I was driving down the highway the other day and saw a bumper sticker that said, "My dog is smarter than you honor roll student". How may other bumper stickers have you seen that said, "Honor roll student on board"? It seems that parents put a lot of weight on having their kids on the "Honor Roll". Like a lot of things from the past, being on the honor roll used to be a big deal. It showed to the world that you were "smart" and a "hard worker". The problem with the honor roll now is that it has been scammed. In the past, only about 10% of the kids made the honor roll, but today it is up to at least 50%. I know kids who took easy classes in high school in order to get higher grades so that they could be on the honor roll. I know that you also knew kids and parents like this too.
Look at it this way. About 50 years ago the kids here in the USA ranked in the top 5 in terms of educational performance, but now we are not even in the top 25. Now at the same time, the percentage of our kids who made the honor roll has gone up from about 10% to 50%. What do you think just might be wrong with these numbers? For starters, having 50% on the honor roll is bull shit.
50 years ago, 90% of the students in our major universities who earned Masters or PhD's were born here in the USA and graduated from our high schools. Today it is the other way around when it comes to the important STEM advanced degrees. 90% were born outside the USA and attended high schools outside the USA. Are you starting to see the "scam"?
When I was about 13 years old, I got my first slide rule. It was one of those cheap plastic things. It was a little complicated, but it could do calculations that the electronic calculators our kids have today could not do. It could also do most of the calculations faster than many electronic calculators. That was because is was an "analog" calculator that gave you instant results. The slide rule also had all the "Trig" functions on it too. Very few of the electronic calculators that most of our kids use now can handle "Trig" functions. A good plastic slide rule costs less than $5.00 and can do much more than most electronic calculators and can also give your kid needed mental exercise at the same time.
I think that if we can ever find the person who started "new math" or allowed calculators and computers into our class rooms that we will have found the cause of the decline in the quality of education in the USA. I know a lot of good intentioned educators thought that the calculation of the answer to a math problem was just a bunch of "busy work" that wasted student's time that they could apply to "real" learning. Their mistake was that the "work" to calculate the answer was a major part of the learning. Do you think that "spell check" on one's computer makes one a better speller? I think that you have your answer.
I hate to keep bad mouthing our public school teachers, but it has been my personal experience that the average teacher of today is far below those of 50 years ago in almost every way. The teachers of 50 years ago were much "smarter" than those of today. This has been proven by SAT scores and IQ testing. It does not matter how many years the teachers of today spent in college. Most today do not graduate with real academic degrees like those in the old days. Today, our teachers graduate with "teaching" degrees from isolated "teachers" colleges or departments. Teachers of today do not have to compete with the smarter "regular" students in Math, Science or Physics classes. I have no idea how low their GPA's would be if they did. The USA is one of the few counties in the world who get out school teachers from dumbed down teachers colleges. Every where else, teachers have to get real college degrees.
Because the Honor Roll concept has been scammed so bad, we need to eliminate it and switch to some kind of "percentile" system. This is a system where grades are used to calculate a GPA, but is then normalized against the whole school population from "zero" to 100. If there are 500 kids in your school and you have the 450th highest GPA, then you have a "percentile" score of "90". It may take a while before people figured out that if you had the 250th highest GPA, it would only be a "percentile" score of 50. That means your kid is just "average" in a pool of kids who rank about 25th in the world. Conclusion, you kid is not very smart. Think about if your kid were normalized against the rest of the world with the 250th highest GPA in your school and it resulted in a "percentile" score of "27"? Now, you kid is not average anymore. He is well below average. We may even conclude that your kid is "dumb".
There is an old expression that we all need to remember and that is, "It maybe OK to bull shit the world, but don't bull shit yourself". Our kids are below average. This is not Lake Wobegon.
