US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

[rhoenix]

An international study of maths ability in the US shows how individual states would have performed if they were ranked against other countries, using the OECD's Pisa results as a benchmark.

The study also shows that privileged youngsters in the US, with highly-educated parents, are lagging behind similar youngsters in other developed countries.

This analysis, from academics at Harvard and Stanford in the US and Munich University in Germany, punctures the idea that middle-class US pupils are high achievers.

Southern states Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the weakest performers, with results similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand.

West Virginia is also among the group of lowest performers, where maths levels are far below western European countries or high-performing Asian education systems in South Korea or Singapore.

The US has been a mediocre performer in international education tests, based on average performance across the country, but this study shows how this average conceals a remarkably wide range of successes and failures.

Northern lights
There is a band of high achieving states across the north of the US, where maths results would be as good as many successful European and Asian countries.

If Massachusetts had been considered as a separate entity it would have been the seventh best at maths in the world.

Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey and Montana are all high performers.

But there is a long tail of underachievement that dips well below the levels of secondary school pupils in wealthier western European countries. It dips into levels closer to the developing world.

New York and California are similar in ability to countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, well below the averages for the US and OECD industrialised countries.

There are 23 US states which would be ranked below 30th place in an international ranking of 34 OECD countries at maths.

The study also overturns the idea that middle-class children in the US are as good as their international counterparts.

It shows that in the US, as in other countries, children from better educated, wealthier families will achieve better results than poorer children.

Among children of parents with a low level of education, only 17% were proficient in maths, compared with 43% of children from well-educated families.

Falling behind
But this standard of maths among well-educated families in US is well below their counterparts in other countries.

In Poland, 71% of children from well-educated families were likely to be proficient in maths. In Germany, 64% of better-off children were proficient at maths and 55% in France.

Even such a poor performance was unlikely to set off alarm bells, said Paul Peterson, report co-author and professor of government at Harvard University and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School.

"There is a denial phenomenon," says Prof Peterson.

He said the tendency to make internal comparisons between different groups within the US had shielded the country from recognising how much they are being overtaken by international rivals.

"The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor," he said.

The outcome was a misleading sense of complacency about middle-class education, which always appeared to be ahead, he said.

Report authors, Prof Peterson, Eric Hanushek at Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich, wrote in Education Next magazine: "Lacking good information, it has been easy even for sophisticated Americans to be seduced by apologists who would have the public believe the problems are simply those of poor kids in central city schools. "

"Our results point in quite the opposite direction," .

California down
The underachievement in some southern states was a reflection of deep-rooted historical divides and disadvantages, Prof Peterson said, such as slavery and segregation.

But the study raises questions about how other southern states can buck the trend, such as Texas.

Among the children of poorly educated families, Texas is a spectacularly strong performer, equivalent to sixth place in the OECD rankings, just behind Finland.

California raised another set of negative questions, said Prof Peterson, with a very low performance.

"California was historically thought to have a good education system, but it's plunged since the 1970s," he said.

It has an economy big enough to match many OECD countries, but in education comparisons it would be a lightweight, its maths performance weaker than in almost any other industrialised country.

"It's where the rubber hits the road," said Prof Peterson.

There were long-term implications from all this, he said. Industries were concentrating around areas with successful education systems. And success in education was linked to healthier and wealthier lives for individuals.

Rebecca Winthrop, director for the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, said the findings would "raise eyebrows". In particular, she thought it would be a wake-up call for well-educated parents who thought that worries about education were a problem for "other people's children".

But she said it was important to remember the great size of the country - and that even getting down to state level there were still huge underlying disparities and inequalities.

"California is in itself a huge place," she said. And any aggregate results are going to hide the gulf between schools serving the Silicon Valley super rich and the migrant poor.

Andreas Schleicher, responsible for the OECD's Pisa tests, said this study was a challenge to middle-class households who thought that debates about school standards did not apply to them.

"The general perception has typically been that this is mainly a concern around poor schools in poor neighbourhoods and so middle-class families have often not been particularly engaged in this," he said.

In the short term, he said, the US economy would be insulated against this underachievement because it still had a "strong skill base, simply because it was the first economy investing in universal education in the 1960s, and those people still make up a large part of the workforce".

