All this has further stirred debate over the social effect of Britain’s private schools. Seen by supporters as beacons of excellence that drive up standards, they are blamed by critics for allowing well-heeled parents to opt out of state education, removing the incentive for it to improve.
.. Nowadays, fees for a boarding pupil are around 33,000 pounds a year, about $46,000. When all free places and scholarships are included, Mr. Green said, 12 percent of students at Rugby pay nothing.
The Wrong Way to Teach Math
In fact, what’s needed is a different kind of proficiency, one that is hardly taught at all. The Mathematical Association of America calls it “quantitative literacy.” I prefer the O.E.C.D.’s “numeracy,” suggesting an affinity with reading and writing.
.. Calculus and higher math have a place, of course, but it’s not in most people’s everyday lives. What citizens do need is to be comfortable reading graphs and charts and adept at calculating simple figures in their heads.
.. I thought they would focus on what could be called “citizen statistics.” By this I mean coping with the numbers that suffuse our personal and public lives — like figures cited on income distribution, climate change or whether cellphones can damage your brain. What’s needed is a facility for sensing symptoms of bias, questionable samples and dubious sources of data.
.. The Carnegie and A.P. courses were designed by research professors, who seem to take the view that statistics must be done at their level or not at all.
.. Deborah Hughes-Hallett, a mathematician at the University of Arizona, found that “advanced training in mathematics does not necessarily ensure high levels of quantitative literacy.”
Stop Humiliating Teachers
There’s an element of this rage at bad teachers that’s hard to talk about, and so it’s often avoided: the dismaying truth that we don’t know how to educate poor inner-city and rural kids in this country. In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys, who, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, graduate high school at rates no better than fifty-nine per cent. Yet if students from poor families persistently fail to score well, if they fail to finish high school in sufficient numbers, and if those who graduate are unable, in many cases, to finish college, teachers alone can hardly be at fault.
.. By the time kids from poor families of all races enter kindergarten, they are often significantly behind wealthier children in vocabulary, knowledge, and cognitive skills. Of course, good teachers can help—particularly that single teacher who takes a kid in hand and turns him around. But, in recent years, teachers have been held responsible for things that may often be beyond their powers to change. They are being assaulted because they can be assaulted. The real problem is persistent poverty.
.. The heart of the criticism: the tests measure demographics (the class and wealth level of the students) more than teachers’ abilities.
.. The political atmosphere in the country has become so polarized that spirited teachers—men and women who actually say something—will not survive hostile parents or a disapproving principal without the protection of tenure. Abolishing tenure would create instability and even chaos.
.. We have to make teaching the way to a decent middle-class life. And that means treating public-school teachers with the respect offered to good private-school teachers—treating them as distinguished members of the community, or at least as life-on-the-line public servants, like members of the military.
.. We also have to face the real problem, which, again, is persistent poverty. If we really want to improve scores and high-school-graduation rates and college readiness and the rest, we have to commit resources to helping poor parents raise their children by providing nutrition and health services, parenting support, a supply of books, and so on. We have to commit to universal pre-K and much more. And we have to stop blaming teachers for all of the ills and injustices of American society.
A New Deal for Europe
the failures to make such reforms are not enough to explain the sudden plunge in GDP in the eurozone from 2011 to 2013, even as the US economy was in recovery. There can be no question now that the recovery in Europe was throttled by the attempt to cut deficits too quickly between 2011 and 2013—and particularly by tax hikes that were far too sharp in France. Such application of tight budgetary rules ensured that the eurozone’s GDP still, in 2015, hasn’t recovered to its 2007 levels.
.. the Erasmus education program—which provides opportunities for students and teachers to study and train abroad—is ridiculously underfunded. It has a budget of two billion euros annually, against the 200 billion euros set aside every year for interest on eurozone debt. We ought to be investing heavily in innovation and young people.
.. If France, Italy, and Spain (roughly 50 percent of the eurozone’s population and GDP, as against Germany, with scarcely more than 25 percent) were to put forth a specific proposal for a new and effective parliament, some compromise would have to be found. And if Germany stubbornly continues to refuse, which seems unlikely, then the argument against the euro as a common currency becomes very difficult to counter.