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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.'"
Now someone is going to tell me that I can't eve count to one!
We = Lazy. Leave us alone and quit picking on us :)
All those numbers in the post are hurting my head.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Our American Football programs are still tops!
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.
Math is hard.
Moo.
This survey has come out at least once a year for as long as I can remember. "US kids lack in X discipline." Next up: US childhood obesity is the rise.
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.
"Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children learned"."
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!
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
.375 years old). Something's fishy here.
Um, according to these figures the average age of these "children" in each country was barely five months old (15/40 =
You didn't win? They MUST have cheated!
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
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?
The engineers from outside the US were able to do the job. Only the top notch products of the US school system could cope.
It was very sad.
or how for the money thing. they spend 1/3 but do they have as many students overall we could be spending less overall (giving the country and cost of things versus over there) we could spend 2$ per kid for pencils or something, while to get 2times the pencils per kids, they only spend 2$
Movies made by a crazy person
http://www.youtube.com/marginalpro
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.
He doesn't appear to be missing many. They seem to be failing in unison. At least Bush got them working together.
It's not an anomalie, eastern european countries have great education systems, even if "cheap". I live in Portugal and we get a load of imigrants from Ukrania an several other countries of the area, trying to earn some money. They mostly end up in the construction business, but they're all college graduates, management, economy, engineering. And they're well-formed people.
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 was looking at the countires that are ahead of us, and i saw Latvia. I thought to myself "Latvia? How the crap did we get beat by Latvia? I don't even know where Latvia is!!". I don't think i could possibly be helping us get better in our standings....
The water gets stirred up again, and everyone starts screaming that we need to put more money into the school system. If this were a business, we would find out where the money was going and what it was doing. Why is it that many private schools cost far less per student, yet the students get higher scores and better chances at good jobs. Before you start claiming we were all "fortunate sons", the school I went to for half of my highschool years had a tuition of 2,500 a year per student. My classmates are now doctors, nurses, and couple of graphic designers. One even was offered several 4 year scholorships based on his math abilities.
Maybe the issue is family life? Parents who take the time to find a good solution for education are more involved? Who knows, but the point is it DOESNT have to cost more.
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.
Only your math skills.
And you went to school? where? Guess what, a decent education(for free) is where you find it. getting a decent education happens all the time in the inner city. The problem is largely cultural. A culture of students and parents who don't value education and believe that the best way to make it big is to
a)win the lottery
b)be good at sports
c)get a music contract.
unfortunately of those 3 choices the most likely one to happen is a, and the odds get progressively worse.
All you need to get into a decent college is decent grades and all you need for decent grades are decent motivations. In this country if you are needy, your college is paid for by
wait for it
still waiting?
TAX MONEY!!! DING!
The US is HUGELY egalitarian. In most countries if you don't try, or fail they tosss you out of school, in the US, they let you stay and hold back everyone else.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
*ducks*
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
More and more, I am seeing that my elementary school must have been an oddity in the US. We were a public school in a small town in TN, of all places, but it was extremely progressive. There was a mix of rote- and practical learning taught at each level. In second grade, we learned the multiplication tables up to 12s, had regular 4M (100 questions in less than 4 minutes) tests, and spent a large amount of time on accounting. We even learned some (very) basic algebra. Throughout elementary school, we had these math projects that involved physical objects, and our tests were generally in word-problem form. Then, in fifth grade, all the kids who were good at math were sent to learn pre-algebra and algebra 1 through interactive computer programs while the other kids got more hands-on help with their math woes. And at some point, we had fraction-based space-invaders computer games to play in between learning segments...
Someday, maybe I'll tell you all about our phys. ed., art, and music programs. =)
Live free or die
The answer is to outsource our math tests to an offshore company. There we can not only raise the averages, but do it at a fraction of the cost (which they will be able to calculate for us).
--
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph Wiggum
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.
Way to be down on the US man, except you forgot one thing - 28th out of fourty just doesn't work out to being in the bottom third, no matter what country you are from!
And you would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those damn SlashDot readers!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What would you expect?
Most education funding goes into administration. There are a lot of non-teachers getting salaries from that funding. I've heard that in California and Arizona there are more administration headcount than there are teachers.