But this legacy would not last forever.

"As time goes by, skill gaps will become increasingly apparent," he said.

The report authors conclude that as well as focusing on the gap between rich and poor, the US needs to pay more attention to the rear lights of their international rivals as they race away ahead of them.

For additional fun, the rankings against different countries, per state:

How US states would compare with OECD member states in maths tests:
1. South Korea
2. Japan
3. Switzerland
4. Netherlands
5. Finland
6. Estonia
Massachusetts
7. Canada
8. Belgium
9. Germany
10. Poland
Minnesota
New Jersey
11. Austria
Vermont
Montana
12 Australia
13. Czech Republic
14. Ireland
New Hampshire
Colorado
15. New Zealand
16. Slovenia
17. Denmark
North Dakota
18. France
South Dakota
19. United Kingdom
Wisconsin
Kansas
20. Iceland
Washington
Maryland
21. Luxembourg
Texas
Virginia
22. Norway
Ohio
Pennsylvania
23. Portugal
Maine
Wyoming
24. Italy
25. Slovak Republic
North Carolina
26. Spain
Idaho
Alaska
Utah
27. United States
28. Sweden
Indiana
Rhode Island
Iowa
29. Israel
30. Hungary
Illinois
Nebraska
Oregon
Delaware
South Carolina
Missouri
Arizona
Michigan
Kentucky
New York
Hawaii
Arkansas
Nevada
Georgia
Florida
Oklahoma
California
31. Greece
Tennessee
New Mexico
32. Turkey
Louisiana
West Virginia
Alabama
Mississippi
33. Chile
34. Mexico

This was a sobering read for me. I've heard complaints from FrogBen regarding abysmal science knowledge of new graduates going into college that he has to work on, but I didn't know our standards for education had slipped quite this much.

To me, this makes attacks on Common Core standards in education here in the U.S. all the more disquieting.

[Hotfoot]

Listen man, you have to understand that we are the greatest nation in the world in every respect. All this criticism? It doesn't add up.

That said, you've heard my rant about the state of education in the US about a thousand times before. This is nothing new, and I lived/worked in one of the highest rated states on that list.

[rhoenix]

Listen man, you have to understand that we are the greatest nation in the world in every respect. All this criticism? It doesn't add up.

That said, you've heard my rant about the state of education in the US about a thousand times before. This is nothing new, and I lived/worked in one of the highest rated states on that list.

My apologies, I didn't remember your rants at the time I'd posted this.

Also, you're a terrible, awful human being who should feel bad due to that pun.

But, yes - I've heard repeated rumblings about this from several people, it's just still a shock to see it put so starkly.

[Josh]

Listen man, you have to understand that we are the greatest nation in the world in every respect. All this criticism? It doesn't add up.

That said, you've heard my rant about the state of education in the US about a thousand times before. This is nothing new, and I lived/worked in one of the highest rated states on that list.

I actually have not heard this rant and would like to, in all seriousness.

[Hotfoot]

I actually have not heard this rant and would like to, in all seriousness.

You should get on Skype more, I must have harangued the others with it a dozen times or so by now. I'll see if I can get in a proper ranting mood for the full thing later, but the short version of it is that the Education System, despite putting most of its money into its leadership, is one of the most rudderless groups in existence, filled with people who are paid nowhere near enough for what time and effort they put into it.

Unless you're admin, then you get paid way too much for doing way too little.

[Josh]

I actually have not heard this rant and would like to, in all seriousness.

You should get on Skype more, I must have harangued the others with it a dozen times or so by now. I'll see if I can get in a proper ranting mood for the full thing later, but the short version of it is that the Education System, despite putting most of its money into its leadership, is one of the most rudderless groups in existence, filled with people who are paid nowhere near enough for what time and effort they put into it.

Unless you're admin, then you get paid way too much for doing way too little.

I should, but y'all stay up way late and I need my sleep when I can get it.

Sounds like a good rant, though, and the gist is something I've felt for a while now. Hell, going back to when I was a kid in school.

[frigidmagi]

I hate to say it, but I really think there needs to be a salary cap on how much an adminster can make in the school system. As it stands, they are sucking away a large part of the budget and what they give in return is not equivent value.

