So Rob Portman voted to confirm Betsy DeVos

[Benton]

(02-09-2017, 07:17 PM)bfine32 Wrote: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/03/248329823/u-s-high-school-students-slide-in-math-reading-science

We are slipping globally. Now why we're doing worse, that's  subjective. My opinion and yours may vary... but if your starting point is we are doing better globally because more folks are going to college then I'm guessing the 'why' is going to be irrelevant to the discussion as it's an erroneous origin.

You can omit stats — and facts — to take a position. But there's not two sets of reality, where facts mean one thing here, and another thing there. Stats are stats, and we're slipping globally.

The home schooled kid always graduates top of his class

Well, I guess if you're teaching yourself what you want to hear, sure.

I've never said we're doing better globally. I said we've started moving in the right direction locally, which is the first step to improving globally. As with my last post, that's (in my opinion) mostly due to the fact that we're about three decades in to education experts having some education uniformity. Maybe we would've kept up globally if we'd had more uniformed education efforts like the majority of industrialized nations.

Other countries have highly controlled education standards. Schools are expected to teach X because it gets results.

Betsy helped implement a system that has very little control, and results from that have been questionable.

If your concern is our ability to keep up globally, is it be better to go in the direction of what 'successful' countries are doing (more centralization and standards)? Or the opposite (hiring an extremist billionaire to wreck 30ish years of progress so her portfolio increases 2%)?