Last week the Herald Courier editorialized: ”we believe that Common Core may help close the education gap between the USA and many countries”.
Amen to that, and a most welcome change in tone and temperament from your previous harangues against Common Core.
Whatever its shortcomings, imagined or real, it is a serious attempt to reverse extremely negative, if not fateful, trends in our system of education.
Home truths, while both embarrassing and painful, are cathartic.
The USA, chronically and compulsively spends more on education that any nation on this planet, yet ranks in the bottom quartile of nations (26th of 34), per the most recent OECD developed country national rankings; derived from the Program for International Student Assessment Data.
The top ranking entities in Language, Mathematics and Science, reside along the Pacific Rim; led by Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong,Taiwan, South Korea and Macau.
The reasons for this should be obvious even to the politically obtuse; among them, their emphasis on results oriented rather than faddish education, largely intact family structures, a strong sense of intellectual curiosity plus self discipline and their innate ability to reason abstractly.
These attitudes and behaviors are the bedrock for their success and have absolutely nothing to do w/spending money; the relentless hue and cry of the usual suspects in our educrat/political nexus.
Unless we face reality and change, the long term outlook is very ominous for the USA.
For our students, it dramatically lessens their prospects for obtaining the highly technological jobs of the future in our multi-cultural world.
For our nation, it seriously erodes our competitive advantage versus our major trading partners.
For our military, it alerts our unsmiling enemies that we no longer have the brainpower to keep pace w/ advances in weaponry, tactical advantage and strategic vision.
Tom Coffey
Herricks
