Young Americans are dumbs

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I wouldn't place the blame so much on teachers' unions as other factors.  We've loaded down the school day with more "things that must be done", both educational and sociological, without really increasing the time available to do them.  The added time needed has primarily come by squeezing the time spent for "non-essentials" such as recess and lunch, and a result, we have kids who are having to engage in long grinding school days with little chance of a break to recharge or socialize.  In education these days, we tend to treat kids as learning machines and then are surprised when they fail to be machines.

Plus, the no child left behind ethos, while good in the abstract, has meant we're spending resources on children who would have been left behind back when you were going to school, and in some places that has been at the expense of those who were previously advantaged.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

With the astonishing amount of money squandered by the government education industry complex, such figures are truly amazing.

Even more amazing data is the massive amounts of windfall profits reaped by those teachers despite stagnant student enrollment. They are winning the treasury.

If you actually bothered to take a look at those figures, you'd see that it isn't teachers that are profiting at all.  In constant dollar terms, the salaries of classroom teachers have remained essentially flat between 1990 and 2010 and only increased some ten percent overall in the forty years between 1970 and 2010.  By contrast in the forty years prior to that, classroom teacher salaries almost tripled in constant dollar terms between 1930 and 1970.  The greedy teachers of that era must have led to some really awful education by your brand of logic.

Yes, we have too much school administration and it is bloated and horrendously overpaid, but to blame teachers' unions for that problem is ludicrous.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I know I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating.  Feel free to call someone else's ideas idiotic, especially when they are, but when you go from attacking ideas to people, please don't.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Another problem with those questions is the apparent lack of any context that would motivate them to learn it.  Aside from perhaps a youthful member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I doubt any of them care about catapults.  Similarly, until and unless someone goes into electrical engineering or even an electrician, I fail to see why anyone would care about electromagnetism problems.  Yes, the math isn't all that difficult, but it's not a area of physics that ever would be of general interest like mechanics can be.  Even tho we may not realize it, lots of people have direct experience with mechanics on a regular basis.  Electromagnetism just is not of much use to ordinary people.  We use electricity all the time, but in a manner that requires most of us to know no more than to not touch a live wire and maybe to make certain you use the proper fuse in equipment that has a fuse.

Of course, it doesn't help that most students have but minimal everyday experience with metric units other than the liter.  Of course it could be worse.  I actually took a junior-level mechanics class in college taught by an old fogey of a professor who had us using an old book in which all the problems were in the FPS system of units.  If I had been a violent young man, I would have been tempted to slug him for that.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I find that the context often makes the problem harder. I could reframe question 18 as follows. I don't think this would improve the rate at which students solve it.

You look up some specifications for your little Smart Car and find that it has a mass of 800 kg with you inside. From the specifications you also determine that when you step on the gas the engine supplies 2000 N of force to the car. Find the acceleration you would feel under those conditions. Bonus part - how does that compare to the acceleration you would experience in free fall?

I fail to see how a Smart Car would engage their interest.      For that matter an approximately ¼ gee acceleration would be somewhat pathetic even for a Smart Car.  (As an aside, I think it would be more useful to define the standard gee as 10m/s² rather than as 9.80665 m/s².  Easier to use and anyone who needs a more precise figure than 10m/s² probably needs to use the local gravity rather than the genericized standard gravity.)

But more seriously, would anyone in the "real world" ever make a calculation like that? My point was not simply that we ought to provide a context, but provide a context that motivates students.  Most word problems fail seriously on the motivation point and an unmotivating context may well be worse than no context at all.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

If you aren't trying to estimate how many g's of acceleration occur when you hit the gas, then I expect that there is probably no real world example to help the students. That's one of the things that makes acceleration so hard to teach - students don't have a real world feel for the concept.

Then perhaps that should be taken as a signal that this is something that shouldn't be part of a general liberal education?  There are only so many things we have time for in the educational day.  As I said, the math involved isn't at all complicated, and the truly abstract idea isn't acceleration per se, but second order differentials differences and derivatives by whatever name.  Perhaps physics isn't the optimal method of using to teach the concept.  (Or perhaps different students should be guided into different subjects that teach the concept, with physics but one option.)  While historically a lot of basic calculus was developed in the service of mechanics, that doesn't necessarily make it the best subject to teach those concepts today.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I see it's been long enough since I had to worry about the terminology I goofed.  When I said differentials earlier, I meant differences  (i.e. ∆x's and not ∂x's).  [By the way, I would think 20 to 0 in 2 sec shouldn't normally cause harm as it's under half a gee.  Possibly for a baby who doesn't have any support in the direction of the acceleration, but certainly not a healthy adult.]

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Of course. Fire the incompetents, dump tenure, and reward the talented, like with 150K per year salaries in the tougher schools. And give them the disciplinary tools.

This combined with making it harder to get a degree to teach secondary education would do more to help than throwing many billions of dollars at the problem.

Sadly many people (especially the very pro union types) don't want to see bad teachers fired and good teachers rewarded.

I don't think it's fair to blame a students poor performance on his teacher's décolletage.

You totally missed the point.  Clearly the replacing of eyeglasses with contact lenses is the source of our educational decline.