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Canadian Education & America’s Regression

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While the U. S. rushes to completely nationalize education, allegedly to improve test scores, America’s nearest northern neighbor, Canada, is taking a different approach.  “I don’t know why Americans don’t adopt the Canadian approach to education,” Jason Clemens of the Canadian Fraser Institute said last weekend at a seminar in Chicago.

In Canada, there is “no federal role in education,” Clemens said at the Friday conference sponsored by the free-market Atlas Network and the Illinois Policy Institute.  Both spending and governance of education in Canada are “entirely provincial,” Clemens said.

While, over the past two decades, Canada’s national government achieved this fundamental transformation, test scores went up. “Canada spends less than the United States on education but beats the US and the OECD averages on PISA results,” Clemens notes.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development consists of:

AUSTRALIA 7 June 1971
AUSTRIA 29 September 1961
BELGIUM 13 September 1961
CANADA 10 April 1961
CHILE 7 May 2010
CZECH REPUBLIC 21 December 1995
DENMARK 30 May 1961
ESTONIA 9 December 2010
FINLAND 28 January 1969
FRANCE 7 August 1961
GERMANY 27 September 1961
GREECE 27 September 1961
HUNGARY 7 May 1996
ICELAND 5 June 1961
IRELAND 17 August 1961
ISRAEL 7 September 2010
ITALY 29 March 1962
JAPAN 28 April 1964
KOREA 12 December 1996
LUXEMBOURG 7 December 1961
MEXICO 18 May 1994
NETHERLANDS 13 November 1961
NEW ZEALAND 29 May 1973
NORWAY 4 July 1961
POLAND 22 November 1996
PORTUGAL 4 August 1961
SLOVAK REPUBLIC 14 December 2000
SLOVENIA 21 July 2010
SPAIN 3 August 1961
SWEDEN 28 September 1961
SWITZERLAND 28 September 1961
TURKEY 2 August 1961
UNITED KINGDOM 2 May 1961
UNITED STATES 12 April 1961

PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment sponsored by the OECD.  Canada achieved all of the above, ironically, under mostly left-leaning leaders who insisted it was a matter of “mathematics, not ideology,” Clemens said. Now if only the two party establishments in the U. S. would improve their computational skills….

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.

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