When I went to school, the administration position for the elementary school (principal) was the 6th grade teacher. The administration office for half the county was this little 2 office building near the high school. How things have changed.
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.
True, they do have superior educational systems. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that they don't put up with the bullshit our teachers do. In our schools, if a teacher so much as yells at a student, they are suspended and warned that their job is at risk. Oddly, we did so much better back when our teachers could take a paddle to the kids. Nowadays there is no respect by the kids show for their educators or the educational system. Fix that, and you fix the problem.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
A very large portion of Americans don't see value in any education at all. They figure out a way to make money, and spend the rest of their time engaged in watching mindless entertainment. Personally, I see that as a problem. Obviously, the vast majority of Americans that live this way don't really see it as much of an issue.
I agree, there needs to be more emphasis on education in general in our culture. Unfortunately, changing the culture to favor something that requires more brain power and effort from the average citizen is easier said than done.
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.
Chris Rock once said that "Nothing makes a nigger happier than to not know something"
Imagine being a nerdy black kid. I was. The black kids sometimes though that I was "trying to be white" because I was good at math. The white kids often resented that I was "showing off" that I was good at math.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I wonder if the education spending numbers reflect spending on actual education, or on 'educational' extras like school sports programs, transportation, nutrition, etc. Not to argue the relative merit or necessity of these programs... but the fact is that they're there, and it's possible that it just costs more to educate a U.S. student than a Czech or a Korean because of all the overhead. Maybe the U.S. just doesn't get as much bang for its bucks. Coupled with a school culture that places more value on extrascholastic activities, this would explain why you can throw a ton of money into the system and produce generations of kids who hate (and suck at) math.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Johnny has 5 apples. Suzie has 3 apples. Bob gives one of Johnny's apples to Suzie. How do you think Johnny feels?
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.
Damn, dude - you should know by know that it's two plus two that equals four... no wonder we're behind in math, with this sort of disinformation wandering the internet...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Finland is at the very top and we educate every kid. Finland also had one of the smallest deviations in the stats.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
Actually, the educational system would be a lot more, but conservatives deliberately dumb it down so that the labor pool thus created can't demand too much money, thus the "cheap labor conservative" I have in my sig.
Take a look at the school vouchers, book banning, attacks on evolution, general denigration of the system ("surviving" public education), school prayers, and systematic budget cuts that conservative politicians have supported. Does that sound like conservatives are behind the idea of universal education?
An ignorant working class means that labor will be cheaper for the wealthy classes. Keeps them poor and hungry enough to work cheap. And they can never earn enough to become rich enough to get off the treadmill. Pay rent until you die.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
BTW Trust me that all the schools are tested, not just the top rated. I am product of one of the special math school in Czech Republic and what we had in math in high school is more than you get from frist two years of community college here in US. If they took survey in just the elite math schools, it would leave everyone trailing way behind.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Half my family are teachers. From what I can see the money is very tight. They can't even aford paper. My sister like many teachers spends her own money for supplies. The problem isn't the amount spent per child it's the amount that reaches each child in the form of direct education. Most of the money like most government departments gets consumed in bloated administrative costs. You might be shocked to find what the proportion of highly paid administrators are to teachers. Remember the structure is very complex and there are many levels between the Congress and the teachers. I've worked at companies where there were three administrators and office people for every person actually working to produce product. The school system is much worse. Let's say the government wanted to add a 10,000 new teachers. Even if they were being paid $50,000 a year that would only be $500,000,000, a bargin. But that's not the way it works. When you add administrative costs I think you'd find it would cost several billion maybe much more. Other than a handful of new accountants to pay the teachers in truth just how much more support is needed. Yes there are more classrooms and supplies but with most schools they have the space just need enough teachers. The knee jerk reaction to an education problems seems to be more planning/administrators. Fire half the administrative staff and hire an equal number of teachers. You'll save money and put a lot of teachers in classrooms where they are needed. Maybe with the money saved they can actually buy paper and books.
interesting to me.
When I was taught that you can tell if a wall is straight with only a measuring tape.
3 foot out make mark
4 foot up. make mark.
mearsure the distance between the marks, should be 5 feet.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Your reasoning is certainly correct. But it seems sad that as long finances are OK, its OK for a person (or a people) to not bother to improve their mental skills.
