Yup. Should we decide to commit national economic suicide and liberalize our policies on STEM worker immigration, versus focusing on training and retaining domestic talent, the number of middle class jobs will quickly head towards zero due to wage suppression for even the most technical degrees. It's better business to have 6 $50k/year coders working 8 hour shifts in "pair programming" than two $150k/year employees working the same tasks. Makes the national emplpoyment numbers look better to.

What I meant was that the government should not wholesale import doctors/programmers/etc from Asia. If the work is to be done over there for cost reasons, then so be it, but bringing thousands over here benefits no one but shareholders in companies like Facebook. It's a form of protectionism, I suppose, but I'd rather see wages creep downward to line with overseas competitors than to bring to flood the markets here.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)

So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)

There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to eventually work at Slate. But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.

I believe in public education, but my district school really isn’t good! you might say. I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy. She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that. Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine.

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. There wasn’t even soccer. This is not a humblebrag! I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.

By the way: My parents didn’t send me to this shoddy school because they believed in public ed. They sent me there because that’s where we lived, and they weren’t too worried about it. (Can you imagine?) Take two things from this on your quest to become a better person: 1) Your child will probably do just fine without “the best,” so don’t freak out too much, but 2) do freak out a little more than my parents did—enough to get involved.

Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

Many of my (morally bankrupt) colleagues send their children to private schools. I asked them to tell me why. Here is the response that most stuck with me: “In our upper-middle-class world, it is hard not to pay for something if you can and you think it will be good for your kid.” I get it: You want an exceptional arts program and computer animation and maybe even Mandarin. You want a cohesive educational philosophy. You want creativity, not teaching to the test. You want great outdoor space and small classrooms and personal attention. You know who else wants those things? Everyone.

Whatever you think your children need—deserve—from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don’t just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids. Use the energy you have otherwise directed at fighting to get your daughter a slot at the competitive private school to fight for more computers at the public school. Use your connections to power and money and innovation to make your local school—the one you are now sending your child to—better. Don’t just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.

Public education always felt to me to be something of an equalizer in this regard, perhaps it’s not so effective anymore, and the country doesn't care about that as much? I don’t know, it’s just a question I have in my head.

this is pretty ridiculous as a talking point. why in the world would it be beneficial to allow generations to pass in what I assume would be decay and ruin for the sole purpose of making public schools better. shouldn't it be more of a question about how can the country improve public education so the society DOESN'T decay for generations?
I honestly can’t determine if this author is an outrageous prick of a human being or is just yanking her reader’s chain, but either way, it’s embarrassing if not to her, than to me, because I don’t want to be lumped into an group of people who might be serious about it to some degree – it’s coming across as a desire to be inflammatory in order to get attention, which does no good for the endorsement of public education.
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Do the skills cited as being desired necessarily require an liberal arts degree to attain? It seems to me that the development of those skills should be happening for all students, starting as early as in secondary school.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2013/09/04-algebra-coursetaking-loveless
Algebra II and The Declining Significance of Coursetaking

The Brown Center released a report today called “The Algebra Imperative.” The report shows that current national and international math assessments do not adequately measure how well American students are learning algebra. In this chalkboard post, I elaborate upon a point made in the report: that taking and successfully completing an Algebra II course, which once certified high school students’ mastery of advanced topics in algebra and solid preparation for college-level mathematics, no longer means what it once did. The credentialing integrity of Algebra II has weakened.

The declining significance of successfully completing Algebra II highlights a dilemma. Pushing students to take more advanced coursework has been a mainstay of American school reform for several decades. That prescription has worked in boosting enrollments. In 1986, less than half of all 17 year-olds (44%) had completed Algebra II, and for Black and Hispanic students, the rate was less than a third. Completing Algebra II is now commonplace. In 2012, about three-fourths of students completed Algebra II, and the race/ethnicity gaps associated with taking the course have narrowed significantly. (All NAEP data below are from the NAEP data explorer.)


