Friday, January 3, 2014

Is Public Education In America As Bad As Some People Say It Is?

I have become frustrated with the political ping-pong ball that public education has become in the past ten to fifteen years, smacked unmercifully by people that manipulate statistics, data, and other information to push agendas and special interests.  Are their problems with public education?  Yes.  And, there is a tremendous amount of research out there, as well as models of very effective education programs that need to be used as guidelines as to how to make changes that will in fact lead to better education programs for our children.  However, a lot of the changes being proposed by politicians, most of whom have little or no expertise in education, are not the changes that have been shown to work.  In fact, privatization, charter schools, and many of the accountability systems that some insist on have been shown to not work, or certainly not any better that what is currently in place!  Maybe we ought to look at the things that do work.

I have included a link to a slide presentation that appeared shortly after the most recent results of the PISA test.  The PISA test is an international assessment that is probably the best comparison of educational programs between nations.  This is the one that many refer to when wanting to point out that America's schools are failing.  However, that is a surface level assessment of the data.  When one takes a deeper look, there is a totally different story to be told.  You will fine that the quality of education is not declining and for the vast majority of students, their performance is quite good.  Do we have problems?  Absolutely!  However, they are not necessarily education problems.  Take a look and decide for yourself.  

Note: While the slide presentation was put together by the American Federation of Teachers, this data and the analysis is supported by numerous educational researchers.

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