ну наконец нашлось время прочитать статью и она , конечно, подтверждает , что небеспричинно мы огорчаемся, столкнувшись с местной системой образования
The origins of this long-running argument can be traced to 1893, when the influential Committee of Ten, a blue-chip panel of educators, issued a report proposing that all public high-school students receive a strong, liberal-arts education. Ever since then we have been fighting about whether our high schools should be college prep for the masses or, as another blue-ribbon panel would put it 90 years later, a “cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course.”
Guided by the new IQ tests (which did as much as any single thing to convince American educators that tracking was not only possible but preferable) and the rise of guidance and counseling programs (which could match young people with the curriculum track best suited to their“scientifically” determined individual profiles), America entered an era of democratic dumbing down: the equal opportunity to choose (or be chosen for) failing programs. Proponents of comprehensive high schools argued that these curriculum options would encourage increasing numbers of students to stay in school and graduate, already a standard by which to judge high-school effectiveness. Unlike the Committee of Ten model, in which all students followed similar college preparatory programs, in the Cardinal Principles model equal educational opportunity was achieved because all graduates received the same ultimate credential, a high-school diploma, despite having followed very different education programs and having met very different standards in the process.
school leaders began giving academic credit for various aspects of the extracurriculum, such as providing English credit for students working on the school newspaper or yearbook. Such actions further diminished the role that academic courses played in high-school education.
Third, educators began giving credit toward graduation for such courses as Consumer Math, Refresher Math, and Shop Math, watered-down material that had not previously satisfied a graduation requirement. In other words, even when the share of math course taking rose, the increases were coming largely from students taking less-demanding math courses, not algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus.
Finally, but most important, during the 1960s and 1970s educators gradually shifted the onus of course and program selection away from guidance counselors and other education professionals and onto students and their parents. This policy enabled educators to duck accusations that they were responsible for reproducing inequality, since course and program selection now rested with students and their parents rather than with educators.
Teachers at all levels need additional preparation in the subjects that they teach and how to teach them. Beyond the fact that large numbers of high-school teachers are teaching subjects in which they have neither a major nor a minor, even teachers who do have strong academic credentials are often clueless about how to teach their subjects to students from diverse backgrounds and abilities. Historically, as we have seen, school leaders “solved” this problem by assigning supposedly less able students to the general or vocational tracks and watering down the courses they took. This process eliminated the need for teachers to do the hard work of developing methods that would make challenging content accessible to all students. Schools of education are equally culpable in this process, having shirked their obligation to do the kind of research that would aid administrators and teachers in implementing intellectually rich programs for all students. Programs to prepare new teachers and professional development programs for practicing teachers must address these problems if American education is to improve and thrive.
"Суть известной басни Крылова состоит в том, что лишь потеряв сыр, можно обрести свободу слова".
. Прикладывали эпитетами от души. 
