"Wha' happen'd to tha butterfly?"

lol

That was funny!

"Yeah, these guys are doing trig."

The state-by-state results will probably correlate with standardized test scores, which means there won't be too much variation between states, but what variation does exist won't line up neatly with a political framework, with culturally opposed states like California and Oklahoma both exhibiting averages that are on the left half of the bell curve.

Anyway, you do what you can for folks, and new technologies help, like basing curriculum around computer tablets instead of physical books and handwritten notes.

However, in a nutshell, this video is why I'm not a collectivist

Part of it certainly is an Oklahoma problem. We pay our teachers crap, so we lose our best ones to the better-paying states around us. Oklahomans tend to have a very anti-intellectual attitude, and fewer and fewer kids are actually going to college. If this state doesn't get turned around soon, we're going to be even worse educated than Alabama.

If you were to pose similar questions to students of similar age over here (Germany), they'd probably fail just as miserably. They just don't care about that kind of information.

In all honesty though: I didn't know the correct answer to three questions.
I didn't even understand what the first question was about until I heard the answer. As for the supreme court, I only knew it had to be an uneven number, so I guessed seven. And even though I knew you elect your senators for six years, I got overcome by the fact that we elect our representatives for four years and assumed this to be the correct answer as well.

That said, I completely agree that it is unacceptable to not know these basics things.

HAHAHAH triple the budget, standard liberal answer. If it isn't working, throw more money at it. All problems can be solved if you make it most costly.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/77_oklahoma_high_school_students_cant_name_1st_president/

Read this. It links to the actual survey results and discusses the credibility of the survey. It wasn't even a test, it was a phone survey done by a conservative think tank that wants to push private schools. The number 1 answer on almost every question was "I don't know".

Well, that makes more since then. Those scores were to terrible to believe. Thanks for digging that up Brian. The article was well written as well, not trying to oversell the schools are well and dandy, schooling is still a problem, just not the moronic hopeless kind of problem that would be sold by those stat. As one who works in the polling business, never believe polls...ever...ever, make sure you have enough ever's memorized. Stats gained through studies or such are okish, but when someone calls someone else and polls them, there is so much room for abuse and question wording, not to mention call attendant disposition; the numbers only speak for themselves, not the questions they would pretend to represent.

Ironically, polls usually swing a bit more left from the phone attendant perspective. Most polling is conducted by the poorest and most hopeless of people. When there is a poll that has a more rightish slant to it, the phone attendants work a bear minimum to accomplish a complete call. It is an understood problem and usually weighted against when people want to make since of their data. Polling shouldn't be used as a definitive alarm for anything, it is more like looking down into murky water and guessing how deep it is, useful for establishing certain pretenses but not good enough for other wide sweeping things.