“Who Owns The Future?” Pat Buchanan on education success in the US

[jody]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20101228/cm_uc_crpbux/op_3316460

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America's public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America's schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

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The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

[NOLALady]

1. Great.

There is nothing better than an educated wage slave.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. The decline of American education is 200% the fault of the repukes.

[adnelson60087]

3. I think Mr. Buchanan is missing an obvious truth in his conclusion...

From the article....
The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.
Which brings us to "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools," a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately "refuse to confront the obvious truth."
"America's educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today's schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement."

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school's success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class — not on texts, teachers or classroom size.
If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.
A nation weary of wasting billions on unctuous educators who never deliver what they promise may be ready to hear some hard truths.

___________________

He called teachers unctuous. Wow. Just wow. Anyhow....the truth he's missing is rooted in poverty. Instead of rooting the explanation in "race" ( a social, not biological concept), he should look at the rates of poverty in the populations being studied. I do agree with Weissberg one point though about "cognitive ability and disposition (attitude)" of the child towards school. Those are major but poverty, family, and cultural expectations are major drivers that should not be ignored, but consistently are by Obama, Bush, Duncan, Gates, etc.