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Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind
3l1za writes "The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries. A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10. Further, only about 1/3 of US kids reported that they did not feel as though they were good at math, whereas about 2/3 of Koreans reported this--and the Koreans ranked in the top three. 'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
In this country, there's a huge stigma attached to being good at math. If you are good at math, you're a nerd, where as all the cool kids suck at math, and are proud of that fact. Change the perceptions, and you'll go a long way toward improving the scores.
Perhaps instead of demanding more money, schools should evaluate how they are spending the money they already get.
HINT: I bet Czech schools don't spend millions of dollars (or preferred local currency) on state-of-the-art sports facilities and equipment.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
The US School system needs a f'en major overhaul. The money is there (we're #2 in the world in public funding per student behind Sweden).
The system is just horseshit. No responsibility, teachers can't teach, kids are a bunch of bastards, and the parents are taking absolutely no responsibility for the kids.
But of course the answer is more money!
I have three kids that will be starting school soon (one of them being in Montessori preschool already). Do I want them to feel good about themselves? Sure, as long as it's because they're doing so well in the classes that they're working hard to excel in. If my kid's flunking math because he won't apply himself, then I want her to feel embarrassed about her performance and not proud of the fact that the school would probably advance her to the next grade anyway.
There are some cripplingly serious problems with the American educational system. A severe overemphasis on underserved self esteem is high on that list.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Everyone = Lazy. It's common to humanity as a whole; that's not the problem. The problem is summed up here:
"'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
Exactly. People need to feel that what they're being taught is relevant to them; otherwise, they'll never learn it. I can attest to this, as I'm sure can most people here.
The goal should be to make the children see *relevance* to what they're being taught. That's why I support programs that give kids hands-on reason to use what they learn - for example, ameteur rocketry to get them to learn physics, simple robotics competitions to learn electronics and mechanics, programming competitions to learn computer skills, etc. We need to make being a geek *fun* for kids.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
This is mostly a cultural issue, not an education system issue. As evidenced by data wherein poor countries outperform the US despite our larger budgets.
Kids, and many of their parents don't care about school or education. They will get what they want. They resist teachers and throw up roadblocks. Many parents simply won't help when a teacher explains that their child needs it. That's what's putting our education system in the toilet.
The only case of education system failure is in misapropriation of money (also a cultural issue). Sometimes a wacko or two in high places decide to fund a pet-project instead of math/reading...
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I was surprized the first time I came to know that you folks are allowed to use calculators in high school exams!! And can even use programmable graphing calculators in university.
Tell ya somthing. ditch those calculators, and you'll solve half of the problem!
PS: In India, calculators are banned from exams/classes till high school. In university exams/classes you're only allowed to use at max non-prgrammable scientific calculators!
- mritunjai
I am a "Yank" that has lived, worked, and traveled throughout much of Europe, including Eastern Europe.
The "East Slobovia"'s of Europe are indeed poor, but they have high standards for educational performance and student behaviour accross the board, not just for the "educational elite". Indeed, in the US, it is financial status which is often the most important factor in determining access to quality education: either you earn enough money to buy a home in a school district with good public schools or you are able to pay for private education. Most countries, even poor ones, have a far superior educational system.
If you are so uneducated that you cannot spell a foreign country name, you cannot really be moderated as 5-Insightful, but let's let that go for now.
You might have gotten a bit more mileage from pointing out that comparing the quality of education per dollar spent is a poor metric due to VERY significant differences in the level of living. It would have been more relevant to do it on the basis of percentage of the GNP (Gross National Product, if you're wondering) or a similar statistic rather than the total cost of the educational system.
Then you might have noticed (I guess) that they spend a larger portion of their budget on education (as opposed to cruise missiles,etc.) and thus can give teachers better salaries than US does (compared to the average salary), etc.
Have fun posting.
