SAT scores are on the rise and are the highest they've been in 16 years. Woo f'n' hoo. Pardon me if I'm a little cynical about this whole deal, because it's my firm belief that Americans are dumber than ever. The public school systems are failing all over the place -- here in Los Angeles, it's pretty much worthless to send your kids to a public school, you need to send them to a private school to give them a decent education. And it shows -- though perhaps my sensitivity to it is a little higher because I'm a copyeditor, but do kids today know the difference between they're/their/there or you're/your or to/too/two and when to use each variation? Evidence highly suggests that they don't. Hell, I've seen spelling mistakes on TV, like in the chyrons on the news and on the news tickers running on Fox News & CNN & MSNBC, and I'm pretty sure kids aren't running those machines. When kids today can't form a coherent or grammatically correct sentence, that's a problem. And hey, has anyone thought that maybe the SAT scores are going up just because the tests are getting easier because the scores were going down and the company that runs the test was pressured to make us look good? Math scores are on their way up, too, and the College Board says that it's due to "increased participation in advanced math and science courses such as physics, precalculus, calculus and chemistry." On the other hand, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics "credited teaching methods that include more real-life applications, saying students are 'looking at problems that don't just involve pure calculation and computation-type of mathematics.'" Quite frankly, I took all those classes, and I really can't see any kind of real-life applications of physics, calculus and chemistry on a daily basis, because I'm not a chemist or a physicist or a mathematician. When I'm out and about, I'm not asking myself what's going to happen to the pH balance of something should I add the acidic orange juice to it, nor do I have to compute a geometric proof -- to this day, I still don't know why we spent two months on that in geometry class, because proofs are damned useless. I need basic math and English skills. I need to know how to balance my checkbook, I need to know how to form a sentence so people will know what I'm talking about, I need to know how to spell so my news stories won't be taken with a grain of salt because I can't spell something correctly. And in that way, I think the school systems are failing utterly, and I think that all these new-fangled toys that the educators are touting as helping kids are actually hindering them. It's great that we've got spell-check to make our lives easier, but do you actually learn how to spell a word if the computer corrects it for you all the time? Do you learn the difference between you're and your if the computer just puts a green line under the sentence in Word but you don't click on it to see what you're doing wrong because you think you're right? I'm not saying I'm the smartest person around -- I've definitely got a lot to learn, and I'm not perfect myself. But the government takes my hard-earned money to help fund our school systems, and I'd like to see a return on my investment, because if American kids had a stock price, as a whole it would've plummeted through the basement by now.