You need to stick to the anti jew threads. If you keep getting involved in these others, your credibility will be shot. Look up cram schools in wiki. A sample: "Cram schools are usually privately owned. They are prevalent in East Asia, where rote-memorization education plays a greater part in adolescent life. In fact, there are so many cram schools in Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, that they have become a de facto parallel educational system, and high school students may need to attend cram schools after regular school to master certain important courses, like English, mathematics or natural sciences."
whatever happened to letting local communities make their own decisions? we don't need a dept of ed. quality just gets worse and worse.
I did, here is what I found: "As the name suggests, the aim of a cram school is to impart as much information to its students as possible in the shortest period of time. The goal is to enable the students to "parrot," that is, to unthinkingly repeat, information that is deemed necessary for particular examinations. Cram schools are sometimes criticized, along with the countries in which they are prevalent, for the lack of training their students receive in critical thinking and analysis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cram_school Clearly these schools are a good thing, they have their niche and help students prepare for exams but they work well together with public education systems, they don't replace them. According to the same article in this country similar businesses are called "tutoring services" or "test preparation centers." Some well-known businesses of this type are Barron's, Kaplan, Peterson's, and Sylvan Learning. Generally, such supplementary instruction is only used in the United States as a way to assist students who have learning disabilities or are struggling academically in a particular subject. They are also used by some upperclassmen in high schools to prepare for the SAT, ACT, and/or Advanced Placement exams. Unlike their Asian counterparts, however, these schools tend to stray from rote memorization and more towards vocabulary drills and practicing essay composition. College graduates will sometimes attend such classes to prepare for entrance exams necessary for graduate level education
Why stop at local communities? A million years ago every cave made their own educational decisions, why don't we go back to that model of educational excellence? I don't disagree with that and we should be looking for ways to improve quality but there is absolutely no evidence that countries without a Ministry/Dept of Education have better quality educational systems. All the evidence is to the contrary. All leading countries do have these Depts of Education, the citizenry simply forces them to work harder and do the right thing.
Have you ever been to countries like South Korea or Japan? I taught classes in South Korea for 2 1/2 years. Their "public" school system has nothing to do with the fact that they are outperforming when compared to the US. They value performance and high test scores, while we value creativity and critical thinking. It is a cultural thing that really has little to do with there teachers unions. BTW, your study was the worst I've ever seen in terms of misrepresentation and inclusion of unrelated factors. Really, who judges the intelligence level of a population by how much money they spend per student, and how the teachers' salaries compare to other occupations? Isn't it obvious that DEM states would be ranked highest under those terms? Gee, I wonder who funded this study. :eek:
They are outperforming American students by every measure and in every competition, their educational systems are ranked significantly hire than ours according to every research and avery survey!!! My only point was that all countries that do better and rank higher than the US have Ministries/Depts of Education, their educational systems are based on public education and public schools and it does not prevent them from achieving excellent results. That's the case with Asian countries like Japan and SK, that's the case with European countries like Finland and Austria. People complaining about terrible quality of our public education are right, people insisting that the way to solve the problem is to get rid of the Dept of Education and public education altogether are totally off base as is quite obvious from the experience of better performing countries (in Asia and in Europe).
They outperform on every measure because every testable measure is biased toward memorization. They become very good at memorization at a very young age because that is how the system works over there. It is very difficult to test levels of creativity and critical thinking ability. I'm not saying our system is better, but it is very different. Also, you should realize that there are an incredible number of private schools over there. This creates a very competitive environment. It isn't bad to have a Dept. of Education, but ours consistently oversteps its bounds. Any time a state attemps to pass legislation to try to increase educational competition the NEA and various state departments spend millions to stop it. It is lack of competition that is crippling our system.
The whole premise of this thread was that our education system is terrible, the students don't learn anything (the thread is called "stupid"), we're falling farther and farther behind and that the best way to fix it is to get rid of the Dept of Education and public schools. These were the points I was trying to address by providing examples of European and Asian countries in which their corresponding depts of education and public (together with private) schools found ways to do a much better job educating students.