Ambitious! And something I'm quite interested in: my mum teaches in a prison where the functional illiteracy levels are obscene.
I also know a secondary school Biology teacher and someone who taught English in Japan for a year, which is where I get the idea that training for exams is widespread. Then there's grade inflation -- I've seen an Ordinary Level Maths paper from 1980 (intended for 16 year-olds) which had some tougher questions than the Advanced Level Further Maths exam from 2001 (for 18 year-olds).
So! If you were tsar of education, what would you do? Privatization is a common sci-fi solution: have schools be corporations that receive a portion of the students' lifetime earnings. Of course the simplest plan (given that this seems to be a problem you can solve by throwing teachers at it) would be to raise taxes and hire more teachers, but social spending doesn't seem popular in America unless it will bring rapid results.
The Nordic countries seem to have the right idea: continuous assessment, early specialization (age 15 or so), and unstructured primary education with a high teacher/student ratio.
-- I think most comments on the internet are rubbish more because of Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september) than rampant idiocy. The anonymity doesn't help either.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
I also know a secondary school Biology teacher and someone who taught English in Japan for a year, which is where I get the idea that training for exams is widespread. Then there's grade inflation -- I've seen an Ordinary Level Maths paper from 1980 (intended for 16 year-olds) which had some tougher questions than the Advanced Level Further Maths exam from 2001 (for 18 year-olds).
So! If you were tsar of education, what would you do? Privatization is a common sci-fi solution: have schools be corporations that receive a portion of the students' lifetime earnings. Of course the simplest plan (given that this seems to be a problem you can solve by throwing teachers at it) would be to raise taxes and hire more teachers, but social spending doesn't seem popular in America unless it will bring rapid results.
The Nordic countries seem to have the right idea: continuous assessment, early specialization (age 15 or so), and unstructured primary education with a high teacher/student ratio.
--
I think most comments on the internet are rubbish more because of Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september) than rampant idiocy. The anonymity doesn't help either.