"In President Obama's first term, the administration helped to unleash innovation at the state and local levels, in part through competitive funds that achieved extraordinary 'bang for the buck' in driving positive change with public dollars."
"Much of this leverage is achieved through competitive awards to states and school districts committed to educational innovation and transformation. But the lion's share of the 2015 request--nearly 90 percent of discretionary funding--goes to formula funds that address the needs of disadvantaged poor and minority students, students with disabilities, and English learners."
Those are quotes from the page called "The President's 2015 Budget Proposal for Education" at the U.S. Department of Education's website, which has this address:
This is a quote from a 2006 article called "The Literacy of America's College Students," which is at the American Institutes for Research's website:
"With the recent attention on accountability measures for elementary and secondary schools, accountability in institutions of higher education has been all but overlooked."
Another 2006 article at the same page has this title:
"New Study of the Literacy of College Students Finds Some Are Graduating With Only Basic Skills."
These are quotes from that article:
"Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees--and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees--have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning that they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gas to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research."
"More than 75 percent of students at two-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literary tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials."
The address for that page is:
Those articles were published in 2006, 4 years before the conglomerate formed.
I am one of the whitest people in all of my classes. Of the few who are white, I can't think of any who are blonde except for me. I noticed it during the first week of classes; I've never been in a classroom where the demographic was that way. I have also never been in any classroom where the literacy of the majority of the students was so poor. It's 2016; the White House's expenditures of "public dollars" have not produced literate college students.
As hostile as the New York Times frequently is to me, this 2013 article factually disagrees with nothing that I'm saying today about the neglect of education in the United States:
Like the railing near the children's section at the newly renovated Boston Public Library's central location in Copley Square, which is so low that a child could easily and quickly climb over it and fall to his or her death, education in the United States is not only not being improved, it's getting more dangerous for the students whom it's supposed to help.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, March 7, 2016 @ 8:17 a.m.
