An ONION Report That Hurts.

       There's a shocking report today in THE ONION that the IAEEA has found that Chinese third graders have fallen behind American high schoolers. The article goes on to point out that China is deeply concerned about this failure of it's education system over this report. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IAEEA) states that, based on it's test results, American 14 to 18 year olds have forged ahead of Chinese 8 year olds in Algebra, biology and chemistry. Even China's smartest third graders are testing no better than the average American high school student.
       For those of you not familiar with THE ONION, it bills itself as one of the most respected news outlets in the country. For those of you who are familiar with THE ONION, you can explain to the unfamiliar that everything in THE ONION is spoof and untrue. But much of it is completely humorous and some is down right funny.
       There's another side of THE ONION's articles. They nearly always point to a sliver of truth. Here in this article the sliver that pains us is that China and a fair number of other countries are turning out students with a better education than our kids get. When it comes to grade level comparisons, America is way down the list of  industrialized countries. We're almost even with some developing countries.
       But you'd never know it by the way our government acts. The general impression seems to be that "more money doesn't necessarily translate into a better education." Therefore perhaps less money will improve our educational process. You can scoff at that statement, but just look at the way government at every level has cut funding for education.
       Ya see, if you buy the argument that more money doesn't provide better education, then it's an easy step to "let's try less money for a change." And it's easy to do that so long as your only interest is in teaching for some standardized test instead of the subject matter of a wide range of subjects, like teaching our kids how to think. It's true we need to make changes. But first lets figure out what changes to try, then figure out how much that will cost. Let that determine how much we spend on education.