By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki
Recently the College Board established a website www.dontforgeted.org to promote the importance of education-related issues, especially during this election year in the US. The College Board is best known for administering standardized tests including the SATs used in college and university admittance decisions. It counts over 5900 colleges, universities and educational organizations as members.
On the “Don’t Forget Ed” web site they note some major shortcomings in the US educational system:
* The US ranks 16th worldwide for those ages 25 to 34 holding a college degree
* 70% of eighth graders can’t read proficiently
* American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science (in a ranking of 30 industrialized countries)
* Eighth grade American students are 2 years behind in math compared to other countries
* Increasing the high school completion rate by only 1% would save the US $1.4 billion per year in crime-related costs
* 44% of high school dropouts under 24 are jobless
* Individuals with a high school diploma are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with a college degree
And,
- Every hour of every school day 857 students drop out of high school
To dramatize this last item, the College Board set up 857 desks on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
An article on this can be found at
http://ow.ly/bL1bx
Curriki believes that providing a wide variety of free, open educational resources can help to diminish the shortcomings in the education system in the US and around the world. Anyone, whether student, teacher, or parent can access these resources, which help support more individualized learning models. Curriki has over 47,000 free curricular resources accessible by the public with over 6 million users worldwide, and by over 250,000 Curriki members. (There is no charge to join at www.curriki.org).
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