Sorry about the disappearing comments. You re-posted so many times, so quickly, that the spam filter kicked in and hid them. Hmm, maybe you’ve got super-speed already!

(P.S. I removed your email address from the comment that I pulled out of moderation. As the site owner I can see the one from the form field, but anyone can see the one you put in the comment itself—including spammers, who have programs that crawl across the web and pick up new addresses for their mailing lists.)

In a recent survey 80% of high schoolers couldn’t name the worlds largest democracy, and 25% couldn’t name the Ocean between the US and Asia.

What makes this all the more concerning today is 1) the world is becoming such a small place, with travel and technology connecting us to people all over the world 2) US companies now operate in nearly all countries of the world, so our children will have jobs that almost certainly will have an international aspect 3) the US is the worlds sole superpower and as such plays global policeman.
With all this in place we very much need to improve the geographic knowledge of our kids.

We’re doing our little bit by making world maps available at http://www.mapkids.org/world-map-for-kids.html

PS: English teachers get paid far, far worse.

I fully support paying teachers more, as they have one of the most important jobs in our society. If doubling my property taxes meant we could double teacher salaries, I’d happily pay it. I think that if we can make the position so desirable that people have to compete to get it, instead of having school districts beg and plead for teachers, then we’d see some quality teaching. However, I would like to make sure we have the facts straight — can anyone confirm that average teacher salaries really are “insulting”?

Long story short: extremely effective right wing propaganda since then has eroded the general public’s confidence in public education (although it’s interesting to note that national Gallup polls have consistently shown for years that while most people think the state of public education in America is abysmal as a whole, most people also think quite highly of the particular public schools their children attend).

Those who advocate standardized tests mean well. The tests are intended to monitor the quality of education and hold teachers and students accountable for their academic performance. High stakes (such as college admissions, school funding, high school graduation, etc.) are attached to test scores as incentive. The problem is that the tests are inadequate measures of achievement. It’s an excellent idea to hold teachers and students accountable for their performance, but these tests hold them accountable for the wrong things. This is not the work of teachers but of naive politicians who understand neither pedagogy nor principles of scientific measurement.

As to the collective intelligence of public school teachers. . . . Look at it this way: Confidence in public schools erodes. Teachers take the heat. The job’s a strain to begin with, and for many, this is too much. The pay is insulting, while the job is exhausting and generally thankless. Many who stay in the profession become worn out and less effective. Many more leave. Turnover is significant. Less than 50% of new teachers remain teachers more than a few years. As a result, the vast majority of our teachers are either novices or burned out veterans who’ve held on longer than they should. A lot of the novices have potential, and many are actually fairly good, but given the statistics, it’s hard to find mentors, and these guys aren’t likely to stick around long enough to gain the experience they need to become exceptionally good on their own. Distrust of teachers becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

Meanwhile, bad press for teachers gives children a measure of license to slack off and behave disruptively in class, making the job that much harder, and when the children’s grades suffer as a result, the teachers take the blame.

It all comes back to blaming teachers by default. The more we do it, the worse things get.