The Road to Hell..

I don't know where he went to undergrad, but somewhere nice. He's smart enough to teach at MIT, which must mean something.

... and yes your dumb, I'm dumb, everybody is dumb. And that's okay!

What I was getting at was FulAg's view of looking at SAT/ACT scores as a barometer of academic success. Of course these tests measure something and you have to have ways of measuring academic achievement, but it isn't the end all, be all in my opinion. I don't think better test scores justify spending more on a school per se. I think you should spend a lot on education, because there has to be a high level of education available to all children.

I am just someone who thinks education is really important and we should spent an awful lot of money on it. It isn't bad for affluent kids that they're parents can afford them a great education (moi... look Barack, I wrote something in French), but it can be really bad for those kids who are less affluent. There should be a high level of education that is available for the kids in the worst of situations. If they still fail, they still fail... but it won't be because their community didn't try to help them out. More or less this exist, I think, across the U.S. to varying degrees, but there are cities and States with serious public education problems. Texas, I'm not sure, is one of them... but people down here shouldn't start thinking about downsizing certain school districts just because they perform slightly below some average test score.

 

Canada isn't really bi-lingual though (officially maybe, but not in practice). Quebec is French first, bi-lingual, and the rest of Canada is just English. If you live in Vancouver, why learn French? Yippy kye yay if you do, but it isn't an imperative.

However, if you live in Montreal and want to communicate with the rest of the world, it's an imperative that you learn English. If Texas votes one day to become a Mexican state again, than it'll be an imperative for Texans who don't know Spanish to learn Spanish. Until then, it's helpful if you do, but isn't a must.

I speak German, but I'm still an embarassment to America when I'm in France, Mexico, and pretty much everywhere else. Does that mean I don't care about other cultures and other places? No, it just means there are just way too many languages for me to learn properly and only for the benefit of feeling good about myself. So to Barack "I don't speak a foreign-language" Obama... so what if Americans embarass themselves abroad!?! We can't all learn French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Greek or Chinese just for the pleasure of all countries.

It's not our fault English is the lingua franca of the day, cause if it weren't we'd all be speaking whatever language was the lingua franca.

 

Then how do you explain every other nationality that immigrates to the US, doesn't have a program comparable to ESL and succeeds? Moreover, how do you explain the fact that they all outperform hispanics? The results would indicate the program is more of a crutch than a benefit. But if you prefer to label criticism of it as a "durn foreigners" mindset or assume that immigration control is code for racism, be my guest.

And since when does failing 2nd or 3rd grade get you kicked out of school? Apparantly I missed that one.

Going back to the SAT/ACT point, I mentioned it b/c one aspect of the original article was the desire to send more kids to college. I agree that it's probably not a good measuring stick which is why I included graduation rate stats.