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Attainment
The rise of the high school movement in the beginning of the 20th century was unique in the United States, such that, high schools were implemented with property-tax funded tuition, openness, non-exclusivity, and were decentralized.

The academic curriculum was designed to provide the students with a terminal degree. The students obtained general knowledge (such as mathematics, chemistry, English composition, etc.) applicable to the high geographic and social mobility in the United States. The provision of the high schools accelerated with the rise of the second industrial revolution. The increase in white collar and skilled blue-collar work in manufacturing was reflected in the demand for high school education.

In the 21st century, the educational attainment of the US population is similar to that of many other industrialized countries with the vast majority of the population having completed secondary education and a rising number of college graduates that outnumber high school dropouts. As a whole, the population of the United States is becoming increasingly more educated.

Post-secondary education is valued very highly by American society and is one of the main determinants of class and status. As with income, however, there are significant discrepancies in terms of race, age, household configuration and geography.

Since the 1980s the number of educated Americans has continued to grow, but at a slower rate. Some have attributed this to an increase in the foreign born portion of the workforce. However, the decreasing growth of the educational workforce has instead been primarily due to slowing down in educational attainment of people schooled in the United States.

Student ability and college graduation rates
Despite the demonstrated link between economic growth and education standards, high schools and colleges sharply disagree about the college readiness of high school graduates, in that 44% of college faculty believe that incoming students are not ready for writing at the college level, while 90% of high school teachers believe exiting students are well-prepared. Despite having a high school diploma that includes a college-preparatory curriculum, along with appropriate high school exit examination scores, 60% of first-year college students must take noncredit remedial courses in order to bring their literary and mathematical skills up to an adequate level. Even then, only 58% of students in four-year programs at public colleges will have graduated after six years. The cause cannot be excessively demanding college courses, since grade inflation has made those courses increasingly easy in recent decades.

Gender differences
According to research from within the past 20 years, girls generally outperform boys in the classroom on measures of grades across all subjects and graduation rates. This is a turnaround from the early 20th century when boys usually outperformed girls. Boy have still been found to score higher on standardized tests than girls and go on to be better represented in the more prestigious, high-paying STEM fields.There is an ongoing debate over which gender is the most short-changed in the classroom. Parents and educators are concerned about how to motivate males to become better students.

Racial achievement differences


The racial achievement gap in the US refers to the educational disparities between Black and Hispanic students compared with Asian and Caucasian students. This disparity manifests itself in a variety of ways: African-American and Hispanic students are more likely to receive lower grades, score lower on standardized tests, drop out of high school, and are less likely to enter and complete college.

Several reasons have been suggested for these disparities.

One explanation is the disparity in income that exists between African Americans and Whites. This school of thought argues that the origin of this "wealth gap" is the slavery and racism that made it extremely difficult for African-Americans to accumulate wealth for almost 100 years after slavery was abolished. A comparable history of discrimination created a similar gap between Hispanics and Whites. This results in many minority children being born into low socioeconomic backgrounds, which in turn affects educational opportunities.

Another explanation has to do with family structure. Professor Lino Graglia has suggested that Blacks and Hispanics are falling behind in education because they are increasingly raised in single-parent families.

A third explanation which has been suggested, by, for example University of California, Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen, in a controversial paper published in 1969, is that there is an innate difference in intelligence between blacks and whites. Other publications are critical of Jensen's methods and disagree with his conclusions. The idea that the difference in achievement is primarily genetic is controversial, and few members of the academic community accept these findings as fact.

Other explanations offered for the racial achievement gap include: social class, institutional racism, lower quality of schools and teachers in minority communities, and civil injustice. Most authors mention several such factors as influential on outcomes, both in the United States and worldwide.

International comparison
In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment 2003, which emphasizes problem solving, American 15-year-olds ranked 24th of 38 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving. In the 2006 assessment, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57 in mathematics and 29th out of 57 in science. Reading scores could not be reported due to printing errors in the instructions of the U.S. test booklets. U.S. scores were behind those of most other developed nations.

However, the picture changes when low achievers, Blacks and Hispanics, in the U.S. are broken out by race. White and Asian students in the United States are generally among the best-performing pupils in the world; black and Hispanic students in the U.S. are among the lowest-achieving pupils. Black and Hispanic students in the US do out perform their counterparts in all African and Hispanic countries.

US fourth and eighth graders tested above average on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study tests, which emphasizes traditional learning.

