Comments about ‘What others say: Causes of dismal ACT, SAT test scores’

None of the onus has been placed on those who take the test. Explain that to me please. We have allowed our young people to be raised Ina society where they are, for all intensive purposes, victims. It's not Johnny's fault that he reads poorly, it's his teacher's fault. He can't write or better yet WON'T write? Teacher fault once again.

Lets use a business analogy here since the anti-public education folks like to use business as their model. If you have a worker building a car on an assembly line who refuses to work or improve their basic skills once they have been shown how to perform a task what happens? They lose their job. In our schools what happens? The supervisor gets blamed because Johnny didn't get better. Am I missing something here? Oh, I work in education in the trenches so I speak from some experience here.

Teaching to the test is rarely the teaching part of the day. It certainly is not the teacher's bright spot in the day. It is also boring to the students.

Just the message you want to send. Education is boring to all participants. A sure recipe for success . . . .

BTW, this is certainly not how we teach (or try to teach) at church. Perhaps there is a reason.

EJM is correct -- although his post is so convoluted it's hard to understand.

Trouble is, we can't seem to find a way to fire students. It's just much easier to go after teachers and blame them.

Perhaps the REAL reason for the mess is simply that we have become a nation that no longer really values education. Instead, we seek constant entertainment. Entertainment requires no effort.

But learning does.

one old man,

I need to disagree. In my experience that is one of the key differences between public and private education - the ability to "fire" the student. If public education had that option (and I am not arguing it should) it would be far less costly and could provide more education (less babysitting).

We just don't, as a society, expect much of our kids. Smart kids are nerds, brainiacs, geeks or worse. It's cool to be a jock or party animal or some sort of miscreant. We've entitled the little darlings so much they've become boorish, lazy louts. It's time to start leaving some behind. We knew which kids weren't very bright when I was in elementary school. Everyone, including the teachers, had descriptive nouns for them. You can't say those anymore, and that may be part of the problem.

After some interesting thoughts and statistics, the last two sentences were the crux of his political point. He seemed to call on government for greater wealth redistribution to "increase prosperity for all". Unfortunately this will lower prosperity for everyone and will make the problem worse. I guess we can look to the great prosperity of the USSR over the last almost 100 years with their entire population being wealthy and prosperous as our ideal goal. I would venture that their "poor" citizens and even their "average" citizens were far worse off than their counterparts in America.

Twin -- full agreement here.

But still -- how can we do it? Even you don't have an answer.

One old man,

I don't have a complete answer. I wish I did. I believe the ONLY answer we do have is what you allude to, that we must value education. We must cease seeing the teachers as the enemy, the students as idiots (or worse, each one perfect as they are), and give real allegiance to the idea that education has value.

That value is, I think, in three parts. First, the value to our citizenship - an understanding of our history, our constitution, etc. Reading and writing certainly play into this as well as each of the others. Second, our every day lives such as math at the store etc. Third, preparation for our work lives.

Of course we get bogged down in issues of money/cost and values. I think this is a shame because there is so much good that can and should be done and we waste so much energy on these.

Reference values, I think the best idea for many might be to just not have the schools opine (remove the issue). But there are some where it must speak (e.g. evolution). However, these should bother us less anyway.

I'm a little confused. The article refers to the class of 2012 . The class of 2012 took the SAT, and ACT in 2011, graduated this past spring/ summer and are now in college. Is that the class we are talking about? Or are we talking about those who took the SAT and. ACT this year, which would make them the class of 2013?

I heard a statistic last week from a social scientist: Children of parents who did not graduate from college spend 11 1/2 hours a day using non-educational media, (i.e. TV, cruising the internet, social media, etc.)

They can't write very well. When they write it looks like they are texting.

Apparently there was a greater number than ever taking the ACT and SAT, including a larger number of minorities.

"Many experts attribute the continued decline to record numbers of students taking the test, including about one-quarter from low-income backgrounds. There are many factors that can affect how well a student scores on the SAT, but few are as strongly correlated as family income."

"There is a significant correlation between family income and test scores on the SAT, with average scores increasing with every $20,000 in additional family income."

So basically the problem is that the source of the low test scores is based on family culture.

Tell us liberals, how do you legislate a change to family culture?