[Josh]

I hate to say it, but I really think there needs to be a salary cap on how much an adminster can make in the school system. As it stands, they are sucking away a large part of the budget and what they give in return is not equivent value.

And fucking how.

When I was in school, we had a new hotshot top admin come in. He proceeded to ruin the preexisting disciplinary structure with a new peer pressure-based system called assertive discipline, among other mishaps. Then the school board voted in for a million-dollar annuity to get him to stay, after which he collected a few more big paydays before leaving them in a lurch.

[Hotfoot]

Or the fact that Administrators can pull down benefits from any school system they've spent enough time in? I've seen Superintendents show up for just the exact number of years they need to get retirement benefits from a school system just so they can have a third, fourth, or fifth school system that gives them money once they've "retired". Meanwhile they usually do fuck and all to actually improve the system they're snaking money from.

Okay, so problem number one, Administration gets paid way too goddamned much. I don't have the numbers anymore, but basically if you make it to Superintendent, you're usually pulling down six figures easy on year one. In a wealthier school system and you're there for a while, we're talking high six figures, maybe SEVEN. Principals and VPs get paid closer to sane standards, but they usually have more work they have to do, so that I don't mind too much.

Teachers though? Man, fuck teacher salary. Salary is bad enough given that most teachers pull 80+ hour weeks, and in return for the first 3-5 years of your job you risk being fired for ANY REASON. Not just fired, BLACKLISTED if your boss just didn't like you. They actively try to prevent teachers from getting tenure, so they'll come up with reasons to fire you after three years the day before you got tenure just to keep you from getting paid what might approach a reasonable figure.

Now, what your average teacher gets paid yearly varies wildly depending on where you are, but it's roughly 40K per year around here, more or less depending on your district. Now, that's close enough to a decent if somewhat meager standard of living here in New Jersey, but then you have the incidentals. First up is your pension, the 403(b), which is a 401(k) for teachers, basically. Mine's still running, because fuck it, but you decide how much money you take out of your paycheck for the damn thing and how aggressively you want to invest it. Sure, you get that money back tax free when you retire, but that's when you retire, you don't see that money for decades, normally. Then there's Union Dues, which is a fucking joke. It's "optional", but it's really not, but until you hit Tenure, they give precisely zero shits about your ass, so it's wasted money, but it's wasted money you have to spend or everyone fucking shuns you.

But then the fucking hammer drops. I was working in an Inner City School with...questionable funding. It was one of the worst performing schools in the worst performing district in the fucking city. Books? Handouts? Photocopies? Experiments? Fuck, paper and fucking pencils? I am supplying that shit for my students. Hell, there was a photocopier in the building but they never even gave me a code for it, not that I would have ever been able to use the damn things.

I don't have hard numbers, but a decently large portion of my paycheck went into things like photocopies, school supplies, and other such things. When you're already just trying to get by after taxes, dues, and all the rest, that shit is ruinous. Never mind things like student debt.

But hey, you get dental, so that evens out, right? I mean, I had to get a thing to stop my teeth from grinding and I saved a bunch of money with that.

Now, if you survive this period, like I didn't, you'll work your way up the pay scales to an average salary of something to the tune of 60-70 grand after a few years, assuming you get tenure, but that's assuming you survive.

See, they can't fire people with tenure, even if they are shit at their jobs and are pulling down the coveted six figure teacher's salary that comes with decades of working the system. So the most expensive teachers they can't get rid of, but they can stop new teachers from suckling from the teat of the DOE's budget. So they often try, just to keep costs down. Not that they have to try hard, because most people would look for a job anywhere else after a year of this shit. Now, I'll just admit that I had an exceptionally bad experience that I won't go into here, but barring that, it's incredibly stressful. Each and every day of your life is centered around grading, lesson plans, meetings, and calling parents (most of whom either didn't give a shit or couldn't do shit, either way), and that's before, during, and after school, but let's talk for a moment about during the school day.

By contract, I'm supposed to have 1 period off per day, a planning period, where I can do paperwork, lesson planning, or whatever the fuck I want to do. It's the one and only break I get during the day to do things like take a shit or talk to my mentor. This is mandated by the Union. It's up there with my lunch break.

