On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, SA wrote:
> But the U.S. stands out for its younger cohorts experiencing by far the
> smallest gains. In fact, while US scores for the older group are ranked among
> the top countries, by the time you get to the younger group they're clearly
> below the average. (These cohorts essentially represent people born in the
> 1930's versus those born in the 1960's, all of whom were tested in the
> 1990's.)
I'm coming to this late, and please excuse me if you're all beat on this, but this paragraph baffles me. In the first place it's got nothing to do with kids today -- the "younger" cohort is people who are now 40-50, i.e., us oldsters. In the second place, the 1960s were a kind of educational golden age -- high in money spent and enthusiasm and respect -- while the 1930s were of course the depression when most people didn't even finish high school. In between comes the GI bill and massive expansion in the funds available for education and the peak years of the state university systems. And yet the people who were educated in the fat years are much less literate than the people educated when there was virtually no public spending on higher education and much less on high schools? This makes no sense to me at all. What am I missing?
Michael