You think it's gotten better since then?
ROFLMAO.
Exit exams may be on their way out
Look at how fast testing changes. These are just exit exams. You want to know why there is no money in education? Pay attention to how much is spent on testing and what it actually accomplishes.
No money for education? We spend more than ever on an inflation adjusted basis.
In constant 2000-2001 dollars, we spent $3K per pupil in 1960. By 2000-2001, the per pupil amount increased to $8.8K, an increase of over 190% in CONSTANT DOLLARS.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d01/dt167.asp
Between 2000 and 2009, the CONSTANT DOLLAR spending per pupil (in 2009 dollars) increased by an other 20%, up to $10.6K.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/expenditures/tables/table_06.asp
We spend more money now for worse results. The problem is not lack of money. The problem is lack of educational standards and rigor combined with politically correct multicultralistic pablum which pushes propaganda instead of promoting knowledge.
The problem IS "educational standards and rigor". Teaching to pass tests instead of teaching in-depth knowledge that leads to SELF knowledge and the ability to problem solve.
Incorrect.
The problem , once again, is that public schools have to accept EVERYONE and to put it bluntly, half of students in public schools are a waste of funds.
WOW. Too bad one of the most successful school systems in the world is based on equality.
Finnish Education Chief: 'We Created a School System Based on Equality'
The secret to the success of the Finnish school system is the fact that the schools are filled with Finnish students, not Somalian students.
Meanwhile, the United States has been imposing more external testing—often exacerbating differential access to curriculum—while creating more inequitable conditions in local schools. Resources for children and schools, in the form of both overall funding and the presence of trained, experienced teachers, have become more disparate in many states, thus undermining the capacity of schools to meet the outcomes that are ostensibly sought. Sahlberg notes that Finland has taken a very different path. He observes:
Let's deal with this horseshit, piece by piece.
The US has been imposing external testing BECAUSE the local control model wasn't working. Capisce?
Testing, by itself, has no effect other than to uniformly measure performance.
As for resources, we've tried many experiments. One took place in Kansas City where a judge gave school officials a BLANK CHECK to do anything and everything needed to improve minority student
performance:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
We see the same results in the new Jersey Abbott Schools, which due to State funding spend more per student than schools in rich upper-class districts. Even in the stellar schools, like
Princeton High School, where black university professors send their kids:
An uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.
Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school.
"I said to myself: 'Oh, no. Please, no,' " Ms. Mitchell recalled. "I was so hurt. These were bright kids. This shouldn't have been happening."
It did not escape Ms. Mitchell's perception that her son and most of those faltering classmates were black. They were the evidence of a prosperous, accomplished school district's dirty little secret, a racial achievement gap that has been observed, acknowledged and left uncorrected for decades. Now that pattern just may have to change under the pressure of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Several months after Blake graduated, Princeton High School (and thus the district as a whole) ran afoul of the statute for the first time, based on the lagging scores of African-American students on a standardized English test given to 11th graders. Last month, the school was cited for the second year in a row, this time because 37 percent of black students failed to meet standards in English, and 55 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics failed in math.
One of the standard complaints about No Child Left Behind by its critics in public education is that it punishes urban schools that are chronically underfinanced and already contending with a concentration of poor, nonwhite, bilingual and special-education pupils. Princeton could hardly be more different. It is an Ivy League town with a minority population of slightly more than 10 percent and per-student spending well above the state average. The high school sends 94 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges and offers 29 different Advanced Placement courses. Over all, 98 percent of Princeton High School students exceed the math and English standards required by No Child Left Behind.
When we aggregate this phenomena of rich black parents having children who underperform at school up the the national level, this is what we see:
The children of black executives, black physicians, black judges, the upper class backs, who make more than $200,000 per year, are performing on the SAT almost at par with the children of poor white families where the family income is less than $20,000 per year. Also keep in mind that the SAT OVER-predicts black performance during first year university. Over-predicts, so the issue of the SAT being structurally biased against blacks is now invalidated.
So high teacher pay, small class sizes, excellent school environments, upper class upbringing and nothing closes the gap.
