I would like to see the statistics you should have referred to when citing ESL children scoring "higher" than native English speakers. Assuming there is any degree of truth to this statement, it should be considered one of the positive qualities of our educational system. If an ESL speaker can seize the opportunities provided by our educational system, that is a good thing. It is the very reason educational institutions exist. The link that follows my comments will give you a generalized overview of a few of the variables that effect educational success.

http://www.sedl.org/rural/atrisk/context.htm

not ESL.

chinese schools give thier students american tests, like the stanford achievement test, or the iowa, and the chinese students outscore american students.

the choices of the president are what make it so "bad".

i honestly see nothing "bad" about it, but thats just me.

Are they administered in English as well? If they are, *holy shiznitz* the global dominance the U.S. has enjoyed as the premier superpower is over. I think McDonald's is hiring...

you say "the president" which makes it sounds like you think only one president is truly responsible for America's image today.... when in fact... that's not the case.

american tourists are also responible. American tourists are often ignorant of local culture and customs, and believe they deserve to be treated better because they're american. Wearing american flags in other countries doesn't help either.

We went into Iraq because the UN wasn't doing it's job. The UN is a money making scheme that's supposed to be the police of the world. Instead the US has to do things to protect itself. France didn't support our decision because we were being vigilantes and disrupting some of the UN's bribes. The president can't say what I just did because of political reasons. He still wants to be on decent terms with the UN. Politically you can't just say truthfully how you feel about certain things without a backlash of some sort. By declaring an open distrust of the UN it would be the same as proclaiming them as enemies when we'd rather have them as acquaintances who sometimes disagree. Bush has been told to emphasize 9/11 because it was an attack on our country. An invasion of US soil. He has to use what happened in 2001 to rally support for the cause of US safety. Bush didn't declare an open mistrust. He danced around it yes, but never openly said the UN is an enemy of the US.

Politicians don't want informed voters. Informed voters know that they aren't voting for a person. Informed voters know that they are voting for a group of policies and people who will run the country in a way that will best suit them. An informed voter will see through the mask or face the parties put on them. An informed voter would see that the elephant is working to bring stability so that commerical giants can stay free and lower class will make more money to pay more taxes. The donkey is working to make large changes and jeapordize any stability the elephant has to offer. The republican a man who is rich and wants to stay that way, a democrat a rich man wants the republicans money.

That's a big label but that is how i view the parties at the present time.

Back to the topic, no America isn't as bad as people say. Foreign politicians are rallying their peoples against a common enemy so that the foreign sheep will follow them and help them keep their money making machine in tact.

Yeah, it's all coming to me now...the donkey can kick the elephant so it will smash and stomp all over the UN. The bribe box will probably be unguarded ...hmmm... we can dress up as commercial giants and jack the $$$$. We will get an informed voter to start a rumor that George Bush did it. While all this is going on, the French will be so distracted that we can steal their brie and bordeaux and get fcuked up with the sheep. When the mayhem and carnage is over, the baby sheeple can dominate the world.

That's true about being ignorant of local culture, but it can be said about most tourists, not just Americans, however, Americans always get the heat regardless if we think we deserve better. I can be the most modest American tourist and people will still hold a kind of resentment, sometimes reverence, simply from knowing I'm American. It's stereotype and every person of every culture is guilty of it. It doesn't help when people know I'm from Texas either. But what? Just because I'm from the Lone Star State, I'm suddenly the next G W Bush? Not that it would be a bad thing either, but I'm just saying. A lot of people hate Americans because they indulge in stereotypes, and very few of them actually have valid reasons.

no we didn't.

if we did, we'd be in:

Lybia
North Korea
Israel
syria

just to name a few.

israeli torpedo boats attacked a US warship. the US warship thought the israeli boats might not have know they were US. So, they few thier holiday colors, which is basically a flag twice the size of the normal flag. and still the israeli torpedo boats attacked.

Lybia shot down commercial airlines

north korea has refused to negotiate and has a nuclear program.

syria shot at the SR-71 blackbird with SAMs.

the UN hasn't done anything in these countries either.

