學英文「林威老師」app

Educational expenditures are now about 6 percent of U.S. GDP.

But is all that extra money invested in education giving us much

of a return? Are American students so much better prepared,

coming out of K-12 education, than in times past?

It's not easy to say. Let's turn to the latest 2009 report from the

National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is typically

considered the definitive source of answers to these questions.

On the first page of a fifty-six-page report, I find this sentence:

“The average reading score for 17-year-olds was not significantly

different from that in 1971.” On the same page, a little further

below, I find: “The average mathematics score for 17-year-olds

was not significantly different from that in 1973.” There are

plenty of ways you can slice and dice these numbers with

statistics, but the bottom line is that an “eyeball test” shows very

little in terms of net gains on the tests, and that's speaking over

decades.

Keep in mind that according to the so-called “Flynn effect,” each

generation has higher average IQ scores than the last. So if we're

getting smarter on relatively abstract IQ tests but not getting

better test scores at school, possibly schools are declining in

their productivity, despite all the extra money spent. Or take the

constant scores in mathematics. We are a wealthier and smarter

nation, more reliant on mathematics in our technology, and

there is more mathematics “on tap” in any home computer. If

anything, instructional progress, and thus progress in measured

scores, is to be expected. You might also think that mathematics

hasn't changed so much in decades, so the better teaching

techniques should spread and push out the lesser teaching….