I did study mathematics in US and Russia and I can compare the qualtity of education. It seems that teachers in Russia (and probably the rest of europe) emphasize the understanding the underlying concepts of mathematical theories rather than methods of solving a particular problem. The american students were expecting that the problmes given on the exam are exactly the same that were covered in class, and were always complaining when the professor made even trivial changes in the problems. It could've been the quailty of the students in my particular university, but now I am working at the major government research organization and we get a lot of students coming for the internship in the summer, and it seems that people from europe are much better at solving problems that they never seen before. In these days ability to solve a known problems has almost zero value because it is something that could be done by a simple shell script. Although, sometimes I see US students who are very good at mathematics, those studends usually come from the better schools like MIT and Rice, but they tend to be self taught and usually say that they pretty much skip most of their classses regarding them as the complete waste of time, and I can't say that I disagree with that. This applies
Really ? A country where a large percentage of the voting populace believes the world is 6000 years old is performing poorly in an educational evaluation ? Shocking.
And it's been doing an admirabe job at that. The problem is, a working class in America is now defined less and less as industrial/manufacturing/agricultural based and more an information/knowledge based.
Our primary schools are by design not capable of churning out intellectuals. The intellectuals who make it are either going to private schools or just smart enough to survive public education.
That's right: you don't receive a public education, you survive it.
It's not just that.
Look at our society's overall fascination with athletics. When a school needs a quarter million to build a new stadium, they find the money. When a school needs five thousand dollars to buy a new set of microscopes, they have to hold a bake sale or something, and kids end up sharing because they only raised half of what they need.
I have nothing personally against athletics. But when it replaces academics as the highest pursuit in our nation's schools, when parents spend their Saturdays watching their kids' football games, but won't bother to take them to the libray or planetarium or the science museum, then there's something wrong with our priorities.
We're becoming a nation of used-car salesmen who dreamed of being pro-sports stars. The rest of the world will eat our lunch.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
When I was in high school (and this wasn't in the US), about 80% of the class didn't give a fuck about learning. They've completed their mandatory nine year courses and left the school. About a half of those who stayed really did care about their future and studied really hard for the last two years at least. This allowed them (including yours truly) to enter all kinds of schools in the country, and some of them (including yours truly) graduated with honors from them.
Did this education system succeed? I think it did. Would the average results look good? I think they would not.
Let's face it, you don't need math to flip hamburgers or to do plumbing work. Heck, many programmers in the company where I work are puzzled by the most trivial math formulae. Despite of this they do their jobs fairly well.
I'm not saying that good education is not essential for those who want to achieve things in life (even though "american dream" proves time after time, that you don't have to have any education to make a shitload of money). To the contrary, I feel that people who don't have good education miss out on a lot of things in life.
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Yes -- Humanity, on the whole, tends to the paths of least resistance.
Look beyond that generalization and consider how part of the culture of America is how uncool school is. From stories of our heroes, Presidents and CEOs who dropped out of high school, to the glamorization of the 'cool' kids who cut class we have created the impression that shunning public education as the hip way to start being successful.
We've all sung along to lyrics like "We don't need no Education!" and "School's out for ever!" We've all rooted for Ferris Beuler, the Breakfast Club, and the kids from Saved by the Bell to outwit their bumbling teachers and principals and cut class in the most extreme ways possible. But it's songs and movies like this that has turned education into Enemy #1 for our youth.
If America is to do better academic-wise, it has to do more than just pour money down the public school drain. It has to change the image of education in our culture as something to be respected and appreciated as a necessity and not just an option. For every successful highschool dropout there are a thousand on food stamps and public welfare. For every professional athlete earning millions in the big leauge, there are a hundred thousand earning minimum wage.
Until we impress on young minds the fact that cool or uncool makes no difference when you're grown and penniless these facts will never change. If people want to talk about how the Rich Minority are taking over the country, just look at the uneducated majority and understand why. Sometimes it's not a conspiracy -- sometimes, it's just logic.
I agree.
Not that people are lazy, that's as profound as saying people are selfish (though accurate).
The problem with this county is that it sees education as elitist. You know the old Hollywood stereotype. Evil genius gets the crap beat out of him by buff super guy using big guns.
We have fox news with o Riley calling Yale alumni pinheads. It's fucking Yale, YALE. Hell, we have fox news, which alone says enough about our problems.
Even on Slashdot we get into these regular retarded arguments about how your code is more important then your college degree. Never mind the good it does for society to have another person that can think outside of their narrow scope. It's this attitude that's the real problem.
Only 27 % if Americans (over 25) have earned college degree in 2002. Is that higher then the past years? Sure. But damn it, we are the richest Country in the word, but more then 2/3 of the people only have (at best) a high school education? That's fucking ridiculous.
