55YO wrote:
Wuss alert wrote:
The US needs to move toward the European system of rigorous testing to separate the wheat from the chaff and only graduating the top percentage of each class to higher education.
I know a lot of teachers who agree with this to some extent.
I sort of agree with him too. But it's not going to happen here. Loads of Americans believe that going to a vo-tech school means you're kind of stupid and if you're telling them their kids belong in a vo-tech school you're telling them their kids are stupid. That's already problematic and if you start a major reform where these kids are not allowed into academic high schools unless they achieve a particular test score but instead are forced to vo-tech schools you will end up with vo-tech schools where minority enrollment is very disproportionate to minority percentages of the general population which will create a firestorm that no one wants to deal with. Blaming teachers for this is nonsense.
And it's this kind of thing that makes public school teaching so hard. It's politicized work. Education is NOT the top priority of our public school system. Teaching in college, where education is a much higher priority, is much easier. Education happens in public schools but it's not the top priority for the overall system, has never been, will never be, and teachers are always the first targets of anyone who dislikes some part of what schools do even though the decisions to do those things are almost never theirs.