For US students, which hampers students more out of class size, the media, or laziness?

Just because someone scores higher on a test doesn’t mean that they are more qualified at work… I am assuming that all the engineers in Japan couldn’t stop the reactors from melting down… or even preventing the disaster… and all they had to do was raise the back up generators a little higher to prevent shut down of the Fukushima reactor from going nuts from the flood of water from the earthquake…and you hear about Japan having top scores on tests… and students killing themselves over 98% averages…. Different countries have different priorities… some are passing the tests others have an unique view of the world.

I would like one to be compared to one’s self and not to others… I would be more interested in seeing a students progress report when compared to themselves over time rather than comparing to others.

I’d say education isn’t a top priority in American society nowadays.

To me it is more than obvious as to why. Japanese kids go to school almost all year long and ask any US teacher the single hardest obstacle is getting the kids tuned back in after 3 months off.

Secondly is discipline and respect. There is no goofing around in Japanese schools and any signs of acting out or disrespect to another student is dealt with swiftly and harshly and the biggest difference is most if not all parents take a very active role in their kids education as there is great honor to be had with a good student and great dishonor to a family of a poor student.

Cryonics. There just isn’t enough cryonics in the US. If we froze all the bad students, the ones that are left would pull up the average scores. [Rolls eyes].

This is a more bogus question than normal for this author, with false choices, unsupported assertions, and opinions masquerading as facts and knowledge. As usual, I don’t even know where to begin to try to debunk the question.

If you want to seriously ask about education policy, you should start with what is actually known, not what you think in that pretty little head of yours. Is class size correlated with performance? Let’s look it up. From what I remember, it is.

But the most important thing, if I remember correctly, is the education level of the father. No, not the mother; the father. That is correlated most highly with educational success—however you measure that.

Anyway, just to further critique the question—do you have a clue as to what is being measured when you assert that Japanese students do better than Americans? Like do you even know one measure? Do you even know whether measures of educational success have any relationship to success in the rest of someone’s life?

Oh wait—do you even know what success is?

Hmmm. Who has the largest economy in the world? Where is the video game industry—an industry larger than the movie industry and maybe larger than TV, as well, headquartered? Where is most of the creative work performed in the world? Where is the second biggest creative center? Have you ever seen a product from the second biggest? Where is the most capital concentrated? Who has the greatest number of new business start-ups every year?

Where is the sex industry concentrated (I don’t know the answer to this one, so I’d be curious if it is Southern California, or Japan or Thailand or what)?

Should we not judge an education system by it’s real world results, not its test scores? Just curious. What do you actually think? Are you a test score porn junkie, like George Bush II and all his ignoramus flunkies were?

Anyway, there are the @Hypocrisy_Central normal bogus questions, and then there are questions like this one which are so nonsensical, they’d even look weird if they were in Alice’s Wonderland!

I’ll go with lazy out of the three, because I agree with @cruiser on the discipline and respect part, and they are kind of all in the same category to me. So, the question is
parenting also maybe? Media, parenting, teachers? One thing I always wonder about the statistics is how the mean average really gets all added up. America still has amazingly focused, disciplined, intelligent, hard working children. I have a feeling we have a lot of kids at the bottom dragging down the averages, that it is not a simple bell curve.

@Cruiser except we did it back in our day. We came back after three months. I actually prefer year round school also don’t get me wrong. I think it better for the student, teacher, and parents. A city 45 minutes from me has year round school, 9 weeks on two weeks off, and the summer is a little extended, something like 4 weeks off, I have to do the math to see how many weeks are left over. When I lived in Raleigh, NC they had a magnet/charter (not sure which term they used) that was year round.

I don’t think that it is any of the three you mentioned in the question. It is a matter of culture. In other countries more emphasis is put on education and educational standing. That is why the students perform better.

None of the above. One as @marinelife stated, it’s a cultural difference. Being a nerd in Asia is known as being productive, and intelligent. It’s not known as something one should be made to feel socially inadequate for.

