How Educated are Americans?

This may come as shocking news ... but when I recently did some research on this topic, I discovered that the answer changes depending upon how you look at it. High school graduation rates have soared since the 1870s, yet although rates have fallen off in the last 30 years of the 20th Century, by 2000, the percentage of graduates was the highest it had been since 1960. I find this information fascinating, and often record the stats in my website www.RoccoBasile.net.

What's more, the number of college students has also been on the rise since the 1870s. There was a dramatic increase from 1950-2000. The good news is that for all racial groups, education has been rising steadily since the 1960s, and literacy rates for adults has been going up ever since the 1870s. It reached a rate of 99.3% in 1979.

Now here's an interesting concept: How do our children compare to other children in the world when it comes to education? The United States ranks in the top 10 for reading, and in math, we still rank in the top 10 for 4th graders. However, our scores drop in the rankings for 8th and 12th graders.

So you may wonder, why aren't the students in the U.S. keeping up with students from other countries? Standardized testing became a tool for measuring school performance in the 1970s, just as Federal spending on education increased.

If you would like to read more go to: http://social.jrank.org/pages/951/How-Educated-Are-We.html#ixzz0RPL72vNz

--Rocco Basile