Table 1. Percentage of 17 Year-Olds who Completed Second Year Algebra (1986-2012)



Percentage of 17 Year-Olds who completed second year algebra

Getting more students to take higher level math courses may be a hollow victory. It has not coincided with students learning more math. Figure I shows the average NAEP scores for Algebra II completers (in the following discussion, “completers” include students enrolled in the course when they took NAEP). As enrollments boomed, test scores went down. Caution must be exercised in infering causality. We cannot be certain of a causal connection between rising enrollments and falling scores, but it is certainly plausible—even likely--that enrollment gains have been achieved by drawing in students who are not prepared to take the course. Research does not indicate a decline in the quality of Algebra II teachers or Algebra II textbooks or some other deterioration in course components from 1986-2012 that can explain the decline in NAEP scores.




Figure 1. NAEP Math, 17 Year-Olds who have Completed Second Year Algebra (1986-2012)


A Pipeline Problem

Previous research has documented serious problems in the earliest stages of the advanced math pipeline, in which students traditionally progressed from Algebra I to a final course (Pre-Calculus or Calculus) over four or five years. More and more unprepared students are being pushed into advanced math in middle school. In 2008, I published a study analyzing eighth grade NAEP data. The data were from 2005, and even then a large percentage of low achievers (about 29% of those performing at the 10th percentile or lower in math) were enrolled in advanced math courses. I called these students “Misplaced Math Students” because they did not function at a level commensurate with their math courses. They functioned at about the second to third grade level. They were students who had trouble answering NAEP items involving fractions, decimals, and percentages, concepts that should have been learned several years earlier, and yet they were enrolled as middle schoolers in courses that until recently were considered high school courses.

Several subsequent studies have raised questions about policies that make low performing students take Algebra I in 8th grade. A study out of California found that marginal math students who spent one more year before tackling Algebra I were 69% more likely to pass the algebra end of course exam in 9th grade than ninth grade peers who were taking the course for the second time after failing the algebra test in 8th grade. The researchers referred to a “leaky pipeline” put under increased pressure by California’s aggressive placement of low achieving 8th graders in algebra. The policy succeeded in boosting middle school enrollments in Algebra I, but a large number of students quit taking math just as soon as they could in high school. Even low achievers who matriculate into higher level math courses may not benefit. A study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg students by Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor found that low achievers who took 8th grade algebra experienced negative long term effects, including lower pass rates in Geometry and Algebra II.

Consequences

The misplaced students are not the only ones who pay a price. Recent studies suggest that a systematic erosion of the legitimacy of advanced courses is taking place. By that I mean: students are taking advanced, college-prep courses, passing them with good grades, and yet do not know the advanced subject matter signified by the titles of the courses they have taken. Courses have lost their credentialing power. An National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study of high school transcripts analyzed the textbooks students used in high school Algebra I, Geometry, and Integrated Math courses. NCES conducted the study to solve a riddle.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study (HSTS) found that high school graduates in 2005 earned more mathematics credits, took higher level mathematics courses, and obtained higher grades in mathematics courses than in 1990. The report also noted that these improvements in students’ academic records were not reflected in twelfth-grade NAEP mathematics and science scores. Why are improvements in student coursetaking not reflected in academic performance, such as higher NAEP scores?

The researchers found that course titles often don’t mean what they say. NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley summarized the study’s main finding in an interview with Education Week, “We found that there is very little truth in labeling for high school Algebra I and Geometry courses.”

As unprepared students flow through a series of counterfeit courses, the entire curricular system is corrupted. Algebra II teachers are expected to teach mathematics to students who passed Algebra I with good grades but who, in reality, have not mastered elementary grade concepts that are fundamental to understanding algebra. Parents get false signals about how well their sons and daughters are prepared for college. Schools misallocate resources dedicated to remedial programs by assuming that students know material that they, in fact, do not know.

In the end, the transition to college unmasks the charade. In California, the California State University System draws students from the top one-third of graduating seniors. In 2012, about 30% of entering freshmen taking the Entry Level Math test failed the exam and were placed in remedial math classes, despite earning a mean GPA of 3.15 in college prep high school programs. That doesn’t make sense. Good grades in tough courses, yet remediation was needed.[iv]

The problem is not confined to California. Nor is it limited to mathematics. A report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCPPHE) estimates that about half of all four-year college freshmen must take remedial classes. The NCPPHE pinpoints a flawed assumption:

Over the last 15 years, many states have emphasized mastery of specific content and performance standards, as shown through grades and statewide assessments; however, this shift to standards-based performance in the schools generally has not been extended to higher levels of achievement associated with college readiness, whose indicators still focus on courses taken. The flawed assumption has been that if students take the right courses and earn the right grades, they will be ready for college.

