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Falling Through the Cracks: How The US School Actively Fails its Students …

- - - - That pressure leads to worsened mental health among students in the US.
        
        Because teachers' pay increases are directly linked to how well their students do on standardized tests, they are forced into the "teaching for the test" cycle. And since they are already overworked and underpaid, they tend to spend more time and attention on "promising" students who thrive under that system, and less on ones that need more specialized help.
        
        "Grading is a system where every student is held to an arbitrary standard of excellence; a system that is absolutely prey to the prejudices and whims of specific teachers, prejudices that include blatant examples of racism and sexism (there’s plenty of literature on that subject); a system that is designed to categorize certain students as smarter than others." -Charlie Monroe
        
        Kids who have failing grades often have the same anxieties as kids who are passing, but are in constant fear of failing
        
        With college graduation rates going up and job opportunities diminishing, students are pushed harder than ever to compete for coveted spots at prestigious universities.
      - "From elementary school through high school, students face a tremendous amount of pressure to get good grades, so much so that their mental well-being is at risk. Research has shown that there is a clear correlation between grades and suicide risk. 16-year-old students with the lowest grades are three times more likely to commit suicide than those at the top of the class. Something needs to change."
        
        The hierarchical grading system of the American education system creates this relationship between grades and self-esteem. When it comes to applying for college, your high school GPA determines your value as a student both monetarily and socially
      - "Currently, the entire American school system is designed around the assumption that children and teens are able to work like machines. School days start in the early hours of the morning, despite the fact that it has been proven that teens naturally sleep in late and need as much sleep as they can get. Classes are back-to-back, with little to no breaks in between, and they last for eight hours. School scheduling is harsh and rigorous, and for absolutely no reason. Their entire day is dictated to them. They are even told when to eat and when to relieve themselves."
- - - - More than 100 years ago, the United Daughters of the Confederacy created commissions ensuring textbooks depicted the Civil War as a struggle over states’ rights and sugarcoated slavery as a protective institution. Such books were in use until the 1980s. Here in Texas, as recently as 2010, textbooks had removed slavery as a central cause of the Civil War, an inaccuracy that existed until 2018.
      - A panel made up of the center’s staff, an independent education researcher with a background in middle- and high-school education and a history professor with expertise in the history of slavery looked at how the books depicted enslavement, evaluating them with a 30-point rubric. On average, the textbooks received a failing grade of 46 percent.
        
        It’s far better to equip America’s youth with the historical reality of our nation’s sins than infuse them with masturbatory patriotism through revisionist propaganda. You can still be proud of your country and be aware of its past and present moral failings. To paraphrase Dan Rather, patriotism is rooted in humility and courage, while nationalism is rooted in arrogance and ignorance.
  - - - “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
- - - - it's not about how much a country spends on education, but how it spends the money. He says, in other countries, it's all about teacher quality.
      - One in four U.S. students did not reach the PISA baseline level 2 of mathematics proficiency. At this level, “students begin to demonstrate the skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life,” according to the PISA report.
      - As the U.S. economy continues to improve, according to news headlines, one area is still feeling the squeeze from the recession years: K-12 public school spending. A report this month from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that 34 states are contributing less funding on a per student basis than they did prior to the recession years. Since states are responsible for 44 percent of total education funding in the U.S., these dismal numbers mean a continued crack down on school budgets despite an improving economy.
    - - The countries with the most significant improvements in education and healthcare — namely, Turkey, China, and Brazil — also saw quicker GDP growth on a per capita basis. This leads the study to conclude that education and healthcare investments could be tied to a country's economic performance, and improvements in these areas could lead to faster economic growth.