Thread: The state of education in your country.....

After watching a documentary about American state (public) schools I would say that if I lived in the US and had kids I would feel obliged to enroll them in a private school! The environment that was shown in the documentary was terrible and I don't see how the child could get a good start or succed in their studies in such an environment. The lack of discipline and knowledge was unbelievable. How could American politicians let things get so out of control?

In a better state school shown as a contrast, it just seemed that being "cool" was the main objective for going to school, not learning... No doubt there are exceptions, but after seeing that I felt really sorry for American parents. What a nightmare situation.

In Britain some state schools are bad and some are very good. The trick is getting the child into a good state school ("grammar school") and get a top class education for free. Parents will revert to ANY strategy! The most common one is to start attending church so the child can get a place in a church-run school (requires active church membership..) or buying a house right next to a particularly good school. This skews the housing market in a very odd way.. The system seems TOTALLY BIZARRE to a foreigner.

In Sweden all schools are more or less the same... Not bad but not exceptionally good either. A lot of talent is lost by not channeling the brightest kids into more challenging courses where their skills can be developed. Hardly anyone supports private education but recently a few more private schools have started whereas before that there were only a few in the whole country. Such schools usually specialise in something, like sports or music.

I also saw a Youtube video of a school in Ukraine. The teachers seemed REALLY passionate and competent and the children appeared motivated. The school building looked like it had once been very nice. But all the equipment was outdated and the school was clearly short of money -- this was casting a long shadow over the situation. The children had no access to modern electronic equipment at all.

What's the situation in Russia and other ex USSR countries and how does it compare to the above examples?

I was at high school meeting last week and at this meeting it was announced that in November, 100 students took a "pre-Accuplacer" exam. This exam tests general assessments in sentence skills, reading comprehension, arithmetic, elementary algebra and college-level mathematics. The testing assessment measures whether incoming college freshman students have the necessary skills for college or university study, or whether they would benefit from taking further practice or developmental courses designed to improve key academic skills.

Of the 100 students tested... only SEVEN, let me repeat that SEVEN, students placed proficient in ALL categories. That means if those seven students were to go to college today, they would be ready. The other 93 would need to take and pay for remedial non-credit classes AFTER they graduated from high school.

This seems to contradict the news that came out today about us being the top ranked school system in the United States...

Schools in Maryland have received another No. 1 national ranking, and one local school system had a big hand in achieving it,

according to the AP Report to the Nation

.For the fourth straight year, Maryland high school seniors ranked number one in the nation in passing Advanced Placement exams, with 29 percent of graduating seniors passing at least one AP exam with a score of 3 or above last year. The national average was 18 percent. The numbers were even higher in Montgomery County, where nearly half of graduating seniors passed an AP test. Montgomery County students accounted for 32 percent of students who passed a test statewide.While Maryland did rank number one nationally, there's still some concerns, as school systems in rural areas like Dorchester County do not have enough money to offer AP tests to its students.Elsewhere in the area, Virginia ranked No. 3 in the nation with 25.6 percent of graduating seniors registering a qualifying score in at least one AP exam. D.C. came in third from the bottom with 6.6 percent of graduating seniors passing an AP exam -- ahead of only Louisiana and Mississippi.

Originally Posted by rockzmom

I was at high school meeting last week and at this meeting it was announced that in November, 100 students took a "pre-Accuplacer" exam. This exam tests general assessments in sentence skills, reading comprehension, arithmetic, elementary algebra and college-level mathematics. The testing assessment measures whether incoming college freshman students have the necessary skills for college or university study, or whether they would benefit from taking further practice or developmental courses designed to improve key academic skills.

Of the 100 students tested... only SEVEN, let me repeat that SEVEN, students placed proficient in ALL categories. That means if those seven students were to go to college today, they would be ready. The other 93 would need to take and pay for remedial non-credit classes AFTER they graduated from high school.

This seems to contradict the news that came out today about us being the top ranked school system in the United States...

Rockzmom... There's no chance in a million years that the funding behind this test comes from a source that's tied to folks who sell, oh i don't know, say, private tutoring for post high school kids who want to brush up on a few things at a high rate of pay before going to college?

Originally Posted by kidkboom

Rockzmom... There's no chance in a million years that the funding behind this test comes from a source that's tied to folks who sell, oh i don't know, say, private tutoring for post high school kids who want to brush up on a few things at a high rate of pay before going to college?

Nice try, but no. The test is actually for ONE specific local community college for their placement of incoming students and the test was done in the high school. The county is now coughing up the money to tutor the kids WITHIN the school system during this school year and then they can retake the placement test. If they still don't pass, as they are seniors, they will then be SOL.

I think that both the USA and Europe is letting themselves down in the area of education.
Look at how they study in China, Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries.
Russians used to be top class scholars too, study really hard - I don't know what it's like now.

