Education: Worse Than Ever in the US

A research group at Harvard University just published an alarming report on the competence of American students in various disciplines – it was the BBC that reported this news The conclusion is definitive. American students succeed much less than students in any other country in the world. Even students who come from wealthy or educated families succeed much less than students from other countries who come from wealthy or educated families.

Generally, American students rank in about 30th place. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Vermont and Massachusetts, where students achieve a rank equivalent to 8th or 10th in the world.

The authors have reached an inevitable conclusion: With these kinds of results, the entire U.S. economy is at risk. American students will not be able to take over from their elders because the study also shows that the grades of today’s students are not as good as those of students 10 years ago.

Why is this true? The authors of the study did not venture to find an explanation; they just reported the alarming results.

We must therefore immediately forget about explanations related to the students’ social class, education level, or media influence. With the same setbacks, students from other countries are able to succeed substantially more. So what is it?

Actually, there are not many suspicious factors left on the list. Remove the role of the parents, the influence of the media, the role of money; I repeat, even if all of these factors play a part, they do not enable American students to succeed more than students from countries subjected to the same conditions.

One of the common factors that remains is the teachers’ training.

What if we start to train teachers with a primary focus on content again? What if we re-introduced inspectors in schools? Because the better performance of countries like Canada is still weak compared to that of many countries where content and inspectors still exist.