Why American Schools Stink

An interesting take in Bloomberg Business Week on why the education system in the United States is not up to par. Their conclusion is that it is because of the parents of American students, or rather the lack of commitment to education that their parents display. [Read the article here.] Some of the causes they shoot down, and the data they use to do it, are

• Students are slackers: Between 2002 and 2009, the U.S. high school graduation rate climbed three percentage points, so that more than three quarters of all students now get a diploma.  And the average school kid is learning more than ever before (United States Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress).
• Teachers are incompetent and don't work hard: Less than eight percent of teachers in their survey ranked below “basic” competence and the average teacher may be working an eleven-hour day (Measuring Effective Teaching: A Potential for Change, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
• American schools suffer from a lack of resources: The average U.S. student costs around $80,000 to educate from the age of six to fifteen.  Only Switzerland spends at a similar level, and the Czech Republic, which scores higher that the U.S. on the international math tests, spends about a third of that amount (The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement, Stanford University).

After ruling these causes things out, they settle on parents as the problem. As with so many other issues, the problem is much more complex and there is no easy catch-all solution, even though the news and many politicians wish there was.

The two things that really caught my eye (and I agree with...duh...I'm blogging about it) were

1. The calling out of the legislative nonsense that No Child Left Behind has become. I especially like that the article acknowledges that we can have standards and benchmarks (and should) yet needn't mandate standardized tests to have these. 
2. The suggestion that the culture needs to shift in order to change anything. The unfortunate part of this is that the article ends all touchy-feely about it. Rah-rah parents. You can make a difference! I guess this crap sells magazines/journals. 

Last Thoughts: The article reports, "Around the world, the catch-all measure used to proxy for parental commitment to education is the number of books in a child‘s household".  Proxies are necessary for capturing so many latent traits and variables that their use is ubiquitous in every educational study. One question...in the technology age, especially that of e-books, will educational researchers continue to measure this proxy?  Should they?