I got one break. A week. Ever. Every other one was a meeting with the VP, my mentor, my grade level, or the science team. Every. One.

My lunch break? Once I got a half hour to eat. Once. Most of the time I had to shovel food down my throat in ten minutes or less, and then it was back to the fucking grind.

But hey, school vacations, those are great, right?

Yeah, those are fucking fantastic. Let me tell you how half of them you come in to work for. Those are often professional development days, where you come in and waste time listening to some fucking asshole drone on about some bullshit and then pack his shit up to go spew that same bullshit somewhere else. None of it fucking mattered, but it was vital we be there for it. Fuck, the days our admin tried to spin the stats of that shithole were fantastic. It was clear he was trying to keep spirits up and keep hope alive, but the numbers were right there for us to read, and we're all fucking teachers. WE UNDERSTAND THE FUCKING NUMBERS. IT IS OUR FUCKING JOB.

So like I said, shitty fucking school, in the crapper for years. I was teaching middle school science, with my students having an average reading level FOUR GRADES BELOW the grade I was teaching. That was the AVERAGE.

What the fuck do you want me to do with that? What the fuck can ANYONE do with that? These kids have been failed for the better part of decade by this system before they got to me, but I have to compete with the motherfuckers in the suburbs with tutors and shit? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the standard, No Child Left Behind. Can't fail them, because if you do, it means YOU failed.

Except we ARE leaving them behind. We're pushing them into the next grade level without the understanding and knowledge required to handle it, leaving them to fail all the way out of school. In a city where there was a gangland drug shooting TWO BLOCKS from my fucking campus, involving students who were just in high school, kids only a few years distant from my kids, that's a fucking problem. A lot of these kids? They had basically no hope of ever getting into college ever and they were on the cusp of understanding that. Worse, it wasn't even anything they themselves had done. It was teachers and parents and the system failing them utterly and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do to change that.

Many of those kids that were in my class are probably dead, in jail, or parents themselves right now, and some are possibly two or more. A few might have made it out, and I hope to hell they did, but that school is shut down now. The kids and teachers spread to the four winds.

But they were trying to make it better. They actually made a lot of improvements in the decade that Principal was there, but it was just too far gone. All of the bogus fucking test scores they tried to put in, all of the bullshit to keep the doors open longer, in the end, it just didn't matter. If they put money into the school, maybe that would have helped. Maybe if they had gotten veteran teachers from other districts with promises of higher pay, maybe if they had new textbooks and decent supplies and worked with parents to provide appropriate discipline and outside of school tutoring, there might have been a chance, but that's not what happened. A LOT of money went into that school system too, that's the thing, but it wasn't spent on the areas that needed it.

I rarely run into this these days, because people know my stance on the issue, but there's people who exist who bitch about how much teachers get paid. Average salaries of 50-70 grand for 9 months of work sounds pretty fucking sweet, after all, and you can get a summer job to supplement it, though unless it's a summer school teaching gig, you're competing with every student ever, and man FUCK summer school gigs. Camp Counselor gigs for the Y or other such things aren't bad though.

Oh, and of course, where would I be if I didn't bring up the state and national standardized tests. Oh fuck those things. I have to stop teaching for like a month and a half to prep the kids for these fucking tests, tests which may or may not even matter for my curriculum, because why have a test based on the material I've been teaching? FUCK. THESE. TESTS. Fuck them right in the fucking ear. Yes, I know, we need some way to tell if our kids are learning what they need to learn. Yes, testing sucks and not all kids are good at it. Tests in and of themselves, even standardized ones, aren't bad. These suck, because what's done with them? THEY FUCKING CUT THE FUNDING OF SCHOOLS AND SHUT THEM DOWN. Failing schools are often failing because they don't have the money to attract new teachers or pay for new teaching initiatives. Cutting the fucking funding is fucking INSURING FAILURE from that point on. Teachers are graded on if their students pass or fail. If I've got some little shits who want to see me canned, they can INTENTIONALLY FAIL THE TEST and my ass gets lit up for it. They don't receive additional help or tutoring, they don't even get held back a year, but me? I can get fired without tenure, and with tenure, I can be reassigned to the rubber room or a fucking broom closet until I decide to quit.

