Political science professor Robert Weissberg has a great piece on American Thinker that was inspired by the predictable wringing of hands over the recent poor showing for the US on international tests. They should not be the occasion of hysteria, he explains; nor should they be the excuse for still more government spending on and meddling in K-12 education. The fact is that many more American kids are impervious to instruction than are kids in, say, Singapore or South Korea and no government program will change that. Moreover, we already have a surfeit of people holding college degrees in STEM fields, so it’s pointless to fret that lots of our high school grads are bad at algebra.
by George Leef