Obvious Op-Ed Topic Of The Day

Though a rise in scores would be better, the drop in SAT scores this year isn’t as bad as it’s being made out to be in some quarters – actually in the long run it’s kind of good news if you think we should be expanding the ranks of students thinking about post-secondary education.

6 Replies to “Obvious Op-Ed Topic Of The Day”

  1. Test results like this make me wonder how effective our educational ‘reform’ over the past 10 years has been. We’ve been throwing money and resources at solving the problem of underperforming schools and children, and have little to no national results to show for it. EVERY measure of academic achievement on a national or international basis remains just about flat. So we have students ‘thinking’ about post-secondary education — do you think the majority of those students can actually SUCCEED in college or a technical school? They have had 12 – 13 years of schooling to try to bring them to grade-level abilities. Those students who score very poorly on the SAT will NOT be able to pass college-level reading and math subjects. We are offering them false hope by encouraging them to ‘think about’ college and take the SAT. What they need are strong academic SKILLS to succeed, and we do not seem to be capable of bringing the lower achieving students up to college-level (or even 11th or 12th grade level) ability. We should focus on solving the poverty issue, because focusing on changing the schools, the curriculum, the standards, or the teacher certification process hasn’t made one BIT of difference in over a decade for our poorest students.

  2. When international rankings started up in the 1960s, the US was not at or near the top.
    No much has changed.

  3. @Phillip: What HAS changed in our international test scores is that we have a lower percentage in the highest performing categories now than we did 10 years ago. Our best students are slipping — everyone else is pretty much where they were before NCLB and all the ‘reform.’

  4. Does anyone, anywhere read? Obviously not.

    The USA has NEVER been an academic powerhouse. It was NEAR the top in the 60s because every other nation was so TERRIBLE.

    Now they have surpassed us. Not much has CHANGED with us. But our competitors got MUCH BETTER.

    Lets use the vernacular here: We have always S@cked. Now it is public knowledge.

    So, have our teachers s@cked for that long?

  5. When one reads the thoughts of edu-experts one must keep this in mind: This is their career and how they make their big salaries. They could care less about how a student learns physics or mathematics. They want a good crisis. It gives them their pay and power.

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