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How serious are we about reforming education?
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On one hand, there is lot of tough talk about the need for a radical reform of education. See, for example, an account of the recent of the National Summit in Detroit. On the other hand, almost every fact mentioned there is wrong, and every suggestion is lame.
According to the report, Dr. Jay Noren, president of Wayne State University, says “In the past we have been a leader and we have become complacent in the last two decades -- we are lagging in the investment in human capital compared to the rest of the world.” None of this is true: The U.S. education has never been the best in the world, as long as international comparison studies exit. In the last two decades, American education did not become worse; it achieved very modest improvements. The U.S. is already spending the largest proportion of its GDP on education in OECD (except for Iceland). Dr. Noren calls for more investment in education, but it has been fairly well established that more spending does not improve student achievement.
Michigan Governor Granholm contributes her brilliant insight: “unless we get more of our students past high school and into college, the rest of the world will eat us for lunch.” This is, of course, nonsense. I have written about it and won’t repeat the argument. But more college graduates do nto mean better education or economic competitiveness. The National Summit, just like any number of similar gatherings, is full of clichés, half-truths, and calls for radical reforms. No, it is even funnier: they say we should stop talking about it, and start acting. And they say it again and again, and again.
I don’t think this country is serious about solving its education problems. When people are serious, they stop posturing, repeating common-sense errors, and first admit that they don’t know the solution. We really don’t have many new ideas about education reform, so let’s just stop pretending that someone has the answer, or that we even remotely agree on what needs to be done. It is neither clear, nor easy, otherwise we would have done it already.
Let’s get serious about education. I am so sick of being treated like an idiot by people who do not bother to check the simplest facts, or make a slightest effort to understand the complexity of the issues. The political class of this great nation is largely ignorant about education, and shows no sign of having any real interest in learning about it. But wait, they graduated from American schools, that’s why…
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