Here in the US, it’s common for people to regard their babies with baby talk. That is the opposite of how Asians treat their babies.

Next, it’s curriculum. Asians are taught thoroughly before thay move on to the next level. Math is a perfect example of how different our views on education are. Here in America, schools teach a sampling of all areas of math early on. Whereas in Chian & Japan, children are expected to know the ins & outs of addition (all addition facts) prior to moving on to subtraction…and so it goes.

@wundayatta Do you even know whether measures of educational success have any relationship to success in the rest of someone’s life? Interesting duck, doge, and hide maneuver. Almost like trying to make a case about how long the vehicle will last when the skill of the driver is the issue. As for the rest, out on the range on a an eight hand horse, all hat and no cattle.

@JLeslie @Cruiser except we did it back in our day. We came back after three months. Why is that you figure? Because we of that generation did not have the summer long distractions of electronic gadgets, we got more air and play outdoors, better diet, a combination there of? What is so different in kids three to five decades ago than now?

@marinelife It is a matter of culture. In other countries more emphasis is put on education and educational standing. Doesn’t the media play into that in some part, as to what is cool, dorky, fashionable, heinous, desired, lousy, etc? If the media played up the fact that being a good student was cool do you think those kids not doing well in school would still want to do badly or do better because it was cool? If us Yankees have a culture of apathy for education, how did that happen nationwide?

@Hypocrisy_Central Well, my example that we did, might not mean it was the best way as I think about it. We did it because of the harvest. The school year was set up to allow children help to work the farm. In fact, my college, Michigan State University, originally Michigan Agricultural College, nicknamed Moo U, started the school year around September 20th back when I attended, not so long ago.

Now, year round makes more sense in my opinion, because parents have more opportunities for family vacations during various timesof the year, and there is not that long summer break. Maybe courses did not build on each other back then as much as they do now? Of course math always did. Anyway, maybe it is not so much the techy gadgets our kids play with now, but the technology they have to learn.

Well first of all, I just want to say that as an American ninth grade student I beat the scores of my school, my county, and my state in both of my reading and math tests last year. I admit, there are distractions around, and some rule infractions, but mostly I’d say it’s the fact that a lot of parents don’t care quite as much about their child’s education as they used to. My parents care and I’ve maintained A’s and B’s since sixth grade, but I know a lot of students whose parents never have any idea what their child’s grades are and quite frankly don’t care all that much about it.

@laineybug Interesting point of view. I tend to think that back in the day, the day of your mommy and me, and before that even, parents were less involved with school in general. I could be wrong about this. I might make a question about it now that you have me thinking. They cared we got an education, but they just kind of sent us off to school, and let the school handle it. That is my overall impression anyway.

@JLeslie I might make a question about it now that you have me thinking. They cared we got an education, but they just kind of sent us off to school, and let the school handle it. In my neck of the woods growing up there were two things no kid wanted to be; ”the fat kid”, or the stupid kid who flunked and was left behind. To be left behind, having to repeat the same class with the “little kids” under you, would have been worse than death. The parents too did not want to have a kid that flunked. The parents did compare report cards to see whose kid was circling the ‘D’ range and who had straight ‘A’ students.

@Hypocrisy_Central No one wanted to flunk where I was from either. The parents checked the report card, but I never saw any parents worrying about the grades of other children, just their own. But, that might have been out of my sight. It was not that the parents did not care, only that if things were kind of moving along ok, the parents kind of left it alone. There were some parents who put pressure on their kids to get good grades, but most of us just kind of earned the grades we earned and the parents did not spend much time meeting teachers or asking us about homework. That was my experience anyway.

Here is my question regarding parents involvement years ago and now, for those interested.

I graduated from a Florida public high school in 2010 – just to let you know where I’m coming from here. I’m really not familiar with the way schools in other states work, so I might be discussing a flaw that really isn’t representative of the system as a whole. Anyway!

