AiA wrote on Jul 6
th, 2016 at 3:15am:
I have been back living and working in the USA for a few years now, in Atlanta actually. Like you say Andrei, Americans are incredibly nice, sometimes annoyingly so, but their worldview can be infuriating, and their tendency towards polar opposites regarding the simplest matters is puzzling.
Depends on where you go in America, whom you meet and what circles you hang out in.
The general education level is lacking because teachers' unions control public education, and that makes it difficult to get rid of inept teachers. In New York they have what are called "rubber rooms" for teachers who have no business being in the classrooms, but remain on the payroll because of the power of the unions.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/17/city-pays-exiled-teachers-to-snooze-as-rubber-rooms...The documentary "Waiting for Superman" covers the problem quite nicely.
It doesn't help that the federal government has its own bloated bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Education, which is essentially accountable to no one. Thus, it doesn't really matter that test scores haven't improved since it was created in 1979 (by Jimmy Carter, not surprisingly) -- the bottom line is that Congress has no intention of abolishing it.
This is one of those federal agencies that could disappear tomorrow and the vast majority of Americans would never know the difference.
Forum
Pages: 