Money is certainly nice - but somehow just ending up as a comfartable potato with a fat bank account seems to be a waste of brain
If you are as lazy as me, here it is:
n
H ungaryi land
1. Finland
2. Korea
3. Canada
Hong Kong-China
Netherlands
Macao-China
Lichtenstei
Japan
Australia
Switzerland
Iceland
New Zealand
Denmark
Belgium
Czech Rep.
France
Ireland
Sweden
Austria
Slovak Rep.
Norway
Germany
Luxemburg
Poland
Spain
Latvia
United States
Portugal
Russian Fed.
Italy
Greece
Serbia
Uruguay
Turkey
Tha
Mexico
Brazil
Tunisia
Indonesia
There's a problem with test methodology here.
One problem is how we count money. $1 in the US is not $1 in the Czech republic. You can get a very nice meal at a restaurant in the Czech republic for under $5 (US) (groceries/rent/etc are much cheaper as well). Trickle this down, and the Czech republic can afford to pay their teachers much less while maintaining a better standard of living than US teachers.
Another issue: it's mandatory for everyone in the US to go to school. Everyone. In other countries, it's voluntary or not strictly enforced. Because it's mandatory, not all parents really care about their kids performance. My mom read to me since I was born, and I learned math skills at home before I ever went to school. I don't think it's purely coincidental I managed a 650 in math on the SATs while going to public schools my entire life.
Lastly, immigrants. The majority come from poorer countries. The proble is that kids who never went to school in Haiti, come over to the US and take this test, aren't going to do so hot. In addition to not having an education, malnourishment is a problem in many poorer counties. Early malnourishment has been scientifically shown to have a stifling and sometimes permanent effect on intellectual capacity.
I like the use of empirical methodology to measure these things, but we have to study the data a bit more thoroughly before making conclusions (even radical things like spending more money on foreign aid to the world's poorest countries instead of more nuclear subs we're never going to use).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
So this just means that if this survey was performed by americans, then the results could be way off.
Think about that one without making your head explode.
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.
Woo-hoo!
And to improve the actual performance of Americans, it's not out of 40 but out of 41 countries. And in the news paper I read this morning, it said US ranked 24th not 28th, except I couldn't confirm with the OECD's site.
Well, for one, we can ignore calls that "intelligent design" be taught in science in place of evolution. When you have states like Kanses, Georgia, etc, in this country saying they should be taught as equally likely theories in science classes... we are doomed.
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.
Ok, I KNOW this is slashdot, but... If you'd RTFA there IS a comparison to GNP... Page 93 of the PDF if I remember correctly...
Give me a job. Please?
And he is GREAT at math. He knows that 1 cry + 1 poop = 1 diaper change and 2 boobies = 1 lunch
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.
[How many careers actually use higher-end math at work?] More than use knowledge of Civil War battles or the digestive system of an earthworm or most of the other things that are taught in school.
A lot of that is supposedly to make us more-informed voters on things such as wars and pollution standards, not necessarily get bigger paychecks. Whether it helps or not is debatable. There is not a lot of research for how early-year school affects decision making 30+ years down the road. Thus, what we have left are tons of pet theories and Holy Wars about what should be taught.
Table-ized A.I.
Because of such programs, teachers have left for more afluent schools or they have left specialized programs. In the example of CSAP, it is hard for schools to find special ed teachers. Wonder why? Think those kids score high on CSAP tests? With so few spec ed teachers, spec ed students have been integrated into the regular classes at the learning expense of the other children. It's not that I'm saying that spec ed students shouldn't get a chance, but at least give their teachers a more level playing field so that they [the teachers] can do what they really want...teach.
And it is stupid to just have students memorize answers (espcially for fundamentals that other subjects build upon)...it's not the right way to teach and that is what the teachers complain about...they aren't being allowed to teach and it makes school boring for both the student(s) and the teacher(s). Please elaborate on how those teachers are wrong...or so you work for a school administration in such a program?
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Not that they were born dumb. They were made dumb by the system. I grew up in an Eastern European country. I thank god (and communists :O) every day for providing me with such a great education. Sure, I was poor, and I didn't have a computer, but while the American kids were playing stupid video games, I was either reading a book, or outside playing soccer/basketball with my friends. That was our fun. So, I turned out not to be fat or stupid. I was amazed when I started going to college in the US, how easy you had it guys (no oral part to the exams, cheat sheets allowed, and all that). 90% of your senior university students wouldn't make it past the freshman year in most of the rest of the world. The "I-don't-need-to-learn-this-since-it's-not-helping -me-make-money" mentality is what kills you guys. Same applies to "Oh, I can't make a school team, and I have no chance to be a pro, so why should I play sports".
You don't require enough of your kids in school, and even the little that's required, you don't enforce. Your parental skills are zilch. It's not the teacher's fault that your kid doesn't know crap, it's yours as a parent. If a teacher fails half the class, don't blame the teacher as long as he/she stated the requirements for passing the class clearly at the beginning. And do not curve when you grade. Either you pass or not. Don't do that "Everybody in the class is dumb, so I won't fail them all, I'll geave the least dumb one an A, and curve everyone else." Everyone below 60% (or whatever) fails. Period. Even if it means failing everyone.
Kick your kid in the butt, throw out that Nintendo, chat rooms, demented TV shows, or better yet, sit down with him/her and teach them something. Make sure your kids study for at least 3-4 hours a day (plus or minus depending on how smart they are) and you'll see the results. What? They don't want to? Well, that's where you come in as a parent to make sure you make them. It's either that or let your kids be educated not by books, but by Hollywood and the rest.
The society's (parents' and schools') obligation is to make sure everyone comes out of high school well-educated (even if it means repeating a coupls of years). As for the higher education, well guys, don't dumb it down so everyone gets a chance. What's up with this everybody goes to college, nobody fails crap. Pretty much if you stick around and keep paying, you'll get some kind of a degree. Not everyone is smart enough for college.
The engineers from outside the US were able to do the job. Only the top notch products of the US school system could cope.
The top-notch products of the US school system hired you to do the work while they rob the company. Sucker.
paintball
A tap broke in the flat of a professor of maths. He called a plumber. The plumber arrived, in 15 replaced a pipe and charged the professor 1/4 his monthly salary.
"My god! So much? But it didn't look difficult at all! You must earn quite a bit more than I do!"
"Sure, just become a plumber and you'll earn as much as me. No, seriously, there is demand, and the job isn't really hard..."
So the professor became a plumber. He started repairing leaking taps etc, earning a lot of money for very little work. And it lasted until one day when the union decided all the plumbers need to know at least basics of maths, so there will be a training...
So, the training starts, the maths is extremely simple, just like for kids. And then the teacher calls our professor to the blackboard and asks him to write the formula for the field of circle.
And professor, in terror realizes, he forgot.
"Okay, no panic. I'm a math professor, I don't remember the formula but I can derive it."
So he starts calculating the formula, splitting the circle into infinitely many pieces, filling whole blackboard with calculations, integrals, derivatives... finally comes up with minus pi r squared.
"No, that's wrong. Field can't be negative. There must be a mistake somewhere." So he checks his calculations once, twice, can't find the error. And whisper arises in the classroom filled with a crowd of plumbers. Finally he starts recognising the words in the whisper, and everyone in the room whispers "Exchange limits of the integral! Exchange limits of the integral!"
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The "no child left behind" program is idiotic. I have several nieces and nephews in public schools. Their teachers have set curriculums they must cover each year. If they don't cover everything and their kids do poorly in testing, they get in trouble. So they try to cover everything, teaching just enough of each topic to hopefully get everyone to answer the questions that will be on standardized testing. Hence all the rote learning as mentioned in the article.
And of course there is a price to pay for all this too. There is a significant tax burden to everyone to pay for schools. I am lucky enough to make enough money so that I can send my children to a private school and pay this tax burden. Many parents are not so lucky and have to send their children to public schools. And there's your socioeconomic stratification for you.
However, it's the attitude that "there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE" that is the root of these problems. There are actually a lot of good reasons for students to lag behind. If you have a child whose parents don't care about education, the child will not do well in school. There's nothing the government can do about this. It is up to parents to educate their children, not the government. That means there will be lots of children who don't go to school, but so what? If you round those kids up and force them to school, they won't do well anyways.
