The real reason Stink schools in America

In the coming weeks, millions of American schoolchildren will return to the summer vacation classroom, and not a moment too soon. Compared to these children difficult to study in China, Korea or Finland, American students seem to be chronic underachievers. The average child in the US is less than an hour of homework on average at all levels, according to a study several years ago by RAND and the Brookings Institution. A recent Council Working Group on External Relations on Education Reform and National Security led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, former head of the New York City public schools, has concluded that "school failure puts the country's future economic prosperity of the United States, global position, and physical safety at risk."

There is no doubt that the performance of the US education system is less than stellar. The Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, gives tests to students in a range of countries. The evaluation concludes that the United States ranks behind sixteen other countries, including Poland, Estonia and South Korea in terms of student literacy -the ability to read, integrate and evaluate texts. ranking of American students in mathematics are even lower - falling in countries such as Slovenia, Hungary and Taiwan. The United States also produced some of the biggest differences in test results between the strongest and weakest students.

So where is the group in the US that could try harder? Are teachers more concerned with their terms and pension rights that actually teach children? Do federal legislators and miserly state, starved of resources educators? Or maybe it's the lazy students too addicted to questing with their avatar through World of Warcraft thinking about algebra?

The answer, it turns out, is none of the above. If there is a crisis in education in the United States, the fault lies in a more accustomed to level the blame receiving group: parents.

An increase of all lamentations on the state of education in the United States is that vast amounts of data now exist on what is really happening in America's classrooms. In recent years, teachers have become the main targets of the wrath of reformers. Yet a study of the Gates Foundation released in January this year on the basis of 3,000 classrooms across the country revealed that less than eight percent of teachers in their ranking survey below competence "basic". And a second study funded Gates released earlier this month suggests the average teacher can work one day eleven.

As for the argument that American schools suffer from a lack of resources, analysis by economists Eric Hanushek at Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich suggests the average student costs US about $ 80,000 for education from the age of six to fifteen. Only Switzerland happening at a similar level, and the Czech Republic, who has scored more than the United States on international math tests, spends about a third of that amount.