Your Child Left Behind (diversity and international competitiveness)

[XemaSab]

For years, poor performance by students in America relative to those in other countries has been explained away as a consequence of our nationwide diversity. But what if you looked more closely, breaking down our results by state and searching not for an average, but for excellence?


By AMANDA RIPLEY

IMAGINE FOR A moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go?

Our hypothetical recruiter knows there’s little sense in judging a nation like the United States by comparing it to, say, Finland. This is a big country, after all, and school quality varies dramatically from state to state. What he really wants to know is, should he visit Finland or Florida? Korea or Connecticut? Uruguay or Utah?

We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/your-child-left-behind/8310/

[Drale]

1. I personally feel one of the big problems in our school system

is that we want our children to be great at every subject and that is just never going to happen. I do not like Math, I will never like math thats just the way it is, but I love history and I am very good when it comes to history. We need to focus on our strengths.

[XemaSab]

2. Back in elementary school my teachers used to dog me about math

saying I was really bad and I needed to work harder at it. I went to a tutor for YEARS for basic math, such as multiplication and division.

As a result, I hated math and I always thought I was really bad at it.

A few months ago I got my transcripts and I was in the 80th percentile in math on the standardized tests! :wtf: