Phil: One could make the argument that, as high school got tougher (which some would interpret as "better"), the dropout rate would increase as more students felt they couldn't make it. Perhaps, one should consider that more students might stay in high school if it was made more interesting.

LeRoy: I have always said exactly that! Perhaps you have forgotten my posts (there have been a few of them) where I recapped the results of a week-long series of articles by The Rocky Mountain News in which they reported on the seriously high level of truancy in Denver-area high schools. They found large groups of students 'hanging out' in local parks (when they should have been in school), and interviewed many of them. A large number of those students complained that their teachers and classes were 'boring'...but, more to the point, a surprisingly large number of those students said that their classes were 'too easy'! This is not what the public would generally expect truant students to say, and it strongly suggests that we need to raise our expectations. Of course, classes that are 'too easy' will be 'boring'; how could it be otherwise? In particular, these students said that their math classes were too easy!

I suspect that I will remain eternally baffled as to why the American public is not more angry about the under-performance of our K-12 schools. After all, the American public pays a considerable amount in taxes to support these schools...where their children are kept, typically for five days a week, for perhaps seven hours a day, for ordinarily nine months of the year...and, after twelve years of this, their children come out at the other end, perhaps with a diploma, and perhaps knowing almost next to nothing!! A majority of recent American high school graduates cannot solve a simple two-step math problem (like finding the perimeter of a square given its area, or vice-versa) and in many cases cannot perform simple arithmetic operations (ask a recent graduate to add one-sixth and one-seventh, and see what kind of a response you get), and their knowledge of history and geography can only be described as woeful. [Don't even ask about science!!]

What are the schools doing with our children in all the time they have them?

And why aren't Americans uproariously angry about this??