US Students Struggle more than Global Peers to Top Parents

[No1]

Receiving a better education than one’s parents sounds like a tenet of the American Dream, but it’s a reality more commonly achieved in other developed nations.

The U.S. ranked fourth-worst among 29 developed countries for children obtaining a higher level of education than their parents, according to a report released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the U.S. only 21.6% of those 25 to 34 years old achieved a higher level of education than their parents. That compares to an OECD average of 36.8%.

The study found that even Americans with the lowest level of education had a poor chance of seeing their children achieve higher levels.

“The odds are low that young person in the U.S. will go on to higher education, if their parents didn’t,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD deputy director for education.

If a young American’s parents failed to finish high school, there is just a 29% chance that he or she will even attend college, the third worst odds among the countries OECD studied.

The failure of subsequent generations to achieve higher levels education contributes to a cycle of those born into poor families staying poor themselves.

In the U.S., those with a college degree earn about three times more on average than those without a high school diploma, OECD found. A separate Labor Department report last week showed the unemployment rate in August for high-school dropouts was 12.0% versus 4.1% for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

U.S. students fail to receive more education than their parents for a number of reasons. For one, the proportion of American parents with college degrees is relatively high at 40%, which makes obtaining an even higher degree difficult. However, the U.S. lags behind other countries in ensuring students at least obtain high school degrees.

The OECD study found 23% of U.S. students failed to obtain a high school diploma, down from 30% in 2000, but still the sixth-worst rate among the countries studied. The OECD study does not count those who hold general equivalence degrees but didn’t finish high school as graduates.

Other findings include that the U.S. ranks 26th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education, at 69 percent. Furthermore, teachers in the U.S. spend between 1,050 and 1,100 hours a year teaching, much more than in almost every country.

“Only Argentina has a longer instructional year than the United States, with U.S. teachers teaching approximately 40 percent more hours per year than teachers in other OECD countries, yet U.S. teachers’ salaries do not crack the top 10 among OECD countries,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.

Weingarten also pointed out that using standardized-test results as a basis for evaluating and paying teachers is “very rare, as it is not even mentioned as one of the top 16 uses of testing data.”

She added: “while most U.S. education decisions are made by school districts, most OECD countries leave those decisions to the people closest to the students — the professionals in each school.”

The last thing I bolded is to back up the point I made to Brown Pride awhile back on here. Longer school days and more time with teachers is not necessarily conducive to better off students.

 

[Hussein Fonzarelli]

Get a loan
Work hard
Intern, dont get paid shyt, learn how to be someones bytch
Get a real job
Shut down the mawl
Get your first real credit card
Shut down the mawl again
Mortgage
Car
Mawl
Repeat
9-5
Die