They have changed their stance on that as of late.

but recentley.

if the bush administration applied the same time frame they gave iraq to start being reasonable, we should be in north korea already.

We are in those countries. Israel is not a threat.

We're in Lybia, North Korea, and Syria?

Okay, I'll grant you this one, but...



They do that becuase people value oil more than the marginal benefit to environment and health that would result from being aggressive. Think about it this way--if a new fertilizer made food a lot cheaper and would reduce hunger, but would cause one case of cancer every five years, is it a good idea to ban it? We have to keep everything in perspective and seek a happy medium, which I think we have--it doesn't make sense to let companies do whatever they want, but it also doesn't make sense to regulate them out of business.



Yeah, right. We have the highest percentage of college graduates of any large country. Why do you think foreigners come to college in the United States and not vice versa?



That's because, in most foreign countries, you have to score a minimum on a test in order to get into high school. Otherwise, they pack you off to vocational school and your scores aren't counted in these sorts of tests that they use to measure this.

A better comparison would be the average test scores in a foreign country versus those at a school in the US you have to test into, like Stuyvesant or Phillips Exeter.



But how many people in foreign languages speak English? Or even speak their own native language?



Read my point above. The average student at the TJ Math and Science Institute is scoring better than foreign students. You can't compare foreign countries (in Germany, only about 1/8 of people test into high schools) with America, where everyone goes to high school.



That's because those statistics are for the Federal government, and the Federal government isn't supposed to involve itself in local educational problems. If you added all the money spent by Federal government, State governments, local governments, and private individuals (test prep books alone are a multibillion dollar industry) combined, then it would exceed our terrorism funding. People spend nearly $3 billion a year on undergraduate education at the Ivy League--just eight schools. And that's not to mention we have prep high schools here like Exeter that have endowments higher than most third world GDPs.

The reason our education spending appears low is because we the people do it, instead of the Federal government. Schools should be funded and administered locally, because local citizens know what their problems and their values are better than bureaucrats in Washington, and can thus tune their education better.



Medicare is the Federal Government's second largest expense next to Social Security. Defense is third. And once again, that doesn't count private medical spending. There is very little private defense spending, but almost half of total medical spending is private. And that doesn't even count the amount of money that pharmaceutical companies and universities put into research and development. When all is said and done, we probably spend twice or even thrice as much on healthcare than we do on defense.

antix's point is that we don't have a national healthcare system like many other countries do for its citizens. It's not a matter of how much is spent in sum in the US--it's a matter of cost for the average citizen. Healthcare rates as of late have been skyrocketing. Many people are unable to afford health insurance, surgeries, or even prescription medication. In most other first-world countries, these things are paid for by the government; in the US, the citizen foots almost the entire bill, and that's a bill that many Americans are unable to afford.

Medical costs are skyrocketing because our doctors are very overpaid by international standards. No other country has a licensing agency that has anything near the power amassed by the American Medical Association. The average doctor in the United States makes a quarter million dollars a year, far above any other field. Since most costs in almost any industry are derived from labor, the most effective way to reduce healthcare costs is to reduce the power of the AMA and open more medical schools, thus increasing the supply of doctors.

The same reasoning works in the legal field. The reason that legal services are so much more expensive in the US than elsewhere is that the American Bar Association artificially restricts the supply of lawyers (that's right; we don't have enough lawyers, because our laws are so complicated), thus inflating the price.

National health insurance does not work, because it creates clogs in the system. Since it effectively abolishes the price system, something has to replace it--and that something becomes rationing. In addition, since people aren't paying out of pocket, they start to get checkups for everything. Colds that ordinarily would have been dealt with by chicken soup now require a doctor's attention--meaning fewer doctors available to deal with pneumonia and cancer patients. People have less incentive to follow sensible diet and exercise regimens, instead relying on the healthcare system--and only a limited amount of people want to be doctors, meaning that the wait lines in a NIH system would be deadly. Literally. It's a lot easier to get prompt medical treatment in the United States than elsewhere. In Canada, only 1/4 of heart attack patients get the treatment within the first 20 minutes, and lines for cancer surgery are often several months long.

