I don't agree that this is the problem. I mean, it is a problem at times, but that's a separate issue.
There's quite simply no easy fix here. The best schools (and yes, that includes many public schools) are teaching a variety of skills that help the students whether they're going on to college, a trade school, or straight into work. And I suspect that those schools would be competitive or even beat Japan and Finland.
But just look at the conditions of some schools. --Detroit is making the news for schools that are falling apart and infested with rats and worse. When the government won't even provide funds to provide a clean, safe space for students to learn, just how much can you expect from the teachers and students?
Most of us don't feel good about going through increasingly intrusive screening at airports. Imagine how students at some of the schools in New York feel having to stand in long lines and go through metal detectors every day before class. Do you really expect them to respect an environment when they're put through that?
In Kansas they're trying to defund the state's Supreme Court because they ruled that the funding of public schools was inadequate and distributed unfairly to the point of being unconstitutional.
Look at the Republican candidates all crowing about how they'll shut down the Department of Education if they're elected. Don't get me wrong, like all government agencies, some reform is needed, but there are plenty of examples to show why the department is necessary!
There are other factors in play as well, of course - as much as people would like to pretend otherwise, there are a lot of people living in poverty in the US, and students living in poverty consistently do worse in school than middle and upper class students.
So really, there are a LOT of reasons for the US scoring this way, and unfortunately our country is not doing a good job of addressing these reasons.
Life skills? I think it is. My sister was substitute teaching and a frustrated math student wanted to know "what this is good for". She said "how will you know if someone is screwing you over?" to which the kid seemed to find a fresh interest is the subject. Learning without application to real life can be boring to a lot of kids.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The interpretation of "gerneral Welfare" varies of course, but providing SOME sort of standards and funding at the federal level for education is well within accepted US federal authority.
> The interpretation of "gerneral Welfare" varies of course, but providing SOME sort of standards and funding at the federal level for education is well within accepted US federal authority.
You are correct that it is generally accepted, but you are 100% incorrect that it is in any way a faithful reading of the text of the Constitution.
The power granted to Congress in that clause is that of taxation; its powers concerning the common defence and general welfare of the United States (of the states as a whole, that is, not of the people of the United States), are enumerated elsewhere in the document.
Your interpretation — common though it is — implies that there are no limits to what the Congress may do, and that the Ninth & Tenth Amendments are meaningless.
Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.
> Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.
Being backward compatible is a feature in a legal system (e.g. forbidding ex post facto laws). Moreover, it's entirely possible to change the Constitution in any way one wishes, simply by passing an amendment. What you can't do is claim that it says what it doesn't, any more than one could run an amd64 Linux kernel directly on a 68000[1].
The Constitution's not perfect. It wasn't when it passed, which is why the Bill of Rights was required. It still wasn't, which is why further amendments were required (e.g., that banning slavery in most cases). Some of the changes were themselves suboptimal (e.g. the 17th Amendment, which has been a catastrophe, or the 18th, which banned alcohol). It's perfectly fine to amend the Constitution to fix it (e.g. the 21st Amendment, which repealed the fundamentally flawed 18th), but one can't just read whatever one wants into the document (c.f. drug prohibition: if an amendment were required to ban alcohol, then one must be required to ban drugs; and yet here we are).
[1] Yes, I'm sure that someone could in fact come up with a bitstream which is both valid amd64 opcodes and valid 68000 opcodes, and that someone could use that substrate to implement some sort of half-assed, tortured 'Linux' kernel. You know what I meant.
The Department of Education issue isn't one of funding, but one of Federalism and returning control of schools to state and local governments. It's about decentralization, not getting rid or even reducing funding for education. If you think about how much money the DoE spends that doesn't actually get to a school, the proposal doesn't sound crazy as people make it out to be.
The following numbers are just for illustration but if you think of the DoE with a billion dollars and some percentage of that pays for the DoE. Then that percentage is education money that is going to pay DC bureaucrats rather than being delivered directly to the states. Each state already has a Department of Education, thus the benefit of the federal DoE is often redundant. The DoE doesn't create curricula, the DoE doesn't hire teachers, the DoE doesn't do anything that State departments aren't already equipped to do.
So yes, abolish the DoE and let the states do what they are already doing.
If we want to improve education, that happens at the state and school board level. A school in urban Detroit has much different needs than a school in suburban Austin, yet a blanket DoE directive doesn't necessarily respond well to dramatic variations between states and localities. Highly centralized control is less efficient than more granular control given the huge variations among communities and states.
The problem with American education is cultural. Comparing a Chinese parent with a south Chicago parent reveals huge discrepancies. I taught in both China and Korea and they provide a fraction of the per student funding than they do in DC Public Schools. They're using old desks, the students are required to clean the school, technology is very limited, teachers are paid less -- yet they kick American ass in things like math and science. After school in China is spent studying -- for hours. Parents have zero tolerance for failure. Schools paddle rogue students. Embarrassment is a very big deal. Yet what happens to the south Chicago kid that goes home after school and spends his time studying: he's ostracized, even being accused of 'acting white.' There's your problem. A culture that puts the Kardashians on a pedestal and parents who are disengaged and teacher unions that put seniority above results. You also have the issue that university schools of education are frequently the refuge of academic rejects. This is incendiary, I know, but have a look at the academic standards required for education majors compared to pretty much any other major. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Funding isn't a problem -- it's a scapegoat. If you want proof of that, compare per student funding and academic achievement per dollar spent: there's little correlation.
There's quite simply no easy fix here. The best schools (and yes, that includes many public schools) are teaching a variety of skills that help the students whether they're going on to college, a trade school, or straight into work. And I suspect that those schools would be competitive or even beat Japan and Finland.
But just look at the conditions of some schools. --Detroit is making the news for schools that are falling apart and infested with rats and worse. When the government won't even provide funds to provide a clean, safe space for students to learn, just how much can you expect from the teachers and students?
Most of us don't feel good about going through increasingly intrusive screening at airports. Imagine how students at some of the schools in New York feel having to stand in long lines and go through metal detectors every day before class. Do you really expect them to respect an environment when they're put through that?
In Kansas they're trying to defund the state's Supreme Court because they ruled that the funding of public schools was inadequate and distributed unfairly to the point of being unconstitutional.
Look at the Republican candidates all crowing about how they'll shut down the Department of Education if they're elected. Don't get me wrong, like all government agencies, some reform is needed, but there are plenty of examples to show why the department is necessary!
There are other factors in play as well, of course - as much as people would like to pretend otherwise, there are a lot of people living in poverty in the US, and students living in poverty consistently do worse in school than middle and upper class students.
So really, there are a LOT of reasons for the US scoring this way, and unfortunately our country is not doing a good job of addressing these reasons.