Education Quality in Am. Capitalism

[Jaga]

Lets face it. Here in Idaho one of the districts shortened the school week to 4 days a week! Becasue the district has problems with money.

Can you imagine anything like that in Poland or the rest of the Europe?

In one country the school year was shortened so that.... there would be more money for snow-cleaning - the community of elredly voted for the change

[hollister]

I seem to recall seeing a report where Idaho was one of the states with the lowest rates of funding for schools in the USA - only Lousiana was lower.

[bescheid]

I am not sure of the over all quality of American education as per-location. I think most folks are supposed to be able to read and write. At times, I have found that to be questionable and especially with comprehension of the written word.

What I have found is some resumes and position applications on occasion, will have some very unusual references. These aberrations will some times carry over into some what over stating of experience and educational qualifications. Or as commonly put, a lie (nicer word would be deception).

Fairly often, these misrepresentations would have been totally not necessary if the person had not the intent to pad their qualifications as an edge against the competition. As often their examination entry scores were very well.

Those folks knew the score and must have reasoned they would be caught through the back ground check and the polygraph, but took the career fatal choice and lost.

Charles

[Jaga]

Holly,
I was looking at some statistics I did not find a direct evidence that Idaho spends so little for schooling. The life is relatively cheap in Idaho. Besides, I worry less about my daughter education in Idaho than about education in Maryland, where we lived for 2 years.

AT least the gas is cheap here - Idaho is among three states with the cheapest gasoline in the nation

[hollister]

Jaga,
Check this link nces.ed.gov/edfin/graphs/topic.asp?INDEX=1
According to the site the national average spending is $8, 041 Idaho is $6,081
One reason you may not be feeling the pinch is that you live in the Boise area which is well funded - when you get out to the rural school districts the funding is MUCH lower. Partly because the rural districts do not have the tax base to fund levies so the money from the Feds and the state has to go MUCH further.
As far as gas - I was talking to friends at home they told me gas in Moscow was going for $2.75 a gallon for the cheap stuff - again as you are in Boise and closer to the pipe line gas would be cheaper there than in northern Idaho.
BTW we are paying about the same for gas here in Tampa as we would be in Moscow.

[leslie]

Chris (Holly)
You don't know how lucky you are with your cost of petrol (gas). Ours is rising almost daily at the moment and today I paid 96 pence per litre - i.e. almost 1GBP per litre. 1 Imperial Gallon = 4.456 litres, so our gallons are costing between 4.5GBP and 5GBP, i.e. between about 9 and 10 dollars. Very rough figures but I think they show the difference.
Leslie

[george]

If the quality of education was not top notch in as far as the university level is concerned, we wouldn't have hordes and hordes of foriegners trying to get into our universities! In my community they are even flooding into our community colleges. Can this be said about American students going to foriegn universities? I don't think so.

[bescheid]

I really actually do not think that there are world wide races to attend the American Universities. The foreign students come to the US to attend a university primarily because of the lack of higher quality training in their home lands.

This is the same with many other European countries. The specialty of attending an American University is the acquirement of American English.

For the American students, there is little incentive or money, for them to study at a Foreign university.

American higher learning is good, but, world wide, it is not that exceptional.

Charles

[Eric]

School has been shortened to 4 days a week to save money? Such a thing would be unthinkable in Russia (I think, in most of the world), and Russia certainly has a much smaller education budget than America has!

I think it's a shame that the United States, which is supposed to have all this money, more than any other country, spends so little on education. It is the children who will suffer - all the future generations.

Jaga, is there some kind of private school or additional education for Ela, if you think that the school she's in now isn't able to give her such a good education?