But large parts of Europe the school discipline is awful and the kids know almost nothing.

I read about some refugee kids coming to Sweden from Syria. They were way ahead of the Swedish kids in all subjects, because they were actually forced to sit down, pay attention and study in their school. They were totally shocked that we have all the prerequisites to have good schools here, yet the schools are a disgrace. From what I understand, things are even worse in the USA where gang members turn up with guns to school and most of the kids care only about showing up in school for the social life.

China must be laughing at us, and if we all don't get our act together in this area.

A while back, this excellent series was on the BBC.

Originally Posted by Hanna

I think that both the USA and Europe is letting itself down in the area of education.
Look at how they study in China, Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries.
Russians used to be top class scholars too, study really hard - I don't know what it's like now.

But large parts of Europe the school discipline is awful and the kids know almost nothing.

I read about some refugee kids coming to Sweden from Syria. They were way ahead of the Swedish kids in all subjects, because they were actually forced to sit down, pay attention and study in their school. They were totally shocked that we have all the prerequisites to have good schools here, yet the schools are a disgrace. From what I understand, things are even worse in the USA where gang members turn up with guns to school and most of the kids care only about showing up in school for the social life.

China must be laughing at us, and if we all don't get our act together in this area.

A while back, this excellent series was on the BBC.

The interest in schooling in any given country, while obviously a topic which can be tied to many interests (women's libbers could say "we want better education in order to make our future generations better educated about our gender rights issues"; ultra-cons could say "we want.. so people know the dangers of communism" etc etc), is ultimately about one thing, and that is INIQUITY.

"What a weird thing to say Kidkboom!" Yes, but it's true. Ultimately the paradigm I'm seeing here is not one of cooperation but of COMPETITION. So, the prize here is not "knowledge" but INIQUITY - that one country should have an imbalance of information superior to another's. That their people should have an imbalance of information superior to another people's. We can beat around the bush all day but that's the topic at hand.

So, when in a competitive paradigm, we look at the performance bottleneck. Much like a runner examines his running stance and his shoes and his knees and everything that could be a performance bottleneck, here we look at the political structures that create and maintain these scholastic functions.

To put it simply and save a lot of headache, these systems vary a lot. It's easiest to lock education into "HIGH" position when the popular or autonomous freedom/control buttons have been switched "OFF." I don't know much about Syria but they don't look to me to be a country that's highly focused on human freedoms and the ability to act autonomously as individual within the system. I.e. the autonomous freedom button is switched "OFF" or at least set to "LOW," and to put it simply, people will do what they're told to do.

I believe here in the states our trade-off is a low amount of control over the results of the individuals in the system, and a high amount of freedom for exploration given to those individuals WITHIN the system. One boon to public schooling in America almost never mentioned is the rather unique freedom to choose classes, electively and selectively, throughout Middle and High school, a privelege most countries if I'm not mistaken don't receive until college (and as to the selective nature of classes in some state-paid-for colleges in Europe, including Russia, I'm really not sure how much freedom they are given!). Whle the merit of this might be hard to see from an external point of view, it's reflective of the individuals' freedoms within the system, freedoms I suspect no Syrian student has ever been offered.

But what's to be said about the student, psychiatrically? In one country you've got a group of people who learn things having been driven to them by INTEREST and INTRIGUE, by FASCINATION, by a sheer desire to KNOW a thing. In another, you've got a group of people who learn because they are afraid of what will be done in REPERCUSSION if they don't obey this order. Those things they learn will be what they are told to learn, and they will not study with the glint of an interested student such as Einstein or Tesla, who learned what they had a passion for. Instead they will have a cold, flat, lifeless if accurate understanding of the information, which may function well if building nuclear warheads to exact specs under a harsh military timeline, but will most certainly never turn out a Dr. Suess or a John Williams.

You can tune a computer to operate at a very high efficiency, but it increases the rate of burn-out.

Really I guess it's about what you want as a result, at the end of the day.

Just my two cents.

PS - Guns in schools may seem uniquely American, but that's again because of freedoms - we're allowed to have guns as citizens here. In the UK I doubt this has ever happened, but I'm not sure I'd trade liberty for safety on this one.. =\

(Silver Lining: If Chechen terrorists take over an american school, they will have to pat down all the students)

KidK -I think there can be a bit too much of a good thing though - I mean free thinking and creativity.
If you visit a good private school you'll quickly notice that there is a lot more discipline. A bit of that is needed if the kids are to actually learn anything. So if the kids whos parents can afford to pay get that, then why not the regular kids? If the system just lets them hang around and do nothing, then they are just being let down.
A mix of free thinking and serious studies is surely best.