The United States is one of three OECD countries where the government spends more on schools in rich neighborhoods than in poor neighborhoods, with the others being Turkey and Israel.

Poor education also carries on as students age. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) administer another survey called the Survey of Adult Skills, which is a part of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). In the most recent survey done in 2013, 33 nations took part with adults ages 16 to 65 in numeracy, literacy and problem-solving. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) found that millennials- age from teens to early 30’s scored low. Millennials in Spain and Italy scored lower than those in the U.S., while in numeracy, the three countries tied for last. U.S. millennials came in last among all 33 nations for problem-solving skills.

Wider economic impact
Current education trends in the United States represent multiple achievement gaps across ethnicities, income levels, and geography. In an economic analysis, consulting firm McKinsey & Company reports that closing the educational achievement gap between the United States and nations such as Finland and Korea would have increased US GDP by 9-to-16% in 2008.

Narrowing the gap between white students and black and Hispanic students would have added another 2-4% GDP, while closing the gap between poor and other students would have yielded a 3-to-5% increase in GDP, and that of under-performing states and the rest of the nation another 3-to-5% GDP. In sum, McKinsey's report suggests, "These educational gaps impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession."

Overall the households and demographics featuring the highest educational attainment in the United States are also among those with the highest household income and wealth. Thus, while the population of the US is becoming increasingly educated on all levels, a direct link between income and educational attainment remains.

ACT Inc. reports that 25% of US graduating high school seniors meet college-readiness benchmarks in English, reading, mathematics, and science. Including the 22% of students who do not graduate on time, fewer than 20% of the American youth, who should graduate high school each year, do so prepared for college. The United States has fallen behind the rest of the developed world in education, creating a global achievement gap that alone costs the nation 9-to-16% of potential GDP each year.

In 2007, Americans stood second only to Canada in the percentage of 35- to 64-year-olds holding at least two-year degrees. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the country stands tenth. The nation stands 15 out of 29 rated nations for college completion rates, slightly above Mexico and Turkey.

A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in September 1993. It involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

The U.S. Department of Education's 2003 statistics indicated that 14% of the population – or 32 million adults – had very low literacy skills. Statistics were similar in 2013.

Behavior
A 2011 study found that students who were expelled were three times as likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system the following school year.

Corporal punishment
The United States is one of the very few developed countries where corporal punishment is officially permitted and practiced in its public schools, although the practice has been banned in an increasing number of states beginning in the 1970s. The punishment virtually always consists of spanking the buttocks of a student with a paddle in a punishment known as "paddling." Students can be physically punished from kindergarten to the end of high school, meaning that even adults who have reached the age of majority are sometimes spanked by school officials. Although uncommon relative to the overall U.S. student population, more than 167,000 students were paddled in the 2011-2012 school year in American public schools. Virtually all paddling in public schools occurs in the Southern United States, however, with 70% of paddled students living in just five states: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia. The practice has been on a steady decline in American schools.

School security
For some schools, a police officer, titled a school resource officer, is on site to screen students for firearms and to help avoid disruptions.

Cheating
In 2006, one survey found that 50% to 95% of American students admitted to having cheated in high school or college at one time or another, results that cast some doubt on measured academic attainment tests.

Charter schools
The charter school movement began in 1990 and have spread rapidly in the United States, members, parents, teachers, and students to allow for the "expression of diverse teaching philosophies and cultural and social life styles."

Curriculum
Curricula in the United States can vary widely from district to district. Different schools offer classes centering on different topics, and vary in quality. Some private schools even include religious classes as mandatory for attendance. This raises the question of government funding vouchers in states with anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments in their constitution. This in turn has produced camps of argument over the standardization of curricula and to what degree it should exist. These same groups often are advocates of standardized testing, which is mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

There is debate over which subjects should receive the most focus, with astronomy and geography among those cited as not being taught enough in schools.

English in the classroom
Schools in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, teach primarily in English, with the exception of specialized language immersion programs.

Other languages
In 2015, 584,000 students in Puerto Rico were taught in Spanish, their native language.

The Native American Cherokee Nation instigated a 10-year language preservation plan that involved growing new fluent speakers of the Cherokee language from childhood on up through school immersion programs as well as a collaborative community effort to continue to use the language at home. In 2010, 84 children were being educated in this manner.

Some 9.7 million children aged 5 to 17 primarily speak a language other than English at home. Of those, about 1.3 million children do not speak English well or at all.

