Are we still ‘Stupid in America?’
By John Rieping
MaderaTribuneRedLine.com
In 2006, the ABC News show “20/20” caused a bit of a stir with a special news feature on how high school education in the U.S. stacked up.
The feature, hosted by John Stossel and entitled “Stupid in America,” pointed out — among other things — the achievement gap between U.S. high school students and teenaged students in most other countries, as well as the fact that “many other countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do.”
The show also poses possible ways to improve the situation, such as allowing healthy competition for school funding and reforming the tenure system.
The reaction to the broadcast was outrage by teachers’ unions, which claimed it was an outright attack on both students and teachers.
So how are our nation’s high schools doing two years later? Recent indicators do not seem encouraging.
Only this April did Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announce that states would be required to report high school graduation rates in a uniform and consistent way.
Why? Because of such creative methods as that of the state of New Mexico, which determined the official high school graduation rate as the percentage of students who enter the 12th grade and exit with a diploma — a method that ignores drop outs during the first three years. California’s method is also allegedly one that inflates the results, but despite this inflation California still reports a five percent higher drop out rate than the nation as a whole.
But such good news is like receiving an A, B or C on an exam that was graded on a curve. The value of the grade depends upon the strength of the competition.
How would we truly fare if U.S. high schools were seriously scrutinized in 2008? I guess we may have a somewhat clearer sense in the years to come thanks to consistency in reporting graduation rates.
And thanks to our severely indebted governments on the state and national level, we may soon have a chance to see if — like many nations around the world — we too can do better with less funding.
But pardon me if I don’t sound excited.
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John, I’m not an avid Red Line reader but I just came across your article written in May and I do find it interesting that you have had no responses. I see response after response regarding the multicolored downtown issue, but does anyone care about our children’s schools? Please share with us the Madera high school that ranked so well and don’t leave out the middle school that’s failing something like 6 years straight. Although, for whatever reason, we have Mr. Miller to continue leading that school into even lower failure. Please share more with us parents the value of our child’s grade. How does it make sense that 8th graders are reading at 5th grade level and yet are receiving passing grades maybe even an A. We parents see our child’s report card with passing grades (A’s) and get this false sense of “my kids smart.” In actuality, our kids are receiving passing grades in dumb dumb school.