Education in America - Part IV: Improving AP Test Scores by 138 Percent

This is part four of a six–part series. You can also review , , or .

The heading on the "math and science" page of “Let’s solve this” by ExxonMobil reads, “Let’s invest in our teachers. Let’s inspire our students.” What exactly does that mean because there seems to be no easily identifiable explanation other than a suggestion that we need to invest in our teachers…as if we hadn’t already done that.

My investigation revealed that as of the 2007-2008 school year, Americans were spending somewhere in the vicinity of $10,297 per pupil/per year. As revealed by Patch’s article on , per-pupil spending for the  Black Horse Pike Regional School District in the 2010-2011 school year was at $16,025. Allow me to ask what kind of education you could provide your high school student if you had $16,000/per-year available? So, we in the BHPRSD are spending at least 50 percent more than the per-student national average ($10,499). Is this not investment enough in our teachers as well as enough to inspire our students? How much do we have to spend to empower our teachers adequately to make our students smart enough to compete with the students from Shanghai in the global job market? And I wonder what Shanghai spends on it students? Oh well, it’s probably much easier to moan and complain about all the evil corporations that are sending their jobs overseas than attack the real problem.

Gee, if I had a business, I would seek to hire workers with the least amount of skills to do the job but a healthy dose of self-esteem, and then encourage them to form a union so I could never fire any of them; and then I’d allow the union to demand ever higher and higher wages so that the union dues collected could enrich the union leadership and be funneled into the Democratic campaign coffers to allow the Democrats to offer more and more protection to workers no longer interested in my company making a profit.

Sorry for the length of that sentence but I couldn’t help myself. BTW, I would like to point out that in the past such sentences were the common fare and people had no problem in reading or understanding them. Only recently has such writing become a problem. In fact, a teacher on this site scolded me for my use of what she called run-on sentences. I guess the preferred manner of writing is, “Jack went up the hill.” This is actually indicative of the problem we are facing with education in this country. The fact is that we are being told it’s more important for a student to be able to express one’s thought than it is for that thought to be grammatically correct and coherent to the vast majority of readers. Given an average U.S. reading skill comprehension level at the seventh or eighth grade, I would imagine that a number of countries are getting ready to pass us in the comprehension of our own language even while it is only a second language for them.

So, back to ExxonMobil…right out of the gate I sense a little tom-foolery here. A graphic on the “Let’s Solve This” Perspectives Blog page seems to be pushing for student participation in the National Math and Science Initiative because it appears to engender study which, admittedly, is good and what our students need to do more of, right? However, the last point in the graphic informs us that such participation and study raised scores on the AP tests by 138 percent. Hmmmmmm...What does that mean?

Stay tuned for part five, where I decipher the Advanced Placement test scores.