

I just got back from the Con and am now going to bed but I wanted to quickly ask sg: Wouldn't you just need to graduate/hold back students based on ability? After all, an ability based system would not have social promotion.

Wouldn't you just need to graduate/hold back students based on ability?

No, because the way you teach "bright" kids is different. They need more difficulty and less repetition, for instance.

I'm quite sorry, but given the proclivity of Americans to swing to and fro with political winds, centralized standards are absolutely not the answer. No child left behind, abstinence only, science curriculum - are these things we can reasonably allow the federal government more power to control?

Besides which, as distasteful and flat out ignorant sg's underlying supposition happens to be, the bottom line is that our public school systems fail to provide a functional education for more than half of our nations youth. The reason - because it's all about college prep. It fails to recognize that the kids who won't be going to college deserve to leave school far more prepared for vocational training and/or direct to workplace vocational skills, along with a basic founding in the liberal arts. Likewise, it fails to recognize that simply because someone is going to head for college doesn't mean one shouldn't have some basic vocational skills - at the least enough to be a educated consumer. And given that a lot of those who go to college end up trying to pay off student debt with a job at startbucks, just maybe that vocational training could be of more practical use for some in the future.

While there are certainly reasonable standards to set at the federal level, I think that the last eight years have shown us that we need less, not more authority at the federal level. Because frankly, I'm not sure our current regime should be trusted with our nations schools and even pretending they are, their power is fleeting - waiting only for another shift in the winds.

And beyond that, the people most qualified to judge what vocational focuses are appropriate for a given location, are the locals. For that matter, they are also the people most qualified to judge what college prep should be emphasized.

The current system is obviously fucked up, but it isn't uniformly fucked up. Indeed there are pockets of reasonable schools here and there. Putting the power over all the schools into the hands of a centralized authority is unlikely to make schools substantively better. All it would guarantee is that they would be uniformly fucked up.

DuWayne, I have to agree with your points. I think they are the same as mine, stated differently.

Greg, no social promotion. Track low ability students into different programs. Kids are tested all the time. We know who has the ability to succeed. Low performing kids get referred for evaluation to determine whether they are underperforming based on their IQ. If they are underperforming, teachers must give them special help designed to deal with their learning disabilities. If IQ matches achievement, they may get some adjustments, like extra time for assignments but there are no truly ameliorative interventions for low IQ. These kids need to be in totally different programs in which they can be successful, not watered down college prep. All kids need some vocational education classes. Many students need a vocational curriculum. But really low kids need life skills because they need to be taught directly about rental contracts, insurance, etc, because unlike the college grad working at Starbucks, really low ability kids don't have the ability to figure these things out for themselves by like, reading. I said standards are low already. The evidence is the popularity of AP classes. Colleges know there is grade inflation in high school. So, students take AP classes to show they actually know something by a good score on an AP exam. Many colleges give no credit for even the highest AP score, but at least the student doesn't have to waste his time on a freshman level class. He can start at the next level class.

Schools are rated "good" because the students do well on standardized tests.

Really this is a function of having higher ability students. Just like the best colleges generally take the students with highest ability. Obviously the best students and teachers will yield the best results.

However even the best teachers will not get good results from low ability students.

Populate all of Harvard with only students whose SAT scores range from the 20%ile to the 40%ile and you won't be impressed with the results.

The problem I have with your position sg, is that IQ isn't a very reasonable standard to use when making those decisions for kids. Extremely high IQ doesn't mean that kids don't need the life help instruction, or that they should be focused on college prep. Lower IQ, doesn't mean they can't or won't do exceptionally well in college or a higher thinking profession - especially when you account cognitive disabilities that will cause an extremely poor showing on IQ tests, in spite of rather exceptional cognitive processing in specific areas.

An aspie I taught music theory to has an expressed IQ of eighty and that only because he scored exceptionally well on logic and math abilities - level that to the rest of his curve and he probably would have hit closer sixty. Yet within a week of starting him with basic music theory, he was able to play piano with moderate proficiency and within four lessons was capable of writing out staff, "hearing" the notes in his head as he wrote them down. This is something that I am capable of, but only with extreme concentration and only after extensive grounding in music theory. His music tends to be rather lacking in abstraction, but he has even made improvements on that.

Oh, and he also studies physics - does exceptionally well at it.

This is pretty consistently what we see from people with ASD's. Not to say that they all show low IQ's, but they are generally scoring lower than their actual intellect would imply.

And there are plenty of people who score low because their environment is simply not conducive to learning skills that would help them do better. People who have more against them when it comes to succeeding in school, but who, nonetheless have the potential to do exceptionally well. One of my best friends in school was doing extremely poorly in middle school, because his parents split up and about a year later his dad got drunk and wrapped himself and his motorcycle around a tree. He went into special ed and had consistently shitty assessment scores - something that can easily be attributed to the fact that he was suicidal at the time. It certainly didn't reflect his actual intellect. He's a chemist now, developing building materials and running his own company.

And there is me. I run from just under, to quite a ways above two standard deviations above average - depending on the effort I put into the tests. When I took level assessments going into special ed, I scored grad to post-grad on everything except actual computation and English mechanics, which were closer to my actual grade level - seventh grade. Yet I was failing when I dropped out of high school my junior year. I still have serious issues with basic life skills and only got back into school at thirty-two. I am capable of virtually every aspect of home construction and repairs. I ran a small business specializing in high-end home repair and small remodels - had a word of mouth clientele, but no abilities as a businessman. It can be argued that I am pulling myself out of it and that my neurological issues were largely responsible for where I ended up - but it doesn't change the basic fact that I am far from alone in being exceptionally intelligent, yet consistently failing to get ahead. And without an exceptional support network of loving friends and family, I would probably never get anywhere.

It is entirely plausible for schools to provide a decent education to all of us. Requiring a certain amount of voc-ed in middle school would help identify students who - at that point - are going to excel outside the realm of college prep. Requiring that even those students take a fair grounding in liberal arts will help identify students who could excel at college prep, even if their IQ might not be all that.

Point being, the tests should not be used to determine much of anything. Exposing students to a little of everything early and allowing them to go in directions that suit them is a far more reasonable tact. All the while, it is important to make sure that they get a grounding in areas that are not within their purview, to make sure that their options aren't entirely limited to the direction they take with their primary education. While going strictly by the numbers might produce statistically reasonable results, it leaves large swaths of the population behind. Not that any system is going to be perfect, but going by the numbers is far more likely to leave more kids behind.