And if you're in a situation where these kids have been tossed from grade to grade like a fucking live hand grenade, you can either jump on it or bullshit the kid up a level to the next poor motherfucker who has to deal with it. So what are we incentivized to do? Either help the kids cheat or pump the stats to look better so the fucking Eye of Sauron passes over us, meanwhile the kids get fucked out of any hope of education so that we can have another year to try to help the next generation of kids.

There's also the lack of standards and the power the admin has over what is or is not taught. I personally was reprimanded by my VP for calling Sex Ed...well...Sex Ed. Which is the name of the fucking curriculum in this state. He told me I was teaching Health as well as Science, and since Sex Ed must be taught at some point in middle school, I asked if I was expected to pick up that fucking anvil too. He balked, said no, and never answered me when I asked who was handling it.

Motherfucker, we are in a school system with parents barely 15 years older than their kids, who have grandparents who are barely 30 year older than their grandkids. WE MIGHT WANT TO FUCKING INCLUDE THE STATE MANDATED SEXUAL EDUCATION CLASS TO THEM SO THEY CAN STAY IN SCHOOL LONG ENOUGH TO GET A MOTHERFUCKING HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA!

This is a good chunk of the rant, but it's really just the beginning of it, and I'd better stop here for now or I'm just going to devolve into longer and stronger strings of curses with less actual content between them.

[Josh]

Okay, question for you.

In isolation from all other issues and assuming that you have an actually functional system running behind the teachers, what do you think would be a good metric by which teachers could be evaluated for competence? Average grades come across as a shitty metric, even if you calibrate them for difficulty of subject.

Do you think/have ideas for any way the system as it currently exists to be salvaged?

[frigidmagi]

Honestly if I was in a position to have kids, at this point I would seriously consider homeschooling them (even more given I'm in Arizona), bluntly I don't think I could do any worse then the school system itself. I'll grant in this case the fact that I tend to keep my school books (and buy more besides) helps.

Now there is a concern over socialization, but to continue the bluntness, there are many ways to socialize children. Sports, informal groups, churches, you name it.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Honestly if I was in a position to have kids, at this point I would seriously consider homeschooling them (even more given I'm in Arizona), bluntly I don't think I could do any worse then the school system itself. I'll grant in this case the fact that I tend to keep my school books (and buy more besides) helps.

Now there is a concern over socialization, but to continue the bluntness, there are many ways to socialize children. Sports, informal groups, churches, you name it.

I probably wouldn't homeschool, because there are areas I know I am not competent to teach. But should I ever have offspring by surrogate or adopt, there will be be fun supplemental activities.

Alright Little Timmy, the trebuchet we are building has a 6 meter lever arm with a fulcrum 1.5 meters away from center. It is designed to throw a 20 kilo projectile using a 150 kilo counterweight. How far should the projectile go? Have it done by the time we get to the park.

[Hotfoot]

Okay, question for you.

In isolation from all other issues and assuming that you have an actually functional system running behind the teachers, what do you think would be a good metric by which teachers could be evaluated for competence? Average grades come across as a shitty metric, even if you calibrate them for difficulty of subject.

Do you think/have ideas for any way the system as it currently exists to be salvaged?

Standardized Curriculums and metrics would help, so that the tests dovetail into the curriculum. That gets....problematic though. Tests each year, while potentially useful, get very, very complicated as you go. Teachers already deal with admins monitoring their classes to give them advice (which is of varied use), and there's a lot more on top of that. Part of the issue is trying to make sure a teacher isn't shit BEFORE they get tenure, rather than adjusting tenure to a different standard that's more a gradual slope of benefits as you go.

The issue though, is less with the fact that there are tests and more to do with how the tests are made, what they test, and what the system's response to the grades of the test are. If I'm a teacher entering a school system where the average child is 4 grade levels behind in basic skills (literacy, maths, etc.), I shouldn't be giving them a test for skills they clearly don't have. I can't expect them to pass a test on long division if they still have issues with addition and subtraction. I can't test them on sentence structure if they can't spell, or hell, write.

