Basic US Education Facts

This article in last week's NY Times has a good chart with basic stats on U.S. education. Among them:
  • more than 95,000 (students in) public elementary and secondary schools, 3,200 charter schools and nearly 4,300 degree-granting colleges, as well as 1.1 million who are home-schooled
  • 55.8M students, pre-k-12
  • 11% of elementary/high school students are in private schools
The two most interesting to me were:
  • 10.5M students ages 5-17 speak a language other than English at home (huge repercussions for educating these students and the differences between students' abilities to learn in English)
  • 24% of students 12-17 are in a gifted program and/or take higher level classes like AP (I wouldn't have thought it to be so high. I wonder how this measures against the number of SPS students in the Advanced Learning programs and/or taking honors or AP classes or IB.)

Comments

Charlie Mas said…
If taking an AP class puts students into that 24% of students "in a gifted program and/or take higher level classes" then the number could be right.

Remember that in Bellevue the goal is for EVERY student to take an AP class.

Of course, everything about the statistic is either ambiguous or weird.

The age range, 12-17, which covers grades 7-12, is an odd choice, and it isn't clear if the 24% includes every student who has EVER taken such a class or if it only counts students who are IN such a class right now. High school freshman don't have much opportunity to take an AP class, and most sophomores can only take European History.

Given all of the possible variables, I don't doubt that there is some configuration in which the number is correct.
9/3/07, 8:23 AM
Jet City mom said…
doncha love statistics?

The Almanac Issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education just came & it has some pretty interesting I noticed.

For example- Washington is ranked 14th in population- close to population of Massachusetts( ranked 13)

WA has 8 public 4-year institutions and MA has 15 public 4- yr schools.

But as has been noted elsewhere, we are better educated- ( slightly), only 11.1% of Washingtons population had less than a high school diploma whereas 12% of the Massachusetts residents haven't graduated from high school ( or less)

Other interesting stats
Proportion who speak a language other than English @ home- 16.0 %

Poverty rate 10.8 %

Per Capita personal income
$37,423

Proportion of Enrollment
made up of minority students at public 4- year institutions
22.4%

Non-white state residents
15.2%

30% of WA residents have a 4-year college degree ( or above)

Estimated 54% of high school seniors took the SAT & received an average of 1570.
( which would have been a great score if it was the old SAT)

Estimated new high school graduates in 2007-08
66,802
total instutions of higher learning including 2- year for profit
80

Estimates new high school graduates in MA in 2007-2008
72,318 ( obviously lower drop out rate)
total institutions for higher learning including 2 year for profit
121

no wonder kids go East for school.
9/3/07, 12:58 PM
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