Others, such as Diane Ravitch who initially supported CC and Bush jr, have reversed course and believe it's a bunch of poppycock. They say that the US in particular has never scored high on those standardized tests. Moreover, Ravitch says that standardized test score argument is weak when we consider the overall creativity and originality of US patents, technologies, or companies such as Google and Facebook.
Oh dear.
I wondered how many of those patent holders came from elsewhere, and if she only counted American-educated inventors.
Someone else asked the same question in the comments section. The reply was what I would expect from someone who DIDN'T control appropriately:
Jim, December 8, 2013 at 8:12 pm
“And when it came to creativity, the U.S. “clobbered the world,” with more patents per million people than any other nation.”
Well, if we’re using this measure to rate this country’s education system, we should exclude patents gained by people who received their education outside the US and immigrated. I’ll bet that’s a lot of them.
dianeravitch December 8, 2013 at 11:30 pm
Jim, why did they immigrate here? Freedom? Opportunity? Great universities?
Can anyone
Name That Formal Fallacy?
Seriously, this what edumacator types do when you catch them trying to distort something: change the subject.
I agree-- but then we must also exclude foreign patents when THOSE individuals were educated overseas, as well.
In many STEM fields, relatively few Americans
are educated abroad, and traditionally, a large number of the elite undergraduates from other nations are educated in the US.
When fully 2/3rd of a graduate program are here on educational visas, then it becomes quite difficult to tease apart just what is "theirs" and what is "ours."
Except, of course, for the fact that their students are somehow superior to so many of ours even though
they are usually working ESL, at best. And, um-- I could be quite wrong about this, but using Sergey Brin as an example of a foreign immigrant might not be the best idea, since he's got some pretty illustrious
American institutions in his CV.
Now, what Larry Page and Sergy Brin both
do have in common... is parents who are part of the intelligentsia... the Professoriate, at any rate. Clearly growing up in an environment that values education and provides appropriate opportunities (not limited by formal schooling and/or age) seems to be an important factor; this is also something that Bill Gates seems to have been raised with.
It's not at all clear that we'd have MORE people like them if only we offered more standardized testing, however.
