Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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 =
>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.
That's because the situation is real, hasn't changed and they measure it every year.
Evil people are out to get you.
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?
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 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.
*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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.