Testing is fine, but it should be up to parents to react to the results. If their child is doing poorly, they have options. Chances are there are things that they can do, but if they really think it's the school's fault, they should change schools. If the school is not publically financed, then it will do its best to make sure this does not happen so that it can continue to operate. However, if the parent has no reason to take personal responsibility for their children's education and, just as bad, has no way of taking action about it, then they will just blame the school and will have to rely on the government to do something about it. That is the current situation for the majority of parents/children in this country, and you can see where it's landed us -- in the bottom third.
I claim that as population size and area of the country grow, expenses for the needed infrastructure for the adequate and uniform education grow faster than linearly. So it is unfair to compare Denmark with USA or Russia, or Korea with Brasil.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
How about a few books on the topic:
- Dumbing Us Down
- Another Gatto book
- An online write-up
- Many Children Left Behind.
- Saving Our Schools
I could go on...And steal our milk money, too.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
On the other hand, that excuse doesn't wash when you compare with, say, North Slobovia, or South Slobovia.
Did you look at the results? It's other industrialized nations with mandatory universal public schooling that are beating the States, not isolated private academies in third world countries.
Note to other posters: Cry me a river about the impact of those damn illegal Mexican immigrants. They represent less than three percent of the total population; even if they all scored zero on the testing, dropping them from the scores wouldn't nudge the U.S. up more than a couple places in the rankings. I note that Mexico's students on average scored about 80% as well as their U.S. counterparts, too.
Meanwhile Canada admits far more immigrants per capita than the United States, and they're sitting twenty-one places ahead of the U.S. in these rankings.
~Idarubicin
Last year, he took a Quantum Mechanics class. At the course's beginning, the prof said the pace would be harsh but he figured most students would cope. Mid-terms showed otherwise. My son earned a 75% on the mid-term. He was depressed until he found out the class average was in the 40's. That made him feel better until he found out that his house mates aced the test. His house mates are from Singapore and Taiwan.
When he asked them how they had managed to ace the mid term, they all shrugged their shoulders and said they'd seen the material in high school. They had seen the material in high school for multiple reasons. The typical Taiwanese goes to school 220 days out of a year instead of 180 here in California. The school days are longer, typically 8-5 instead of 8:30 to 2:30 here. The elementary teachers have strong math skills as opposed to our elemetary teachers. Parents in Asia expect more from their children than American parents do and the end results are Asian children have been trouncing American children academically for the past 20 years.
In case you're wondering about the source of all the facts cited above, here are the citations.
The story isn't completely grim however. The United States is nothing if not adaptable. The alternative school movement in the U.S. has made an opening for schools like this one, this one and KIPP schools to function. As the existence and efficacy of these kinds of options becomes more commonly recognized, American education will shift.
The Economist has a good article on how the legal system is running the schools amok: "Who needs a bad teacher when you can get a worse judge?"
I see the problems being the following:
-- I'm embarassed to look like Hemos.
I don't know how big this is in the US, but German media is currently going completely bonkers because we only made place 12. ;)
Talk about hurt pride.
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..
Yes, I did indeed manage to post this in the wrong thread entirely. XD Oh well. I lose at slashdot.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
an American with PhD's in Math and Physics? Stupid American. -South Park
Shame you can't seem to stop exporting all of that arrogance that you keep displaying to the rest of us.
I'm not sure where the impression comes from that public school teachers are necessarily horribly paid. I just took a look at "average" salaries for my part of Connecticut on www.salary.com - elementary school teachers were listed at ~ $49,000/year, and high school teachers at ~ $51,000/year. This is for a job that requires a bachelor's degree and qualifying exam, and has very good job security.
For a similar level of training (eg. BS degree), starting level electrical engineering pays a little more ($57k/year). Same for chemical engineering. An architect with experience, graduate school, and a license comes in at $65k/year. A CAD drafter (who knows AutoCAD) can expect to make $39,000. An Assistant Branch Manager at a bank could hope to make $41k/year.
And if you expect that teachers could make another $4k by working for 10 weeks during the summer (and still having a month of vacation), it really doesn't sound like teachers make a bad salary. Not the same as a doctor or lawyer, but I don't see how you can say "Our society has made it nearly impossible to live on a teachers salary".
Would paying more attract better teachers? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not; but that's a different question.
