The consolidation of neighborhood schools into city-sized schools, along with NCLB, have contributed greatly to the dumbing-down of citizens for the last nearly 20 years. When students feel even more anonymous and invisible in a school of 1000 or more, many respond by treating education as education seems to be treating them.

I've been in education for over 15 years. When I first started, students who weren't interested in graduating could sign out or have their parents sign them out. It was a choice to become educated. Nowadays, such a decision is anathema. Why? Oh, not because it would be better for the student to stay, but because the school/teachers are punished by newspapers, state ed tracking systems and parents who think that the school should not only educate their children, but raise them to be conscientious, hard-working and ethical. Those traits may be concurrently learned in school but they are learned at your parents' knee when you're a wee child.

I believe the schools are now held hostage by their "clients," the helicopter parents who believe their spawn can do no wrong. We are reaping the rewards of the "everybody gets a trophy" mentality. This isn't a political issue, for parents on both sides of the spectrum still want their kids to be isolated from failure and treated like nitwits. By and large, they exit school with no real world skills. They are glib and well spoken, but they have none of the skills it takes to survie in an actual job.

Funny, isn't it, that the GOP has done everything it can to debase public education in the U.S., while, at the same time, bemoaning the lack of quality job candidates? I believe this is nothing more than a strategy to hire hungry immigrants at lower wages and to further outsource jobs. Corporations will simply claim, "We have no good candidates domestically, so we MUST turn to India or China."

Ya think blaming this generation and the previous one really gets to the heart of the USA's problem? You think the valued Harvard boys who have run this country are highly educated, in your god-sanctioned STEM fields?

Give us a break -- I have been teaching since 1983 -- at colleges, universities, and in prisons, for the US Army, and so many other places. The value of education -- both early and 3-12, as well as two-year and four-year and up -- it's been set by neo-cons and neo-liberals, by the US Military Industrial Complex, by Bezos-Bill Gates-Boeing-WalMart-and-company, by mass media, by the Christian Movement, and by a flagging adult cohorts who have almost zero good to say about this generation or the past two.

Public schools need to be MORE public, MORE integrated into each community, MORE balanced by national, smart curriculum, and MORE part of the culture. This is a plasticized society of forced consumption and massive disconnection. Truly, this -- like climate change, like fighting poverty, environmental degradations -- project of creating smarter folk is larger than any Mars probe project or Apollo Program. But to attack teachers and to attack the liberal arts, or anything straying from some of your vaunted STEM thinking, well, you miss more than a thousand points around why the USA is bankrupt and bankrupting the rest of the world.

Do we want STEM graduates to sell our souls to the chemical-digital-pharm-GMO world of transnational company hell? Science and Technology for the highest bidder? So we can put more people out of work, so the STEM-ies can work harder for the One Percent?

Bull. When the science smacks US citizens in the face, when it smacks politicians and the neo/con-liberal financeers and corporate fascists in the ass, you think they value that science, math, technology and math? Ya think they listen to PhDs in marine science, in oceanography, in biology, ecology, physics?

Right.

We need a new paradigm shift -- now. Real up on more innovative ways to frame this education debate, and frame the collapse of USA (and, yes, China and India, since they are disasters in terms of environmental calamity and social injustice and poverty).

Can We Consume Our Way Out of Climate Change? A Call for Analysis

By Lyle K Grant

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3211385/

The US has:
Broken public schools that focus more on teachers' rights than students achievements.
Easy loans to students that attend courses that have no demand in the job market.
A broken job market that prevents graduates from getting work.

The economy killing policies of Bush/Obama need to be thrown out and a new approach is needed.
Romney / Ryan are calling for good reforms, but public opinion is what needs to change.

I agree with Mr. Moff above. Also, there's still a sense that most college students who go into education can't hack STEM courses. That's particularly true for elementary ed students. That's critical. Our school systems also hire more and more support staff and administrators and fewer classroom teachers. We do not seem to put a high priority on education in our communities - school library budgets are cut while the football team gets new lights for their playing field. Change will only come about when people truly decide that academics are important for their kids. Then they'll demand political support for schools and demand that those schools put precious resources into specifically academic programs.