We need to restore the legitimacy of college prep courses. Let’s ensure that all students who study and pass advanced subject matter have learned what that their parents, teachers and colleges assume they have learned.

Hmmm.....

Out of curiosity what do you think of his post? Also what do you think of open-source learning, you seem like the kind of guy that would appeal to. Also John Taylor Gatto's "Weapons Of Mass Instruction". If you haven't read it you must.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elites turn away thousands of applicants with perfect SAT scores and thousands with perfect 4.0 GPAs….. But shapely, well-dressed, physically vital candidates are given a substantial head start–as if elite college was some sort of eugenics project.

I understand what Gatto is about. What I was trying to do there was illustrate the central problem that he shares with other attempts to broaden or deconstruct our basic understanding of how education functions, such as self-directed learning and open courseware. Rather than go point-by-point through each of the arguments made by one of these efforts, I figured I'd point out the one piece they all fail to address.

At heart, these ideas all share a common recognition: things are not working the way they are. We are not achieving high success levels, we produce more believers than we do thinkers, and we badly need our intellectual capital in order to stay relevant in the coming century. None of this is wrong.

The other side of the commonality is that they all propose a structural deviation from the norm, and go about illustrating or defining that deviation in a way that shows a complete lack of understanding of what the real source of the above problems is. At the end of the day, they haven't bothered to try understanding the process or designs of human learning any more than the people who built the designs they're hoping to replace. They won't solve anything. It'll be a new house of holes. That's all.

Learning cannot be evaluated and fixed on the basis of a purely philosophical, political, or religious ideal (and I would argue that Gatto, who has acknowledged repeatedly his dislike of the "replacement of religion with the religion of science," is doing exactly that), which then tries to graft nature-based statements onto its premise in order to defend itself. It has to be evaluated and fixed based first on an understanding of nature; the results can be refined using the above, as is appropriate. Horse first, then cart.

Gatto is especially typical of the "use nature to argue my case but never really understand it" approach, in that he grabs one or two obvious truths (ie we don't all learn to read at the same age) and never bothers to dig into the causes, opportunities, needs for support, or even the basic biological and sociological influencers of that event. He doesn't seem to think it's important to understand anything more about it than "WE DON'T ALL LEARN TO READ AT THE SAME AGE." That idea is both the start of his realization, and the end. So he simply draws a line straight from just such a premise to "see, it's all fucked right now," never acknowledges (or maybe never realizes) that the children who are most responsible for that discrepancy are going to be the ones most at risk under his vision, and away we go.

So, as with just about everybody who proposes a temporarily refreshing-sounding "do over" of a complicated issue, he makes some crucial, accurate points about where the problems lie, but he never completes his analysis by looking into causation or impact. He spends all his time talking about education, and never for one moment really delves into what learning is and how it is best supported. Because, as with so many others, he assumes that the right reception of content will equate to learning. The right experience will equate to learning. Get the system right, and learning will just sort of happen.

And these assumptions are good if you are learning a single, simple skill....if that's all you're after, the aforementioned combination can be a strong basis. But it doesn't do much more than that.

I'd hate to go line by line through what I dislike about Gatto, because it would bore me, but I'll use just one of his logical reaches to illustrate what he seems to do on EVERY SINGLE aspect of his argument:

Fact A: Americans have a problem with obesity
+
Inexplicable Assumption B: American school cafeterias are the primary source of this problem
+
Claim he never bothers to substantiate C: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all choose photogenic intellectual lessers over overweight genius candidates
=
Moron thought D: Schools are designed to keep the middle and lower classes fat, so they will not get into good schools.

Now, for those readers who haven't read Gatto, just to show I'm not being hyperbolic, here's a snippet of that portion of his text:



Given claims like that, it's no wonder he refuses to cite his informational sources with dismissive comments about how source referencing is the stuff of the (implicitly lowly and unremarkable) professoriate.