The main focus of the majority of my classes has been the FCAT scores (our state standardized test). Our teachers were required to go over remedial math and basic reading comprehension skills for at least half of the year (every year, up until 11th grade) to ‘prepare’ us for these tests.

Why? The school’s ‘grade’ is based on these tests, and the ‘grade’ indicates how much funding they get. Ironically, the schools that get poor grades (i.e. the schools that are usually lacking financial stability) get less funding, while the schools that are excelling get more funding. That means that the schools that don’t have enough books for all of their students are getting less money, while the schools that can provide their students with books and up-to-date technology are getting even more money.
In my middle school, most of my classes already didn’t have enough books for us to take home, and most of those didn’t even have enough books for us to use in the classroom. The books we did have were usually very old and hanging on by a thread. We ended up with a C or D one year as our ‘school grade,’ which lowered our funding even more. You can see where this is going. A lot of my teachers have pulled money from their own pocket to help us, whether it’s making their own copies of worksheets due to restrictions on school-funded copies or just doing something nice like bringing in food before the big standardized tests to make sure we’re alert and well-fed.

So in a nutshell, most public schools (in this state, in my experience, anyway) don’t let the students learn. I’ve had quite a few teachers tell us that we wouldn’t have time to cover an important section of material because they had to pretty much stop halfway through the year to get us ready for the FCAT. I’m lucky because I’ve had, for the most part, really great teachers.

Aside from that, laziness is definitely a factor…I wouldn’t even think of denying that. Students have to take at least some of the blame. I know that most of the poor grades I’ve received have been primarily because of my own carelessness and laziness. American students tend to be stuffed with television, video games, and the internet. Studying – especially for tedious classes – inevitably gets put on the back burner.

However, all of that being said (as I finish this novel of a response), I don’t think it’s wise to compare one country to another in the way we do with American education. We’re not the same country. We have different governments, we have different populations, and we have different cultures. What is the point of competing? Maybe if we get our noses out of China’s students’ lives and start focusing on actually motivating our own students, we’d make some progress.

Oh, and I don’t think class size has that much to do with scores. It is more difficult because bigger classes tend to be much rowdier, but assuming you have well-behaved students and an attentive teacher (and enough materials) it’s usually just as easy to learn.

@martianspringtime However, all of that being said (as I finish this novel of a response), I don’t think it’s wise to compare one country to another in the way we do with American education. That happens all over, as the world become closer or more involved through commerce or jet travel, and the Internet. Why try to say which nation is safer, let travelers figure that out on their own when they get there. Just because more people roam the streets with weapons in Mogadishu, or Kandahar than Tokyo means nothing on if violence will find you. The numbers mean nothing, right?

Maybe if we get our noses out of China’s students’ lives and start focusing on actually motivating our own students, we’d make some progress. Where else can we apply that? “Maybe if we get our noses out of Middle East’s women’s rights and start focusing on actually motivating our own human rights, we’d make some progress.” Perhaps, ”Maybe if we get our noses out of Sudan’s human rights and start focusing on actually reducing our prison population, we’d make some progress.”

If the world is truly going global where all the major players arte connected, if there is the choice of those students who score higher over those that don’t, it might effect if jobs are available to them, or ends up overseas, where those who appear smarter are.

@martianspringtime Something to think about. The reason Oprah opened her school in Africa was because what she saw in the US was children did not even take advantage of the education already available to them. She seemed a little annoyed that every child can go to school in our great country, and many of them drop out. Sure some of our schools need help, but for the most part schools are more equal than unequal in the US. There are plenty of new schools, with new computers and new learning materials, and the kids take it for granted and are apathetic. My girlfriend sells software to public schools. She says the inner city has the most money to spend, and those schools still have the lowest test averages, highest drop out rates.

One big contributing problem as I think about it is probably the politics of education. But, that is going off on another tangent.

@Hypocrisy_Central Do you even know whether measures of educational success have any relationship to success in the rest of someone’s life? Interesting duck, doge, and hide maneuver. Almost like trying to make a case about how long the vehicle will last when the skill of the driver is the issue. As for the rest, out on the range on a an eight hand horse, all hat and no cattle.