What kids did they test in the foriegn countries? Something most people forget, or perhaps never knew, is that many other countries have segregated schools based off of performace. In Germany for example there are three major tiers:
Hauptschule: This is basically vocational school, the idea being that you probably don't get any further schooling after this. In the US it would be to say your intention is to get a highschool diploma, nothing more, with an emphasis on practical clases.
Realschule: This is something like a trade school, idea being maybe some secondary training. In the US, it would be for those that wanted to go on to get an AA degree or the like.
Gymnasium: This is for the university bound kids.
(Note that they do have a couple of alternitives to this kind of schooling as well)
Ok, well if the kids you are testing are the ones int the Gymnasium and maybe in the Realschule but not the Hauptschule, your averages will be much higher. This is often how the testing is done for academic tests, given that the kids in teh lower schools aren't on a track for an academic life anyhow.
I don't have the time to read the whole survey, but I could not find any data on this. They claim that countries sought to include as wide a cross section as possible, but made no specifics to level of education of the students. That a student is in a given grade says nothing. In grade 12 at my high school a student could be in anything from calculus to remedial algerbra. The same is not true of a student in a Gymnasium.
I additonally question these studies because of my personal experience with people educated under a foriegn system. I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department which, as one might expect, has a high percentage of foriegn students, primarly Indian and Asian.
What I continually find is that the Chinese students in particular are very good with memorization and forumlas, but very bad at analysis and application. They can crunch numbers like nothing, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to simple real-world scenarios, they are sunk. For them, being smart is knowing a lot of facts and forulams and being able to mash them together, not being able to synthesize and apply data to the real world.
As you note with your "don't give a fuck" stastic, I'd need to see a lot more controls before I'd consider this meaningful. I'd want to know things like how intelligence correlated to score, and what level of education the kids recieving the scores recieved (at the very least).
"Probably not."
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
There are no simple problems, and by extension no simple answers when it comes to society-large problems like "education." I'm sure that in your mind Things Were Better In The Olden Days (tm), spare the rod/spoil the child and all that, but that isn't Interesting or Insightful, its trite bullshit.
You want a short list of the things that give the US problems with education? Here you go: property owners that don't want to pay adequate property taxes to fund solid educational infrastructure, teachers unions that resist any effots to hold teachers to a high standard, parents that have three-letter babysitters (ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, etc.), and students that are surrounded by role-models who are subpar academically and intellectually such as basically every sports star and politician. The system was not designed to provide a high standard of academic excellence to begin with, just good mill workers, and now its had over a hundred years to atrophy and degrade.
Want to have a great school? Have a community that is willing to pay for it, hire good teachers with that money and don't let them get complacent in tenure, and have parents be involved with their kids' lives. With those three things, most any other educational barrier can be overcome other than outright stupidity in the child, which is rare compared to the organizational/infrastructural ills enumerated above.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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.
You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor. Societies composed of the majority being of acceptable skill are far more productive and desirable than the scenario you describe. The occasional exceptionally gifted individual is certainly desirable, but we should not exaggerate their overall usefulness to society to demigodlike proportions.
Also, as adults, we recognise the value of learning. Children, unsuprisingly due to their limited life experience, may not immediately recognise this value (i.e. they may not 'want' to learn). It is our role as parents and educators to motivate and instill a love of learning consistently throughout schooling, and provide learning experiences that are enjoyable and likely to encourage students of the value of lifelong learning.
The scenario of giving up on every student who doesn't display orgasmic joy at the thought of doing algebra condemns a society to mediocrity - so given your nation's current maths education status, it seems that many of your countrymen agree with your philosophy.
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.
Yes, you do - you need maths for all of that stuff, and you use it too. Jeez, even a burger-flipper needs to be able to count how many burgers he's flipping, and how many patties he needs to make X burgers. Plumbers use maths constantly - do you think pipes just miraculously appear at the correct size? Plumbers are highly skilled professionals, and they and other trades are too frequently disdained by those of us with a University education - the amount of knowledge they need and apply daily is considerable. There are also a lot fewer unemployed plumbers than computer programmers around ATM, so maybe that's telling you something too? Who contributes more to the society in which they live - these maths 'geniuses', or the plumbers whose level of knowledge you scorn?
