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Spending versus Academic Achievement
OR Everything You Wanted To Know About Schooling But Were Afraid To Ask 1. Kansas City, MO., poured tons of money into her well- meaning school system; it made little or no difference. 2. According to Hanushek, class size makes little or no difference in the long run. 3. The Jencks and Coleman studies have shown that 85 percent of our achievement in life is a function of the socioeconomic/intellectual status of the family. 4. So what if scores move up or down a little bit. The bottom line is that the vast majority graduate with poor basic skills while, from kindergarten through graduate school, virtually all subject matter is HAPPILY forgotten just as soon as summer rolls around. 5. Upon being forced into most schools, public or private, most kids experience a drop in sociability, self-esteem, curiosity, and creativity while fear, boredom, confusion, resistance, ineffective thinking, judgments, labels, humiliation, and anger tend to reign supreme. 6. Seniors in high school are increasingly unable to think effectively, a function, apparently, of unrelenting stress to achieve leading to elevated cortisol and norepinephrine levels combined with brain-wave changes secondary to watching too many screens over too long a time. 7. Most seniors at some elite colleges know who Beavis and Butthead are. Forty percent are unable to place the civil war within the correct half century. We are l9th out of the top twenty industrialized nations in newspaper consumption. 94 percent are unable to name their Congressman. 8. In the meantime, toddlers have taught themselves both a zillion things plus how to speak the native tongue without any formal instruction whatsoever. And 40 million or more adults have taught themselves to use a computer on the job. Meanwhile, "The Best and The Brightest" got us stuck in Vietnam in large part because they could no longer ask the right questions or challenge the conventional wisdom, not to mention the fact that 70 percent of the jobs coming on line in the next ten years will, in reality, require nothing more than an effective; i.e. skill-proficient 8th-grade education. 9. From a mind-expanding point of view George Bernard Shaw said it all: -- "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school" while, in 1900, our nation forged ahead with a 94 percent dropout rate. 10. So, THE bottom line: -- From an EDUCATIONAL; i.e. learning and mind-growing perspective, academia is, for most kids, the biggest well-intended boondoggle in the history of the human race. Robert E. Kay, MD robertekaymd@mycidco.com
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