Seriously, majority rule and the majority have the education of chimp on tequila binge?
Not cool.
This is a total bullshit. Czech Republic for instance has a compulsory education for all childern since Maria Terezia made that law way back in 18th century. At that time half of US kids were still educated only as the farm duties allowed. Stop making excuses, start listening in school.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
It's up to the parents.
Only the parents can change the outcome.
It is the parent's choice whether to take an active role in their children's education or to abandon them to someone paid by the state to perform that service.
Fool!
You're assuming space is Euclidian! What if the wall is rotating at 80% of the speed of light in relation to you?
Go back to school, "geekoid".
Seriously though, that's one of those things that sounds tricky but is obvious in retrospect, although technically you'd need some way to measure a right angle.
I was turned on to math by my engineer Dad. One of the first things that blew my mind about how cool numbers were was the idea of logarithms. In sixth grade I computed the prime numbers up to 1000 for an extra credit project and in doing so realized I only had to check prime factors up to the square root of the number I was checking.
Math normally becomes interesting when it's applied to do useful and interesting stuff, although some freaks like me are attracted to numbers for the sheer beauty and coolness of them.
Some people point to a sunset or a mountain as evidence that there must be a God. Me? I point to Number Theory. Anyone can heap up rocks or make a planet orbit, but to me, it takes an Omnipotent Creator to achieve the infinite and sublime beauty of numbers.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
IMHO, no more than 10% to 15% of jobs probably require a college education. It's just that the quality of education up through H.S. in the U.S. hass, for the most part, deteriorated to a large degree. Running a small retail establishment, construction, trades, most manufacturing jobs, telemarketing, sales, many first level management, all these should not require a college degree. They didn't in the past. So with 27% of Americans getting degrees, that's twice as many as what's really needed.
Actually, I beleive the offshoring trend has illustrated that learning things like "divergence and the surface integral of a vector field" entitle you to a less-than-minimum-wage (for the US) job in a third-world country. That is, after all, the value that employers appear to be putting on such knowledge. What's the point? We can do better studying french-fry making.
This is exactly the problem.
15-year-olds may be immature, but they're old enough to see what's going on around them and have a basic understanding of society. They can see that engineers and physicists don't have a glamorous life, or even an employed one in many cases, while all their rich friends' parents are all lawyers and businesspeople.
With a society that places the most value on screwing people out of their money, rather than creating new things, why would anyone expect the children of this society to have any interest at all in math and science? You don't need these things to succeed in business or law. Heck, with the current economy, realty is a very rewarding profession, and you don't need to know anything at all to do that--most realtors couldn't even change the locks on a house if they had to!
Honestly, I'm surprised we did as well as we did in this math skills survey.
A growing (but now recognized as problematic) movement over the past few years has been the introduction of the "Investigations" math curriculum into public schools. see here. The goal is to make kids "feel better" about learning math, which in many ways has been a code for dumbing down the curriculum so that academic rigor is out and poorer students can achieve better on tests. They learn by approximating answers, like 12x48 will approximately be like 10x50. In my opinion, this is the opposite of math -- where the goal is to find the one *correct* answer.
In this curriculum, the kids learn by discovering the rules of math on their own, but this is absolutely ridiculous -- the whole point of passing knowledge through civilization is that we don't have to relearn like cavemen from birth. They spend time playing with blocks to count numbers, all the way up to 4th grade. These children are going to be severely hurt. Part of the problem is that teaching math at home has failed many of them, plus the teachers aren't qualified to teach math, so they grasp any curriculum that seems to make the subject more "fun" at the expense of real learning. An annoying part of the curriculum is that it also inserts a very touchy-feely agenda into the textbooks, and while I'm quite liberal about educating kids on history, etc., this has no useful place in math class.
Also, some people suspect that the test scores are rising because we're dumbing down the tests themselves -- which is outrageous. See here for example.
You may not think that these questions affect you, but they do. When we have a large fraction of the population unable to do basic math, we all will suffer. From things like being unable to hire competent workers, to the person serving you at a restaurant or a store unable to compute change, to your kid having access to only the most basic math education because the rest of the kids are so far behind they have to be specially taught, taking away resources for the higher achievers...(part of the No Child Left Behind = No Gifted Child Gets Ahead program) read this report on how gifted children are done given the shaft in the US..