They need everyone to have a fundamental understanding of many things and in all cases, it works. The US Army wants no one left behind, they want everyone to have a baseline and then exceptional people will be exceptional.
American public education has one thing in common - like the military it is government employees - but that is where it ends. Unlike the military, educators don't have standards. They don't want to be accountable if someone does poorly.
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As a result, American students do poorly on international standardized tests. Though every two years there is cultural rending of garments about that - those who want government education to get even more money to solve the problem versus those saying government education is a giant waste of money - the reality is American kids have never done well on standardized tests.
We do great on teaching people how to think. We lead the world in adult science literacy, in Nobel prizes, and science output. It's just that our low end can be really low. That has had consequences with the anti-vaccine movement (dumb people on the left thinking scientists are incompetent from 1995-2021 and dumb people on the right thinking that from 2021 until now) and with energy (solar good, nuclear bad, for those who don't understand basic physics) and with food ("organic" and Non-GMO labels.) (1)
We have made attempts to get better baseline results. No Child Left Behind was an unqualified success. Yet President Obama disliked his predecessor President Bush so much(2) that he dismantled nearly everything he could.(3) The worst assault on our future was dismantling No Child Left Behind and replacing it with Common Core. No Child Left Behind led to parity in girls and boys in math for the first time, it showed dramatic improvements for minorities.
Yet education unions donate 93% of their political contributions to Democrats so they were against it on partisan grounds. President Obama wiped it out and replaced it with what government unions wanted, Common Core, and it has since become the butt of jokes and did nothing at all for education. That is reflected on standardized tests.
Other countries are routinely touted as superior in education because they do better on standardized tests. Yet they're no model for American government-controlled pedagogy. Finland, for example, does well on international tests, but education there is inherently conservative; it is about students, not teacher unions or government social justice efforts or cultural engineering. You can be fired if you are terrible at your job and teaching is by rote. They teach to the test. China also teaches by rote but it is much different than Finland. It is social engineering but the job is prestigious; in return for social currency teachers get less of the real thing. Teachers even have to clean the bathrooms.
Teachers won't like any of those notions, they want a union job to be for life just by showing up, so nothing can change until union officials and the politicians they fund love American kids more than they hate changes to the education system.
NOTES:
(1) Given how prevalent anti-science beliefs are, it is easy to think Americans are stupid. Europe certainly tries to pump itself up tearing the US down. Yet we lead the world in science literacy, thus it's easy to see why countries like France think every chemical made after 1950 causes cancer, or at least infertility.
(2) They get along great now. Funny how doing a job that is not an ideological simulation changes your perspective.
(3) He found governance wasn't as easy as being a Senator and claiming Republicans were ust stupid, especially when he was motivated by undoing Bush. He scrapped the NASA Constellation program so he could put his own name on the replacement, that caused unemployment and we still haven't had anything happen with his Barocket program. He quickly discovered he couldn't 'undo the ban on stem cells' he campaigned on, it was President Clinton's law banning embryo research and the reason hESC technology was created without federal funding, so he added a few more lines and allied journalists still declared he 'lifted the ban' which still exists as much as it did in 1996. He also immediately reneged on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, maybe when he learned that he might be able to take credit for killing Osama Bin Laden if he kept it open. Which did happen. And Democrats cheered when they killed a terrorist. Today, Democrats are back to being pro-terrorist again. Obamacare is obviously the worst thing he did, but he was not undoing a predecessor on that.
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