Smart thinking on education

[unixronin]

freetrav came up with what I consider a very smart idea about how to make the US educational system (and the products thereof) competitive again.  Instead of the current navel-gazing of No Child Properly Prepared where schools are basically encouraged to teach to the standardized test and call it done, and if schools aren't meeting the standards, we lower the standards (a strategy the results of which we can all clearly see), he proposes that we treat world educational rankings as the target.  Here's his suggestion, slightly edited for clarity and continuity:

I would set the standards as follows:  Look at the world educational ranking, and require a US student to achieve at a level equivalent to the 80th percentile in the country rated #1.  Exception: for English, limit the examination to those countries where English is either official or the chief lingua franca.  For foreign languages, inspection of countries where the foreign language in question is either official or chief lingua franca.

In other words, if the South Koreans are #1 in math, a US district is deemed failing in math if the average score of its students on the South Korean measure does not come out in the 80th percentile.

I'll even go so far as to allow for 'easing in' to the higher standards - say the educational dictatorship is initiated in 2010:  In 2010, the target is 50th percentile, but rises to the 53rd percentile in 2011, 56th in 2012, and so on until it reaches the 80th in 2020.

I think he has something.

Comments

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

There is a fundamental different between learning a language as a second langauge for "recreational" purposes - if that purpose later turns out to be more than recreational, yay you, but it was recreational to start with - and learning it for right-now-functionality. English as a Second Language (ESL) is Right Now Functionality.

Several of the service people I interact with on a regular basis are trying to figure out ESL. Most of them are one form of Asian or another, although the lawn keeper is Mexican (he just gets his daugher to translate when his pidgin English and my pidgin Spanish isn't sufficient). As near as I can tell from helping them occasionally, they are actually stuck trying to learn ESL the same way I was stuck learning Spanish and Italian - and the majority of them find it less than functional for day to day use. "Your change is 50 cents", "The ladies' room is in the back" and "You need to move your car because the delivery truck needs to park there" are all much more useful than "The bananas are a lovely shade of red today" - but the latter is what you get from the formal course (no, that's not a typo, just a memorable statement).

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you on principal with how to judge the general level of competance in other fields. I am, however, disagreeing with you in this particular instance. People learning English as a second language in other countries are not going to find their livelyhood disrupted if they fail the course, as they would here. Mind, I'm not wholly convinced any longer that folks here would find their livelihoods all that disrupted, either.