International Test Results In Reading, Math, Science: Shanghai Wins

OS keeps coming back to the same tired theme: We have major economic challenges as a result of the terrible way we have behaved as a culture for the past several decades.

The results have been published for the Program for International Student Assessment. Fifteen-year-olds around the world were tested for reading, math and sciences.

Here's a summary chart.

You'll have to keep scrolling down to find the United States students. Past Shanghai, Finland, Singapore, Hong Kong (Keep going, bubbah, this'll take a while!), Australia, Canada, etc.

Go browsing this evening to view the condition of Shanghai in 1945, to get a bit of perspective.

Now, what does this mean? By the time a kid is fifteen, his/her work ethic and intellectual curiosity is pretty well set in stone. There are exceptions, and OS has witnessed a blessed few of them, but they are exceptions. That means that the generation of kids now fifteen will struggle to compete with their peers in a global economy for the next fifty years!

Remember Jimmy Carter? OS does! This is the guy, who in payment for the votes of the NEA, established a new Cabinet department: The Department of Education. The message was as follows: Write us checks. Big ones. Bigger ones each subsequent year. If you don't do that, you are anti-educashun, and you obviously hate children.

We'll take it from here, and deliver you a wonderful educashon system, assuming you write us more checks, keep yoh' mouths shut, and don't question the experts, e.g., us. The NEA, Department of Education, and Democrat Party have lived hand-in-glove for over thirty years now. Hundreds of billions, poured down the rat-hole.

This hasn't worked well at all. The results are simply inexcusable.

For a sampling of what the NEA feeds its constituency on a daily basis, go here.

Time to begin the debate in earnest about what to do. It must begin with the admission of failure.

In the meantime, Mom and Dad, if you can--homeschool or private-school. If you can't do that, understand that the public schools have failed, and one way or another, you'll have to see that Junior arrives to adulthood as an educated person.

Best wishes.