It's Always a Numbers Game

So there were so many great ideas this week. Many of them a repetition of things we should be doing at any school level, with some specific to the scheduling and needs of a high school. I keep feeling like I have heard all of this before even before this course. I want to know what is it going to take to make the shift to this? When will it start going from ideas for a better education to a plan to actuality? I feel like we are always in this block because the people who make the decisions are not people who have any educational background. We are fighting with a public either nostalgic about their own education and don't want the change, or could care less about education. Are we just waiting for the right politician(s) to be the face of change in public education? There are all these little pockets of greatness as we can see from our readings, but how can we get it to a country of greatness?

This was all spurred from the 9 minute video. They again mentioned how the U.S. ranks internationally on certain assessments. I do agree that our education system falters in that we have too much of the LOTS (lower order thinking skills) and not enough of the HOTS (higher order thinking skills). We aren't creating deep thinkers and reasoners. What I really dislike though is the idea of numbers. My math background tells me that you can make almost any number look as bad or as good as you want it to and I don't like us looking at a single number. We are looking at our ranking, this number, as an epic failure. We should be instead focusing our attention on what it is that we are doing right and work from there in trimming the areas that are not helping us build the kinds of young adults we need to sustain us.

I also wonder about the general population of these countries that are scoring so high. How homogeneous is their population in comparison to ours? Does the natural and expanding diversity of our country account from some of our troubles? Also, how large is the area they cover in relation to their population? In other words, how densely populated and geographically similar is their country? I personally feel it is a lot easier to create systems that are more effective when your population is more homogeneous and your country is somewhat smaller geographically. I can't really articulate why in an intelligent argument at the moment, but I just have this gut feeling that this is part of our problem in the U.S. that is not often accounted for. I am not saying that we can't create a system and curricula that are demanding and rich, but that doing so may prove to be a lot trickier when comparing our population to the populations of those countries who are succeeding (according to the numbers).

I think I will leave it at that...