The tests give you workable data, if slightly flawed, but they give you data. Our response to that data is utterly fucked. The response to failing grades should be to give those schools support. Oversight along with it, sure, but support. That means increased funding, veteran teachers from across the country who can help teachers, students, and parents with education. In that oversight, lead by teachers who are veterans of the system who know what the hell they are doing and give a damn, not admins, politicians, or fucking hell, parents, though they should all be a part of it, you can ferret out the real issues.

Grades are an utterly useless metric. They're fluffed all to hell due to NCLB and bitchy parents who can't believe their little Timmy got high instead of doing his fucking homework. Grades are meaningless on the overall scale (obviously not entirely, but enough teachers fluff them that it's an issue).

As far as salvaging the system? Repeal No Child Left Behind. Burn it to the fucking ground and salt the earth from whence it came. That's step one.

Step two? Lower the salaries of the admins. They're puff positions in a lot of districts and the fuckers use the money to pay for a house in Tampa. Cut the fucking things in half at least and start raising the salaries of teachers, as well as giving schools more money for educational shit. Not fucking bullshit like smartboards, fuck that rich-ass shit, shit like computers, better textbooks, fuck, e-readers loaded with textbooks for the kids. Hell, make them tablets with keyboards or netbooks so no kid can say they don't have a computer to write a report on. We'd SAVE money on the textbook costs for that shit and be able to give every single child in the united states an electronic device at the same motherfucking time.

I'm serious. Check out how much fucking textbooks cost, and the bullshit that goes into making them. It's fucking terrifying.

Create a system that allows teachers to fail kids while still taking their education as a serious thing. Yeah, it sucks being held back a grade, but it sucks more graduating high school without the ability to do your fucking taxes. This is where looking to school systems in other nations and picking up tricks would help a lot. Steal liberally. Those amazing maths and science texts in Japan? Translate them, make them your own. Whatever magic Scandinavia is doing? Take notes. Yeah, they're small scale compared to the US, but it's worth it to look at.

Speaking of stealing, look at what the private schools are doing and see what you can take from that for the public schools. It's not all just money, I'll tell you that much.

Now, there's also the issue of higher education. Our goal in Primary is to get them to Secondary. That is our mantra, our life, our code.

It's a bunch of fucking horse shit.

Not that getting kids to college is a bad thing (well, today it kind of is, but that's beside the point), but it's not for everyone. We need to be able to get kids ready to get into the workforce at the end of Highschool if that's what they want to do. We've lost a lot of Home Economics and Metal/Wood Shop classes all across the country, and while our need for metalworkers might be a bit lower than it was 50 years ago, there's still a need for manual labor across the country, to support our infrastructure and improve it.

We have made manual labor a fucking four letter word, and it's hurting us. Not that people shouldn't strive for their dreams, but maybe they should have some fucking skills to pay their way until they can achieve said dreams.

Never mind the resentment that breeds from the people looking down at stuff like that when their parents are in that field.

Then, there's college. Fuck man, the state of college these days is a joke in the US. I can't speak as definitively on this subject. but for a lot of jobs a college degree is seen as mandatory, but these jobs don't pay enough to live and pay off the college debt. I can see the argument for Lawyers and Doctors paying a lot for their schools when they get big paychecks later on, but even that system is fucking broken right now (that's another rant on how our Medical system treats Med Students).

Getting back to the original point, a lot of people have been talking shit about Common Core. I don't know it, it came onto the scene after I left. That said, it's an honest attempt to find a new way to teach kids fundamental concepts by applying skills and techniques we've not used before. Some people swear by it, other people deride it because "It's not the way I was taught". I'm going to side with the teachers in the system for this one, but something like this needed to happen, especially in places where the kids have been failing K-4 all the way through high school.

[Josh]

Those are excellent points and if I get the time in the morning I'll give you a more detailed response. A lot of it dovetails with my own thoughts, particularly vis a vis manual labor and non-college outcomes.

[frigidmagi]

What if we cut down on the tests? Instead we made it like... I don't know... You had a test that you have to pass before you can advance to high school and a test you had to pass before you could graduate high school. A federally created and adminstered test maybe? Then at least we could set a national minium floor of what high school students and graduates actually know...

