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The easiest answer is that the constitution doesn't set or establish any federal jurisdiction over education, which implies that it is a responsibility that lies at the state level.
Also in practice the federal government can have pretty substantial influence on education policy by tying education funding to compliance with whatever they want done.
an A for the purpose of college admission is valued the same regardless of what state it is from
Are you sure about that? Until relatively recently, colleges relied heavily on the SAT/ACT, and some are going back to them. While imperfect, they’re likely to show and even compensate for differences in grading scale.
Surprisingly, as defective as GPA is, it is better at predicting college success than SAT/ACT. The major positive feature of those tests is that they are free to the customer.
But the two combined is a better predictor than either alone.
I hope they correlate better now than when I took them around 25 years ago. I purposely didn't take the SAT because my practice scores were multiple hundreds less than my corresponding ACT score. Both tests are vastly different now than when I took them so I can't remember all the differences just that it made a lot of people laugh.
I’m not talking about how well they correlate to each other, but how they correlate to performance in college once admitted. So GPA and ACT/SAT together are more accurate in predicting success than either one alone even if GPA is better than ACT/SAT.
The SAT confers a very modest statistical improvement. It is definitely not an equal partner with the GPA. Where it can be most helpful is in identifying students with low(er) GPAs who may nevertheless be good candidates for college. Sadly, this is a kind of student that an admissions officer is reluctant to take a chance on.
Last I saw data the improvement in prediction/correlation using combined was double digit percentage points over GPA alone, so not negligible. It’s a hard thing to predict well because so much isn’t observable, every improvement is important.
In a diverse country of over 300 million people, setting a single national educational policy seems both unresponsive to local differences and needs, and unworkable as a practical matter.
Why does calculus have to be taught differently depending on location?
These responses make me question whether you’re here in good faith.
Education goes beyond mathematics. E.g. each state will teach its own history in addition to general US and world history.
Additionally there are federal education standards like common core that attempt to harmonize what topics are taught albeit with differing curricula.
Not to mention the vast majority of people will never need to know calculus.
Hell I am an engineer and I rarely use it.
Why doesn't Europe? We're the same geographical size, more or less. And our government is more or less similar to the EU in that we're a bunch of self-governing States united under a single Larger government.
I know this is whataboutism but our states are the size of European countries. Centralizing things over such a large area is extremely difficult, especially since these systems were built long before the information age and even before automobiles in many cases.
The real answer is that the Constitution never established it which means it's left to the states. But just logistically... it's difficult.
Exactly. I want to see bureaucrats in Brussels in charge of all elementary schools in Germany and Spain and Italy. They get to decide what the kids are taught and how they're taught and the books they use and the methods they use. It seems like a good idea.
This is an extremely fraught comparison.
Europe is not a country.
Their member states are sovereign entities with entirely separate national identities.
Member states in the EU don’t have to stay in the EU, because it’s a Treaty agreement.
Education is not left to the states in the US, because the federal government has to guarantee equal access to education within the states.
While detailed curriculum choices are made at the state or local level, that is usually made in compliance with guidelines and requirements that earn federal funding.
While a member state of the EU can choose to exit the union and therefore not comply with any of their laws, a state in the US can be compelled by force to comply with the US constitution.
The comparison is because the distance is huge from one side to the other and the amount of people is also great. Why have someone 2000 miles away from you tell your kids what to learn?
Because although the curriculum is broadly similar all across the board, there are certain nuances that come with teaching in rural farm communities that aren’t applicable in an urban setting, and vice versa
Why would the rural-urban devide impact how you grade a calculus question?
You’ve completely ignored my point about curriculum being broadly similar, obviously location doesn’t affect objective math scores
What it does have an impact on however is the educational needs of the local community, some schools in more rural areas will have more of an emphasis on agriculture, technical training, and even ecological conservation, while urban schools have their own niches that just wouldn’t be necessary in rural parts of the country
It isn't as decentralized as one may think. It isn't like there's a state where Math isn't taught.
Colleges have varying levels of accreditation from national orgs, everyone wants to educate their children so they can at least have a shot at college or some type of post-grad education, a lot of Americans go out of state for post-high school, so standards are pretty similar across the board.
What isn't similar is how you get there. Its up to the schools to accomplish the goals, even though the end goal across all 50 states is pretty much the same.
There are a few problems with the priors undergirding your question.
Most glaring is the presumption that resources dedicated to education are evenly distributed: this is in no way true. Because that is the case, a diploma from an underfunded district without high parental educational attainment is simply in no way the same as one from a wealthy district of wealthy people who have a multi-generational legacy of tertiary education.
If it the school system was federal than funding could be equal accross the country
Yes, perhaps, but that isn't reality.
Our education system, like so many other things in this country, is easier to understand if you view America as being equivalent to the European Union and not any particular nation state you might be familiar with.
