“We get almost no return for our education investment"

It's for the unions.

But the children are so much more sensitive these days, and they know so much about the importance of supporting alternate life styles like "my friend has two mommies". What does it matter that they can't read, write, or do arithmetic?

Its not about teaching anymore. Its about a Mono-cultural behemoth ever growing. That uses education as an excuse to build an Empire for itself on the backs of people, for propaganda purposes of the left.
Using even Union dues to buy up businesses to effect radical change in Canadian culture with the destruction of Christianity along with Canadian values. Mean while its directorate. That we call an educational administration sucks in personal wealth, while perverting our institutions. Know towing to our enemies. Replacing a death cult in schools without parental permission.
This has become an ideological tumor in our culture that is out to destroy Western civilization.
Its taken them a long time to to utterly twist Peoples mores & make us dummies for control.
The School boards are the template of complete tyranny of this Nation

Disgusting.

It is not to toot my own horn, but a very directly related statistic.

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2012/05/gdp-yield-per-dollar-in-education.html

Very few students could read and understand the graph.

They will, however, know how to put on a condom.

Every variance and modification to our education system in the last 40 years should be repealed and eliminated. All this feel good crap and social engineering has done nothing except derail a system that had a proven track record for those that had the intelligence and drive to succeed. Not every snowflake is special and not everyone deserves to go to college. There should be a far higher emphasis on trade schools and for the rest, they can compete for manual labor jobs that the present day university students taking gender studies, social sciences and basket weaving look down at. What we have now with our "no child left behind" mentality is a broken system that rewards the inept and lowers the bar to where the students can't read, write and are mathematically challenged when the batteries in their calculators go dead. They leave high school with nothing but 2 spirited garbage in their heads, still believing they could all be brain surgeons because their teachers told them so. Since teachers are forced to toe the line it's a save bet that the "co-parents" are completely out of control in pushing agendas that have nothing to do with basic education. Time for a complete overhaul of the whole system so we get some value for the horrendous taxes we pay to perpetuate this failed experiment.

It's easy to justify spending extra billions on education. Just add "But it's for the kids" at the end of your request.

Going by the Captains chart lets go back to 1945 and start over. Our GDP needs all the help it can get.

"They will, however, know how to put on a condom. "
... on their organically grown vegetable.

Honestly, there has to be a middle ground between learning the "three Rs" but getting wacked with the yardstick or pointer and the everything is normal, okay, everybody passes crap that passes as "edumacation" these days.

What can you say? You're fired...

Central planning is expensive.

Here's a possible explanation. In the Michigan school system you can be caught at school drunk 5 times, high on drugs 3 times and even selling drugs in class twice before you're kicked out. That's not the students, it's the Teachers.

Rick at 7:08

Actually, firing is the last thing you can do to a teacher.

"Waiting for Superman" is an outstanding movie which discusses why the public education system is in the crapper. (I saw on Netflix)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg

I think that SAT scores, as reported, are deviations from the mean. Someone who gets the average sccore will always receive a 550, or whatever the mean score is. If the average one year is 70% correct on the math portion, and the average the next year is 80% correct on the math portion, then both of those students would get a 550. Scores are tied to the percentile that you fall in. Small deviations could be do to new questions but they would naturally flatten back out every couple of years. I don't think this tells us anything regarding the cost effectiveness. A comparison of scores from students that were taught with different teaching philosophies and funding methods would probably speak more to the effectiveness of dollars spent.

Cut spending back to 1972 levels.

Actually, firing is the last thing you can do to a teacher. (Eagle 7:29)

It wasn't that hard to fire Lynden Dorval who ran afoul of the evaluation policies (no zero) in Edmonton. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2012/09/14/edmonton-dorval-zero-fired.html

School boards and administrators are prepared to accept no end of incompetence as long as they are not subject to public mockery. But give them a good teacher with decent principles who makes them look like fools...well they can't get rid of him fast enough.

Rita,

Canada is currently rated at 4th or 5th in world for edumacation.

The firing of Lynden Dorval suggests we are only trending downwards.

School boards and administrators are prepared to accept no end of incompetence as long as they are not subject to public mockery But give them a good teacher with decent principles who makes them look like fools well they can't get rid of him fast enough.
Totally agree.

Jason, from the SAT website, and the GMAT website, the raw score is comparable year to year. The percentile your score represents will change from year to year, so 550 might be 62% one year, and 65 another. The graph does not state if they are measuring % change in percentile or raw score.

Lynden Dorval has accepted a offer to teach at a private school. Bless the man.

Sorry, forgot the link.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/19/lynden-dorval-captain-zero/

Here in BC the politburo of the indoctrination collective has stated that objective exams are obsolete and it is the opinion of the classroom commissar regarding the ideologic purity of the student which is the true measure of how well the indoctrination has taken. The indoctrination collective continues to push for increased remuneration and smaller sizes for their re-education camps -- some people in an equal society are far more equal than others and ensure they get as large a share of the social justice pot as possible

Unfortunately, I think BC is a lost cause and the only thing that will bring the population to its senses is a major economic depression. I find a great way of determining whether someone has a scientific bent or not is to state that unless one can quantify something, one knows nothing about it. It's quite interesting to see the response of the innumerate who violently reject it but can't form a cogent argument. Recently I was reading the UBC medical school goals and expectations and "social justice" was in there. It just about made me go through the roof, but on further reflection, it's a way of grading students. Bring up social justice in a complicated medical case presentation - fail. I've also resisted any attempt by the UBC medical school to instruct me in pedagogy -- in medicine one learns by interacting with people who know what they're doing and, considering that I do this for free, I won't deal with any educational theory crap.

One would think that the Flynn effect would have resulted in a slow rise in absolute SAT scores over the past 40 years. Thus, not only are we getting nothing for our educational spending, the effects of public education are actually making people dumber. All we need is a politician with the balls to fire all of the teachers and hire babysitters instead at a fraction of the cost. I'd predict that this would result in a substantial increase in SAT scores once students found out what real world subject were important.

As far as teaching someone to put on a condom, isn't that a self-evident process? It's like having a class in teaching people the politically correct way to breathe.

Public education is an abomination, like almost everything supported by coercion, i.e., taxation.

It's time to start thinking about how to end public education gracefully. Start with a voucher system. This should be made a big issue in the next Ontario election.