An early sign of aging?

[Taem]

I think this is less a sign of aging and more a sign of moronic sales clerks.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of the "morons" I have had the displeasure to work with are recently graduated, straight out of high school kids whom were never taught how to do such a simple task such as counting back change, much less 'complex' arithmetic when making a sale. These kids are hired in the temporary position of host/hostess and rely completely on what the register tells them in regards to balance and change due; God forbid they should ever have to figure out the tax on a checks net sale.

I honestly have no idea what they teach our children in high school anymore. I thought the No Child Left Behind act was suppose to raise the standards, but apparently certain critical elements are left out of the equation.

In my on opinion, the "standards" in California have dropped dramatically with the influx of non-English speaking aliens. Why do I say this? Because I have to take my children to a school with mostly white children because they speak English, whereas the other two grade schools in my area are predominantly filled with Hispanics who speak either mixed English or only Spanish. The teachers in these schools teach bilingual so it's no wonder why only English speaking students do so poorly in these schools. For the effects of bilingual teaching on the standardized tests, read this article. This quote caught my eye:

In New York, school administrators have been accused of pushing thousands of low-scoring students into high school equivalency programs, where, although they never earn diplomas, they don’t count as dropouts.

Here is another interesting article that links poverty to poor test scores. I am not implying that all Hispanics living in America are poor, not even, however I know that there are a lot of illegals that come here because the wages in Mexico are so bad. They come here and don't mind taking to the fields because here in America, they can easily make 10-100x what they would doing the same job in Mexico. I work with many Hispanics that work two minimum wages jobs just to support their families. A lot of these people send money back to their families in Mexico giving them even less to live on here.

I think the correlation is clear: if being poor is an indicator of how the standardized test might score, then it stands to reason that when these minorities enter high school, something has to give to accommodate everyone. Critical teaching elements must be left out so as to educate those with lower than average test scores so that they might pass the NCLB standardized tests and the schools might get their money from a fund that is already deplorably low to begin with.