Or is that insane?

[rhoenix]

What if we cut down on the tests? Instead we made it like... I don't know... You had a test that you have to pass before you can advance to high school and a test you had to pass before you could graduate high school. A federally created and adminstered test maybe? Then at least we could set a national minium floor of what high school students and graduates actually know...

Or is that insane?

It sounds completely reasonable to me. Isn't that pretty much how the Scandinavian countries do so?

[Josh]

Okay, going through it.

Textbooks have been a scam industry from way back and their costs get more ridiculously inflated as the years go by. At the secondary level they're often a way for certain professors and deans to pad their income. Case in point would be my two buddies who went into EE at Texas Tech, where the dean of the department (a humanities major) would issue a new textbook for one of the classes in his department every year. Since he was not a professional in either electrical or engineering fields, the books were useless junk that the professors discarded on the first day of class.

The argument there is that the costs have to be ridiculously inflated to keep the publishers in business, and the constant cosmetic renewals are also necessary or else everyone will just pass viable older editions along.

That this argument results in comfortable residuals for the writers and obscene profits for the publishers is just very damn convenient. I don't know that switching to ebook versions would actually help with that, since the actual cost of production is ridiculously low compared to cost of purchase. If there was a wholesale conversion to ereader, the electronic versions would just be priced up accordingly.

More practically, the text publishing industry just needs to be taken behind the woodshed and drubbed thoroughly and a more sensible purchasing scheme instituted. But I'm sure that'll also run into the usual web of kickbacks and intrigue you get at admin levels in any bureaucracy.

Definitely agree that failure needs to be returned to the system.

On the matter of going to college: one problem I have with the current system is that asking a kid of eighteen who like as not has little to no actual working experience to pick their lifelong vocation is ridiculous. There are some who pick up their passion early and know what they want to do, but the average teenager has no clue. I sure as hell didn't at that age, and my first pass at college was a disaster for precisely that reason. I floundered, bouncing from idea to idea and finally ended up wasting time playing cards (rummy, we didn't have MtG in those days) at the student union until it was time to give up and go get a real job.

So the option should be there for the ones who have a strong desire to pursue it, but for those who don't we shouldn't be shoving them under the debt loads (and draining their families) so they can go booze it up for a while and then come out either with something they don't actually want to do or fail out with a load of debt and nothing to show for it.

Furthermore, getting out and doing a labor job might just show some of these kids that there's something to be said for breaking a sweat and working with a crew. Looking back, I wish I'd just skipped my initial college time (even if the credits I did garner came back to be useful later on) and just gone straight into the workforce. The experience I got put me on totally different paths from anything I could've imagined as a teenager. I sure as hell never would've thought I'd end up in health care and I had no real comprehension of the very concept of safety work.

So yeah, the priority shouldn't be college at all- it should be prepping people to be functional members of the workforce. That same foundation of knowledge is entirely applicable to college anyway, and the lack of that fundamental knowledge is why colleges have to weed out the illiterate and the utterly math-incapable anyway.

[Hotfoot]

The costs of production are actually reasonably high for textbooks, since they've got such low numbers for total numbers of copies made. They also engage in a bidding war against other publishers for any given school district, which can involve books that are literally nothing more than their covers until they are printed (read Feynman's account of helping California choose their textbooks). It's the same reason RPG books tend to be so expensive, only moreso. Cut out the printer, and you save a ton of money, the publishers can keep printing large run books that they make more profit on per copy sold, sell the layouts of the books with some little bonuses for pennies on the dollar, and really everyone walks away happy. That one is going to be like ripping off a band-aid though, no one actually wants to do it. It would help if we had a tablet or netbook specifically designed for schoolwork, of course.

[Josh]

Given the growth of the POD industry, I don't really buy cost of production as still being high. It may not be pennies on the dollar like you'd see for a mass-produced hardcover, but actual physical production should clock in somewhere south of ten dollars a unit, especially because by POD standards even a few thousand would constitute a bulk order.

[Hotfoot]

PoD should cut costs, and it's a nice halfway point if that's how they're doing it now, but when you can cut the actual costs to that of paying a layout professional to create a digital edition, it's absurdly cheap.