OECD 2011 - We're bottom half everything, 20th finishing high school

[vets74]

ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT -- worldwide economic performance and statistics.

Education at a Glance 2011 -- Adobe Acrobat format, 98 pages.

Full information page for this document -- OECD (2011), Education at a Glance 2011: Highlights, OECD Publishing.

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Bottom line: you go through this report and category after category this "America # 1" country is no where near the top. The G20 countries and EU21 countries are kicking our butts.

Particularly, costs for higher education have been rising spectacularly in America and in United Kingdom. Graduation rate for high school in America is a disaster.

Read 'em and weep :::

● Education levels and student numbers: This section looks at education levels in the general
population, how and where young people are studying, when they graduate, and how well they
make the transition into the world of work.
● The economic and social benefits of education: This section looks at the extent to which
education brings economic gains to individuals, in the form of higher incomes and lower
unemployment rates, and at how these benefits serve as an incentive for people and societies to
invest in education. It also examines the societal benefits related to having a highly educated
population.
● Paying for education: This section looks at how much countries spend on education, the role of
private spending, what education money is spent on and whether countries are getting value for
money.
● The school environment: This section looks at how much time teachers spend at work, and
how much of that time is spent teaching, class size, teachers’ salaries and the age and gender
distribution of teachers.
● PISA: This special section introduces findings from the 2009 round of the OECD’s Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA)

Check out the whole flow of this study. You can flip/scan it and still get the knock-out.

Factoid example: U.S. is also near the bottom for being able to put HS grads and B.A. degrees to work. Page 41.

Our top kids are doing O.K. The most of our country is not.

(I'm going to cross post this to Economics.)

[exboyfil]

1. Some interesting facts

Spending wise we are competitive (even high on an average to the OECD). Our kids also do better in reading than Germany, UK, and France (which I am amazed about).

We keep talking about Finland, but Canada is doing a pretty good job as well. It is more likely that we can be more like Canada than Finland. Australia also does much better than us. Another country more like us than Finland. A advantage of studying their systems is that most of the information (except for Quebec) will be in English.

Does anyone know educators in either of these two countries. I would like to get their observations. I think being more like Finland is a non-starter.

[txlibdem]

2. A scathing critique of "the status quo"

Yet there are still those who try to defend our failing education system.

[vets74]

3. Our schools take off for the summer. Also, TESTOSTERONE EFFECT is ignored.

This affects the bottom-half students particularly. They slide back about a month for every month out of the classroom. There's more serious stuff out there, too.

The teen years hit boys pretty hard. Testosterone comes piling in, which can cause a temporary dyslexia. Specific changes to the saccade/jumping patterns of reading are inflicted, along with reduced performance for the go-to-next-line 'return" pattern.

Everybody in the neurosciences knows aobut it.

Nobody in educations knows anything about it. Scientifically illiterate ??? Maybe. They don't even know scientists, 99.44% of them, much less people who study brains.