Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Are We Behind?
A Chinese education compared to a United States education are completely different. Chinese students do not typically have a summer break as we do, nor do they take holiday vacations. Most of the students have higher test scores than us. They are also far more advanced. I feel this is an issue because we are running behind not only China, but several other countries. Whether or not we should take away summer vacation is debatable. How can you take away something students have come so accustomed to? Are we starting to fall behind because we simply do not care if jobs are being taken over by citizens of other countries?
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You bring up a great point!! Are we by taking summer break lazy? If the subject of taking summer break, and holiday breaks away it would anger many people. I honestly do not think we can take away these breaks after they have been there so long. We as a country are most defiantly falling behind because of the lack of care.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry about China, I think it compares apples and oranges. Their system of school is very different than ours:
ReplyDeleteI worry about the Achievement Gap between the poor and the middle class. Check out this from the New York Times in 2006. They said, "At Johns Hopkins University, two sociologists, Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander, collected a trove of data on
Baltimore schoolchildren who began first grade in 1982. They found that contrary to expectations, children in poverty did largely make a year of progress for each year in school.
But poor children started out behind their peers, and the problems compounded when school ended for the summer. Then, middle-class children would read books, attend camp and return to school in September more
advanced than when they left. But poorer children tended to stagnate. “The long summer break is especially hard for disadvantaged children,” Professor Alexander said. “Some school is good, and more is better.”It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement. “Family really is important, and it’s very hard for schools to offset or compensate fully for family disadvantage,” he said.
Link to entire article: http://www.lwvindy.org/files/ItTakesMoreThanSchoolsToCloseAchievementGap.pdf
What China Does:
ReplyDeleteStudents in secondary education face another challenge in addition to being admitted to colleges and universities; at the end of each school year, students have to take entrance examinations to be admitted into the next grade. If students fail to pass the test, they may take the test again. Ultimately the students who are unable to pass the test are left unable to finish their education.
Entrance Examinations:
At the posterior of every school year, the National College Entrance Examination is held for the purpose of selecting students for higher education, and other positions of leadership [2]. These examinations are basis for recruiting top students in Mainland China [2]. Secondary students are admitted in three different quotas: The first quota admits students to key universities, the second to regular universities within that administrative division, and the third quota of students from other provinces and regions who are admitted to institutions that are operated at the provincial level.
We take everyone. We teach everyone. We keep everyone. How do you compare?
If we better our education here in the United States, competition with other countries for jobs here in the U.S. would decrease thus causing an incredible chain reaction causeing a change in the poverty levels in the U.S. If people in the U.S. had jobs poverty would disapear!
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