The thing with this kind of math usage is that since people do it 'without feeling it', people who don't know better assume that no mathematics usage is taking place. In fact, frequently, this is precisely the way that most maths in put into practice on a daily basis, but somehow this kind of arithmetic is viewed as unworthy because it doesn't involve formulae and 'higher maths'.
99% of the maths that people do in their daily lives falls into the categories you have just described as 'mathsless'.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Until we impress on young minds the fact that cool or uncool makes no difference when you're grown and penniless
An interesting tangent on this -- my wife grew up in Malaysia, and when she was a kid the smartest kids *were* the most popular. No one wanted to hang out with the kids who were doing poorly in their classes, because they weren't cool. Appearance mattered somewhat, too, but was less of a factor. And all the kids she knew *liked* vegetables -- she was totally baffled when she learned about how everyone in the US "knows" that kids just automatically don't like vegetables, need special kids menus with chicken fingers, etc.. None of her friends were like that. Here favorite food growing up was spinach (still is, actually). Yes, I'm totally serious.
Malaysia has problems of their own that seriously hinder education, like blatantly racist policies controlling access to higher education, but the totally different path to "cool" is worth noting. It's NOT automatic that the "nerds" are unpopular (and then never learn proper social skills...), or even that there is some derogatory name for them.
I wish I could follow this up with some good suggestions for fixing this problem... but I'm kind of lost for answers on that one. The first step is at least pointing it out -- then maybe we can work on building better ways for kids to actually use what they learn to do cool stuff; that should help.
First... if you're judging public education by your experience back in the 80's, you don't know shit. Education has changed since then. Some changes for the better, some not, but it's different. So shut up.
Second... if you are judging american schools based on your own experience in one or two schools, you don't know shit. That's a sample that is too small to be statistically significant.
Third... don't compare the US to countries where they get to kick all the dumb kids out by age 12. Some countries do that, you know. And only the bright ones get to go to prep (for college) school. Not all countries do that, but some.
Fourth... don't assume that throwing more money at the problem will not help. It will. Let me explain. We can't get teachers because no one wants the shit pay and lack of respect. Steve Jobs said it best. Pay teachers $100,000 per year. What would happen? We'd have extreme competition and some of the brightest and best people would pursue teaching, instead of a field that actually pays their fucking bills. The more competition, the higher the quality of the candidates. Teaching would be a respected profession. Kids would want to grow up to be teachers. The process of learning would take on a greater meaning because it would be tied to what we americans worship most - the almighty fucking dollar.
Fifth... don't think you can throw the blame at one or two groups. Our entire economy and way of life is based on us continually buying a bunch of shit we don't really need (capitalism.) There are larger factors at play here than just "bad parents." Everyone, including parents and teachers and students themselves, needs to do their part to help.
By the way, I work at a high school. I am doing my part.
Music - www.richardmac.com
Sorry to disagree with you, but there is a place for this kind of maths. Problem is that it is not applied correctly. Problem is that you have a standardized multiple choice quiz with 12*48 =
a) -34
b) 576
c) 3.14
d) sheep
The fact that you can answer b) by applying that 12*48 ~ 10*50 puts you a point ahead of an amoebe regarding maths. And will not help you if the answers were 572, 576, 574 (and if you answered 575 you have to check how pair*pair gives an odd).
But I was tutoring EE, and was amazed at the fact that people cannot use the same reasoning when they are not given multiple choices. They would tote their calculators, and drag the constant through the equation (even if it cancels out later, and even if, for all engineering purposes it can be approximated like g=10m/s^2), and in the end arrive at the conclusion that the voltage between two points in a simple schema is 12.11V. Completely failing to understand the point that if the batery is 12V NO voltage in the schema can be grater than that. Simple approximated calculation would give them a ballpark estimate of 12V, which would be more correct. Or, what I hate even more, when they don't understand that EE deals with physical elements, with their own abberations and limitations (yes, your TI-89 shows that the voltage on that diode is 3000V, but it is long gone in the puff of blue smoke before it reaches that level).
Well, that's my pet peeve - people not using common sense.
(And for nit pickers - yes, voltage can be greater than Vcc if there is an active element, or an element with stored energy like capacitor; but that was not the case with simple Kirchhoff law problems I was trying to explain)