(2004-02-13) Education Vs Offshoring

Nicholas Kristof on Off Shoring as a result of failure at Educating Kids. The latest international survey, called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, found that the best-performing eighth graders were, in order, from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Belgium and the NetherLands. The US ranked 19th, just after Latvia. (India and China weren't surveyed.) "For too many graduates, the American High School diploma signifies only a broken promise," declares a major new study released yesterday by three education policy organizations. Called the American Diploma Project, it found that 60 percent of employers rated graduates' skills as only "fair" or "poor.".. In 1957, the Soviet launching of Sputnik frightened America into substantially improving math and science education. I'm hoping that the loss of jobs in medicine and computers to India and elsewhere will again jolt us into bolstering our own teaching of math and science.