Stupid in America
`”Stupid in America” is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools and it’s about time we face up to it. [..]
To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.
Belgian kids cleaned the American kids’ clocks, and called them “stupid.” [..]
The Belgian students didn’t perform better because they’re smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.’
