Student scores

I just finished watching a segment about education and comparing the United States with other countries and the US ranks 17th in science and 24th in math. The US ranks 5thin spending per student. Experts offer many reasons for this and to me it is all very confusing. In my four years as a sub teacher I have come up with some observations. High schools have sacrificed learning in order to improve graduation rates. The district has an excellent math program as I have subbed in all math classes from 6th through 12th. If a student gets behind then the problem is compounded because each year depends on the content in the years before. The result is by freshman algebra, which is a required course, there are 6 to 8 students in most classes that have no idea what is going on. They are then sent to some remedial classes and if they show up every day they are allowed to take a math proficiency test and they must either pass it or flunk it twice and then they are allowed to graduate. While these students are in the classroom they are bored and soon start distracting the teacher and other students. The teacher spends an inordinate amount of time trying to keep these students from disrupting the class. This is time not spent in helping students who want to learn. Every effort is made to keep these students in school. There are special rooms they can be sent to where there is more one on one instruction but basically it gets them out of the regular class so the teacher can teach. There are two main reasons for this procedure. First each student brings in $13,000 to the school so expulsion is a no no. Second statistics show that if you can keep a student in school until age 18 the chances of him ending up in prison are greatly reduced. Since $13,000 is far less than the $30,000 cost for prison this is considered a good investment. If I had to name the number one problem, I would say it is students who do not learn respect for authority in the home and thus it carries over to the school and later to the job and too many times to the police officer on the street.