I certainly don't support cramming factories, but what I am seeing in Sweden is just way over the top. Freedom and creativity is all that counts. Kids are ignorant about subjects and disrespectful towards teachers. That is more freedom than what is good for them. Unless they want to be cheap uneducated labour in a Chinese owned factory in ten years time!

About Syrian schools - I just remember that BBC made a really long series on that too. It doesn't seem too bad. Here is an episode. The series was broadcast a few years ago. I thought it was interesting. Ugly school uniform though!

I wanted to come back to this thread an give updates to a couple of items here...

Those same students who took the placement test last time were tutored, and took the placement test again in April. This test allows the local 2 year community college to let them know if the students are ready for college level math and English, so there are four tests... if you pass the 2 English, you get into English 101, and the two math are Algebra and a college level math exam. Of the 66 students who took the exam only 4 passed the Algebra. Now remember, we have a state high school graduation requirement of an algebra Exam, so all 66 students had to have passed that state Algebra exam to be able to graduate. They didn't have the numbers for the other exams at the meeting but said they would get them for us.

Speaking of those high school exams to graduate. At first the state required you to pass four, English, Algebra, Biology and U.S. National State and Local Government (or NSL). Then last year, they stopped the NSL requirement only to this reinstate it. It turned out the only reason they stopped the NSL was due to budget cuts, there was just not enough money to pay for all the testing! So for class years 2014-2016, there will not be the NSL requirements, they get a free pass due to lack of money. They still need to take the actual course though.

Finally, I wrote about Brian Betts, the amazing teacher and principal who sadly was taken too soon from the education world. There were four suspects charged in his murder and a mother of one of them was charged for using Mr. Betts credit stolen credit card, all of them took plea deals. The school where he was principal sadly, Chancellor Rhee who strongly supported Mr. Betts and students is no longer there and the program Mr. Betts put into place there of allowing the middle school students who WANTED to stay there in the building for their high school grades and not transfer to "high school" as they felt they would have a better learning opportunity with the teachers and in the smaller building away from the "high school" society, was cancelled by the new Chancellor.

There is a brand new short video about Mr. Betts from both the student's perspective and also explains Mr. Betts view on education.

Although many Russians believe that they have the best school education in the world, the reality is different.
There are very many bad teachers and bad schools in Russia and were at the time of the USSR.
This is especially concerning discipline. The teachers cannot use physical force to bring the pupils to discipline,
and no working mechanism exists.

In the Soviet times the parents were responsible for their children, so a parent was obliged to bring his child into the lines with the discipline.
Otherwise the school could write to his employer and the employer had to take measures against the parent (stripping of financial bonuses
for example or slowing down the carrier progression). This was not always effective because there were parents who were criminals,
alcoholics and who did not bother about their carrier.

Now this mechanism does not work at all because many parents are employed at private enterprises which are not obliged
to take any measures or somehow react to the school's letters.

There are no other mechanisms: for example the police cannot do anything about people who did not reach 14 years and even elder persons can be prosecuted
in only serious cases. The school marks as a rule have no impact on further carrier.

A bad-behaving student should be theoretically forced to repeat a year in the same class, but this is usually not done because the teachers and the administration usually
want to get rid of bad pupils rather than keep them in school for a longer time. Also an elder and stronger hooligan among younger pupils would be even more trouble for a teacher.

That said, the most schools in the USSR were standardized and employed the same curriculum and teaching plan with small variations for some specialized schools inclined in favor of some subjects.

The curriculum was (and is) quite intense. I studied mathematics (up to solving simple differential equations and employing different integration techniques), physics (including material science, quantum mechanics with solving simplest Schroedinger equations and Special Relativity), computer science (including programming in Basic, C and Pascal), organic and non-organic chemistry (including solving problems for reactions kinetics such as time of a reaction and change of the balance between reagents and the product with change of temperature, calculating change in entropy, enthalpy etc), biology, history, Russian language and literature (including syntactic analysis of sentences, morphological and phonetic analysis of words), English language, geography and other minor subjects such as music.

There were some good teachers such as a physics teacher who often made interesting demonstrations such as powering a fluorescent lamp which he held in his hands with an electro-magnetic emitter located at a distance. So the the lamp being not connected to any electric source still emitted light. Or warming a closed bulb with water in the light of a projector that projected the bulb to the screen so to demonstrate the critical point of water: the boundary between water and vapor eventually blurred and disappeared as the substance was becoming a hypercritical fluid. On still another occasion he made an installation of consecutive polarizing filters in front of a projector to demonstrate the effects of polarization and that inserting one more filter in the middle can actually increase the amount of light falling to the screen.

It should be noted that the Russian government recently announced a simplification of the school curriculum with only "basics of Orthodox Christian culture" (a newly introduced subject) or "basics or Islamic culture" (in some regions), life safety (another newly-introduced subject), patriotic education and athletics will be mandatory with all other subjects optional, but not more than three. This came under great criticism in the society.