Both conceptionally and functionally the United States of America is a bunch of somewhat culturally distinct small nation states that have ceded a certain amount of their power to a centralized governing body in order to deal with large or external existential threats but have zealously reserved various powers and rights in order to control their internal processes.
That was the original intent of the founding fathers (which was much more clearly observable in the articles of confederation which was their first attempt at a union) but that basic premise has evolved in been modified over the last 250 years.
It’s not a perfect analogy or description, but if you think about this country from that perspective a lot of things make much more sense.
I don't agree that "if everybody gets an A then no one does". An A can certify mastery of a set of topics rather than rank students relative to each other.
Back to the question, we inherited state-level education from our early history and never agreed enough on federal education policies to make a federal system.
when everybody gets an A that means that getting an A is easy which makes it useless as measurement of academic archievement
when everybody gets an A that means that getting an A is easy
I deny the premise.
Statistically he’s right. What are the chances that out of a random group of people 80% are above average intelligence?
It means that you have met the standard of mastery. Ease of getting that Mastery is not communicated.
Many colleges look at how you did compared to your peers within your school. So just giving out As to every student doesn’t raise chances at admission like you think it does.
You are way too concerned about this.
I'm not sure asking a question makes them way too concerned.
The initial question, sure.
Its the paragraph of a mild rant after that gives evidence.
What paragraph? I only had one
Kinda narrows it down then, doesn't it.
I dunno, I can read a paragraph without getting exhausted.
...so can I? Like, that's what I did. That's how I know they care too much.
This is not the retort you sought.
You sure sound like it took a lot out of you to read it, bud.
Aight, have a great day and keep up your spirits.
Wow. Ya got me.
if everybody gets an A than no one does,
That doesn't make any sense. The grade is a measure of the student's mastery of the subject, not a relative evaluation of the student in comparison to all the others.
when everybody gets an A that means that getting an A is easy which makes it useless as measurement of academic archievement
Nonsense. However, I am thinking of STEM subjects so maybe there's an argument for other fuzzier subjects.
The education a person in California needs to survive and achieve success is different than rural Alabama. Some things outside math and other basic things are regional specific.
What differences between California and Alabama would make it necessary to grade Algebra differently?
Math is pretty universal. It's the extra curriculars that are prone to change
The real question is why do we do things on the federal level?
We have a federalist system. The states should be the ones to do most of our day to day governance, because different areas of the country have different needs, values, and goals.
Apart from that, I disagree with the incentives remark you made. For k-12, there is no inherent advantage to the state or school for giving more A's than needed. There are certain places, like California, that have given a guideline to lower standards for "racial equity." That's really the only one I can think of that fits what you're saying. It doesn't benefit a state to lower standards for the sake college admissions. That would just mean more people going to out of state colleges in many areas. It does, benefits states to have an educated citizenry.
The constitution doesn’t explicitly say where education is allocated to, which means it is given to the states by default. In almost all cases if the constitution does not explicitly give a power to the federal government it is given to the states.
The value of academic achievements shouldn't be tied to scarcity; it should be tied to the practical value of what you know. Public education should be as accessible as possible, and you should face no additional barriers so long as you understand the concepts needed to be useful in your chosen field.
That makes it OK to have things be managed at a local level so long as there are accreditation boards reviewing things. If North Carolina wants to increase its number of engineering graduates, the public universities that facilitate that will have to get through ABET accreditation anyways...the state government will have to abide by those standards and provide genuine educational value to those students.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution doesn’t specify that it’s the Federal Government’s job to deal with education, so it defaults to the States.
Because our country is leaps and bounds bigger than most. Australia is an entire continent and it basically the same size as the US. Doing anything on a federal level encompasses so much land mass it's kind of insane to track and enforce.
All things not specifically delegated to the Federal Government are governed by the State Governments as per the Constitution. So from that standpoint the Federal Government does not have the authority to do what you are wanting.
Additionally doing things from the top down means that the responding to local needs and individual needs are slow if not impossible. It means that schools cannot adapt. It also means they cannot be held accountable by locals both in educational standards and in the conduct of Staff and Administration.
Your question is the same as asking why all of Europe does not allow the EU governing body to dictate education in all of Europe.
Educational policy at the state level allows for tailored solutions that address unique local needs. While concerns of reduced standards exist, implementing standardized assessments and accountability measures nationwide could ensure quality across states while maintaining state-level flexibility for addressing specific educational challenges.
The relationship between the federal government and the states is complicated when it comes to education.
Because the federal government has to guarantee equal access to education after Brown v Board of Education, it provides funding to schools that meet certain requirements. The detailed curriculum varies because different schools have different needs, and local government/state history varies by state.
The requirements from the federal government have changed over time, but the vast majority of schools follow guidance from the federal government on what needs to be taught at a baseline. This has been the case since 1965.
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