Evolution in Kansas
In 1999 the School Board of the state of Kansas caused controversy when it decided to eliminate teaching of evolution in its state assessment tests. Scientists from around the country objected. Many religious and family values groups, on the other hand, stated that evolution is "simply a theory" in the colloquial sense (not the academic sense, which means specific and well supported reasoning), and as such creationist ideas should therefore be taught alongside it as an alternative viewpoint. A majority of the board supported teaching intelligent design or creationism in public schools. The new standards, including Intelligent Design, were enacted on November 8, 2005. On February 13, 2007, the board rejected these amended science standards enacted in 2005, overturning the mandate to teach Intelligent Design.

Sex education
Almost all students in the U.S. receive some form of sex education at least once between grades 7 and 12; many schools begin addressing some topics as early as grades 4 or 5. However, what students learn varies widely, because curriculum decisions are so decentralized. Many states have laws governing what is taught in sex education classes or allowing parents to opt out. Some state laws leave curriculum decisions to individual school districts.

For example, a 1999 study by the Guttmacher Institute found that most U.S. sex education courses in grades 7 through 12 cover puberty, HIV, STDs, abstinence, implications of teenage pregnancy, and how to resist peer pressure. Other studied topics, such as methods of birth control and infection prevention, sexual orientation, sexual abuse, and factual and ethical information about abortion, varied more widely.

However, according to a 2004 survey, a majority of the 1001 parent groups polled wants complete sex education in the schools. The American people are heavily divided over the issue. Over 80% of polled parents agreed with the statement "Sex education in school makes it easier for me to talk to my child about sexual issues," while under 17% agreed with the statement that their children were being exposed to "subjects I don't think my child should be discussing." 10 percent believed that their children's sexual education class forced them to discuss sexual issues "too early." On the other hand, 49 percent of the respondents (the largest group) were "somewhat confident" that the values taught in their children's sex ed classes were similar to those taught at home, and 23 percent were less confident still. (The margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percent.)

According to The 74, an American education news website, the United States uses two methods to teach sex education. Comprehensive sex education focuses on sexual risk reduction. This method focuses on the benefits of contraception and safe sex. The abstinence-emphasized curriculum focuses on sexual risk avoidance, discouraging activity that could become a "gateway" to sexual activities.

Textbook review and adoption
In some states, textbooks are selected for all students at the state level, and decisions made by larger states, such as California and Texas, that represent a considerable market for textbook publishers and can exert influence over the content of textbooks generally, thereby influencing the curriculum taught in public schools,

In 2010, the Texas Board of Education passed more than 100 amendments to the curriculum standards, affecting history, sociology and economics courses to 'add balance' given that academia was 'skewed too far to the left'. One specific result of these amendments is to increase education on Moses' influences on the founding of the United States, going as far as calling him a "founding father".

This effect is however reduced with modern publishing techniques which allow books to be tailored to individual states.

As of January 2009, the four largest college textbook publishers in the United States were: Pearson Education (including such imprints as Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall), Cengage Learning (formerly Thomson Learning), McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Other US textbook publishers include: John Wiley & Sons, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, F. A. Davis Company, W. W. Norton & Company, SAGE Publications, and Flat World Knowledge.

Culturally-responsive curriculum

Culturally-responsive curriculum is the outgrowth of research evidence that suggests that attitudes towards others, especially with regard to race, are socially constructed (or learned) at a young age. Therefore, the values that we attach to various groups of people are a reflection of the behavior we have observed around us, especially in the classroom. Culturally-responsive curriculum responds to the importance of teachers connecting with students in increasingly diverse classrooms by incorporating sociocultural elements into curriculum. The goal of culturally-responsive curriculum is to ensure equitable access to education for students from all cultures.

Culturally-responsive curriculum draws directly on the idea of a "hidden curriculum" or system of values that teachers impart on students in the classroom. Culturally-responsive curriculum attempts to break down the dominant cultural bias that often pervades curriculum and instruction. Similar to the anti-bias approach, culturally-responsive curriculum is intended to help students and teachers "recognize the connections between ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class, and power, privilege, prestige, and opportunity." Culturally-responsive curriculum specifically responds to the cultural needs of students as learners in the classroom.

Teachers gain in-depth understandings of their students' individual needs by engaging with parents, learning about culturally-specific ways of communicating and learning, and allowing students to direct their learning and to collaborate on assignments that are both culturally and socially relevant to them.