I don't deny their ability to lower drug costs through mass bargaining power (the same way a monopoly lowers labor costs through its bargaining power, a monopoly buyer can lower the price of a product), but if EVERY country adopted the mass buying model, there would be no money left to do research and development, and we would find that the quality of our medical care would decline in the long run.

There's always a cost to be paid--just look at government financial aid for colleges. Thanks to Federal grants, virtually anyone can afford to attend an Ivy League school. But are more people attending Ivy League schools now? No, and people are paying for it with health-crushing sleep deprivation and stress in high school. All government aid is doing is substituting one rationing mechanism (an essentially random admissions process, because there are so many qualified applicants, that, among the best applicants, the process is essentially random) for another one, namely price.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing in reference to colleges, but it would be a terrible thing in reference to healthcare, when restricting the supply of the good could mean death and suffering for thousands.

The only way of driving healthcare costs down without serious adverse effects is to get more doctors--and that means allowing more people to attend medical schools. The only way we're going to do that is by reducing the influence of the AMA, which is, after all, just one big labor union for people making six- and seven- digit incomes.

You certainly make a reasonable argument, one with which I don't disagree. There's no arguing the fact that most of the high costs in our society can be attributed to the greed of those who control the commodity in question--in the case of medical care, the American Medical Association.

So we can agree on the root cause of the issue of high medical care in America. Your solution to produce more doctors is not unreasonable, but you note that solution has a barrier--the power of the AMA. And you also note that the power of the AMA must be reduced.

Unfortunately, you stopped there. The question then becomes: how does the power of the AMA get reduced? Can it even be done, given the context of our system of laws, rights, and privileges in America? In the end, you have identified a number of root causes, yet even after that analysis, we seem to have no solution at hand.

Which relates back to the issue of a national healthcare system. Certainly, this has been shown to not be an ideal solution to the problem of soaring healthcare costs, but it is a solution, one which is certainly much more feasible than "producing more doctors" and "limiting the scope and power of the American Medical Association". It's all well and good to deal with issues in theory, because that helps us find solutions, but in the end, the real world is what matters, and solutions ultimately have to be implemented in the real world. In the real world, I don't think we can--right now--limit the power of the AMA, or produce more doctors. It's simply not feasible at this point in time. A national healthcare system, while expensive and possibly contrary to some American ideals, would at least alleviate the immediate concerns of healthcare costs that millions of Americans face today and on a daily basis.

The AMA's power comes from its ability to lobby State Legislatures into putting restrictions on medical school admissions.

There was a case in Wyoming, a state with less than 500 doctors, of a retired army nurse who wanted to set up a shop to set broken bones, something he was qualified to do because of years of army training. But the Wyoming state legislature, pressured by the AMA, shut him down.

The solution is for state legislatures to resist political pressuring by the AMA and ease restrictions on medical school admissions and board testing (looking at the parallel field of law, the few states that allow lawyers to take the Bar without going to an ABA-accredited law school such as New Mexico have considerably lower legal costs than other states). The answer is more free market, not less.

Reducing restrictions on the creation of new medical schools is a more effective long-term solution, and a far less drastic one, to a national healthcare system.

And again, an admirable goal, but can we really expect the government to "resist political pressuring by the AMA"?


You'll pardon me for pointing out the irony in a user named ComradeRed, who flies the Soviet Flag as an avatar, advocating more free market.

It's certainly a lot easier to resist pressuring by one special interest group than completely overhaul an existing institution that's probably an eighth of our GDP.



Meh, we change with times. http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=ThePravda

Is that to say that they are both nearly impossible?

israel has spies in washington. they have openly attacked an american ship flying an american flag. how exactly is this "not a threat" ?

Fair

i think people hate america simply because they hate bush. i am american, but i hate saying so at times because i hate bush and the STUPID RETARDED MOFO-ING BS hes done. =)