Quote Originally Posted by DuncanONeil View Post
First you say that the cost of school is too high in the US and then say we need to spend more? Huh!?

Money will never solve the education problem in this country! The biggest problem is the kids are just shuffled through the schools like an assembly line. If the kid does not perform or learn the material, no matter, they need not learn. It would damage their poor fragile psyche to be held back to learn the material. No matter that not learning the first set of material deliberately dooms them to failure. With it being below 70% nationally and trending down in spite of in the neighborhood of $200,000 per classroom. Something is wrong that money can not solve.
I said that university education was the most expensive of any country. Then in a discussion of scholarships which come from high school I pointed out that the US doesn't spend enough on schools. So yes, both statements are true. Of course you were probably skimming them so you assumed a contradiction through misreading where none exists, you've done that a lot lately.

As for money never solving the problem, it can if you bother to spend it correctly. Higher standards/qualifications for teaching accompanied by a modest pay raise (Canada has much higher teacher salaries and much better education performance, Finland spends even more than us and is among the best in the world), more money on materials for classrooms. Stop dumping money into voucher systems and calling it education spending, because having a lottery for 1% or less to escape a broken system is no way to run education.

As for fail vs pass student who has grades to fail, countless studies over the last 30+ years have consistently shown that in lower grades if you pass the student on they are more likely to catch up. Convincing a young kid they are stupid is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think a lot of the problem is there is good scientific information on this topic and people choose to ignore it in order to apply their ideologies to the education system complete with all their mistakes.