Methinks the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly you have no idea of what standards you are using, so you accuse me of dodging the question when you are the one who is actually doing it.

No one can answer a question meaningfully when you don’t define your terms or offer anything to support the idea that your assertions have the slightest to do with the real world. Of course, this is typical for you—offering hypothetical restrained choices that are completely irrelevant to anything in the real world. It’s unfortunate, because if you took a little more care, your questions could be pretty useful. But they are mind candy: they look very pretty on the surface, but when you bite into them, there’s nothing there.

Students are not too lazy. Teachers and schools only explain a small portion of student success as measured on tests. But I don’t know if tests are a useful way of assessing students, nor do I think teaching to the test is a useful way of preparing students for real life. Life is not a test, just the same as constrained choices are not reflective of life.

I do not believe it is a waste of time trying to get people to refocus their energies on more nuanced questions.

Teaching to test will always be a waste of our resources @Hypocrisy_Central. And, that is precisely what is going on in our public and in many private schools here in the US.

@JLeslie I don’t blame the kids. I’ve never met a child that didn’t want to or get excited to learn. The teaching methods and the curriculum are what I question.

@SpatzieLover You don’t blame the families, the community, the warlike environment they grow up in? I also agree teaching methods should be looked at, and the teachers, and the board members running the schools. It’s so political a lot of the time. Where I live Memphis voted to give up their school charter to the county. Memphis had their own school system and school board. Most people out in the county are freaked Mempis will now be part of the county. There are many reasons they don’t want it, one is now Memphians will be able to vote members onto the Shelby county school board.

@wundayatta It’s unfortunate, because if you took a little more care, your questions could be pretty useful. But they are mind candy: they look very pretty on the surface, but when you bite into them, there’s nothing there. People with teeth can sink it into that quite well.

You have yet to prove how a junior whose science is at a level of a 8th grader and math equals a sophomore, is going to hang with a junior from another nation whose science equals that of a senior, with math that equals a college freshman. Before you come by with the tired doge and duck by saying there is no proof, it is all over the Internet. I would point some out to you but you will think they are all Yankee haters and doctored the story to make US students look bad. US students are suppose to be more successful.

How do you measure that, by how many villas they own? Perhaps, their stock portfolios, bank accounts, trophy wives, or husbands, yachts or private jets? So, you are saying what you score means little so long as you die in the top 5% of the US, the people who are suppose to be at the crux of everyone else’s misery. Big swing and a miss.

@SpatzieLover Teaching to test will always be a waste of our resources @Hypocrisy_Central. If that is a reason why US students don’t score better is because they are not being taught to learn, but to only know what is on some test, then that seem to be one of the problems.

@JLeslie The reason Oprah opened her school in Africa was because what she saw in the US was children did not even take advantage of the education already available to them. She seemed a little annoyed that every child can go to school in our great country, and many of them drop out. That kind of echo a news story I told some time back with I was chatting with a teacher on ICQ, she was in a program somewhat like Doctor without Borders, only it was for teachers. She said she was teaching somewhere in Sub Saharan Africa where schools and teachers were far between. She said every night even though the people had hardly nothing, they would invite her to have supper with them; for them it was a great honor to have a teacher for dinner. She said that teachers were treated like rock stars there. They don’t seem to enjoy nowhere near that here, the media peg them as douches, or some anal clods out to ruin the fun for the kids. Why don’t the media here make teachers seem super cool, and the “in” people to know and hang with?

No @JLeslie I blame the system that invests $10 to $13K per student annually yet can’t get a kid to graduate and be ready for the work force. They dump money and dump money, yet won’t dump the curriculum or the tests that clearly aren’t working.

@SpatzieLover I actually agree with you about the stubbornness problem on hanging on to educational idea that are not effective; but, I think it is many things at once, not just that one thing.