Culturally-responsive curriculum is also implemented at the level of preservice teacher education. One study by Evans-Winters and Hoff found that preservice teachers do not necessarily recognize the intersections of race and other social factors in understanding and characterizing systems of oppression. A shift in preservice training has been made toward a more self-reflective model that encourages teachers to be reflective of the types of cultural and social attitudes they are promoting in their teaching practices. This kind of preservice education can help teachers anticipate social-identity related tensions that might occur in the classroom and think critically about how to approach them.

 Reality Pedagogy 

Reality Pedagogy is one model of culturally-responsive pedagogy that uses individual student backgrounds to adapt curriculum and instruction. It was introduced by Columbia Teachers' College professor, Christopher Emdin, and elaborated in his book For White Folks who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Emdin promotes the use of cultural code-switching in the classroom to connect vernacular concepts with academic concepts. Reality Pedagogy is a form of culturally-responsive pedagogy that attempts to bridge community-based knowledge with classroom learning experiences.

 Gender-sensitive curriculum 

The notion of gender-sensitive curriculum acknowledges the current reality of our bi-gender world and attempts to break down socialized learning outcomes that reinforce the notion that girls and boys are good at different things. Research has shown that while girls do struggle more in the areas of math and science and boys in the area of language arts, this is a socialization phenomenon, rather than a physiological one. One key to creating a gender-friendly classroom is "differentiation" which essentially means when teachers plan and deliver their instruction with an awareness of gender and other student differences. Teachers can strategically group students for learning activities by a variety of characteristics so as to maximize individual strengths and contributions. Research has also shown that teacher's differ in how they treat girls and boys in the classroom. Gender-sensitive practices necessitate equitable and appropriate attention to all learners. Teacher attention to content is also extremely important. For example, when trying to hold boy's attention teachers will often use examples that reference classically male roles, perpetuating a gender bias in content.

In addition to curriculum that recognizes that gender impacts all students and their learning, other gender-sensitive curriculum directly engages gender-diversity issues and topics. Some curricular approaches include integrating gender through story problems, writing prompts, readings, art assignments, research projects and guest lectures that foster spaces for students to articulate their own understandings and beliefs about gender.

 LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum 

LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is curriculum that includes positive representations of LGBTQ people, history, and events. LGBTQ curriculum also attempts to integrate these narratives without biasing the LGBTQ experience as a separate and fragmented from overarching social narratives and not as intersecting with ethnic, racial, and other forms of diversity that exist among LGBTQ individuals.

The purpose of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is to ensure that LGBTQ students feel properly represented in curriculum narratives and therefore safer coming to school and more comfortable discussing LGBTQ-related topics. A study by GLSEN examined the impact of LGBTQ-inclusive practices on LGBTQ student's perceptions of safety. They study found that LGBT students in inclusive school-settings were much less likely to feel unsafe because of their identities and more likely to perceive their peers as accepting and supportive.

Implementation of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum involves both curriculum decisions and harnessing teachable moments in the classroom. One study by Snapp et. al showed that teachers often failed to intervene in LGBTQ-bullying.

Other research has suggested that education for healthcare professionals on how to better support LGBTQ patients has benefits for LGBTQ-healthcare service. Education in how to be empathic and conscentious of the needs of LGBTQ patients fits within the larger conversation about culturally-responsive healthcare.

 Ability-inclusive curriculum 

Ability-inclusive curriculum is another curriculum model that adapts to the social, physical, and cultural needs of the students. Inclusion in the US education system refers to the approach to educating students with special needs in a mainstream classroom. This model involves cultivating a strong relationship between teacher and student, and between non-special needs students and special needs students. Like the other models of culturally-inclusive curriculum, ability-inclusive curriculum often involves collaboration, parental-involvement, the creation of a safe and welcoming environment, returning agency to the students over their learning, and fostering open discussion about individual differences and strengths.

Research generally demonstrates neutral or positive effects of inclusive education. A study by Kreimeyer et. al showed that a group of deaf/hard-of-hearing students in an inclusive classroom scored better than the national averages on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and mathematical problem solving measures. Another study showed that inclusive practices increased literacy rates for autistic students. Many theorists champion the potential socio-emotional benefits of inclusion. However research on the social dynamics of inclusive classrooms suggest that special needs students might occupy a lower social standing that non-special needs students.