[yespkorg]

Originally posted by GePap
And somehow state schools in many other parts of the world do a fine job educating their students on the basics.

So the question is why ahs public education in the US doen badly, because the world has shown that public education can work.

I say its all the anti-government bull, local control which leads to too many layers of beurocracy, treating education as a commodity, and low prestigue for education overall. Except that the decline of the system began long before I heard anyone taking the "anti-government bull" line. Honestly half of the problem has to do with the values and experiences the students bring with them to class. This is exacerbated by a shift in educational expectations (everyone should graduate from high school, many if not most should attend college etc.) without a corresponding commitment to educational achievement on the part of students, parents and schools.

Add to that the revaluation of female labor which hurt the quality of teachers badly while at the same time increasing the cost of public education, the rapid shifts in curricula (in the 1960s and 1970s particularly) which in many districts meant leaping from one trend to another to the extent that whether or not any one trend was worthy (many were not) any actual students who attended during that time nevertheless suffered from disjointed incongruous educations which never were built properly on what came before. Integration through bussing also created huge problems, though in many cases not the ones predicted. Rather than having to deal only with racial / cultural clashes within the schools, many urban districts also had to deal with the disappearance of most of their tax base. The need to integrate the schools also led to a lowering of teacher standards in order to jump-start the hiring of teachers of color for whom no large market had previously existed and who hence were in short supply.

There are plenty of problems to point to, which is one reason the larger problem is so vast. I agree that the layers of governmental control really do inhibit innovation and waste vast amounts of time and money as every legislative trend ends up creating some educational requirement or another, and this happens on at least three levels. I disagree about the low prestige for education overall, in fact I think that the prestige factor has harmed the system precisely because education is overvalued by the average person. It is no longer acceptable for the average student to drop out or end their education at the high school level. As the public educational system previously only graduated a thin majority of its attendees previously, a political battle was waged and the stakes were lowering standards in order to achieve a higher graduation rate, or increasing the average level of student achievement in order to do the same thing. Suffice it to say that the easy path won out politically.