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Taking Issue With Claims That American Science Education is 'Dismal'
TaeKwonDood writes "We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why."
I think you meant "How to increase NASCAR viewership"
No it didn't. Here's why.
For it to be science, it has to be based on observable evidence and not belief. What you are talking about is the moment when what you believe is shown to be wrong, which is a change in belief and not a change in science.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Column: Quit fretting. U.S. is fine in science education
The article is correct in a lot of respects. But one thing I personally disagree with is that we should quit fretting. If you believe you are the best in the world at something, you might quit working hard to achieve that and stagnate into irrelevance. Personally I always view myself as "behind the curve" and therefore I am always working harder to overcome my self-perceived adjustment.
Likewise, when I am judging the United States, I'm often harsh. Because it's not going to get any better if I say "Yep, education is top notch, best in the world. We're #1." Unsurprisingly enough, my Republican friends call me a self-loathing liberal because my criticisms of the United States are often harsh. Better that than the alternative of stagnation and irrelevance.
American science education might not be 'dismal' but valid criticisms abound. Also, the measurements used for it being dismal or great are almost always flawed. For example, in the article:
Yet during this period of national "mediocrity," we created Silicon Valley, built multinational biotechnology firms, and continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications and total number of Nobel Prize winners. We also invented and sold more than a few iPads. Obviously, standardized tests aren't everything.
Surely, every one of these things had influences and inspiration other than the "United States public science education"? I'm reminded of someone from Alabama chastising me for complaining about states that have low literacy rates. She reminded me that Huntsville has more post-graduate degree holders per capita than any other city in the United States. Great. Good for them. Does that have anything to do with whether or not a random 15 year old can read in Alabama? You can cherry pick statistics one way or the other, I think China's got more published academic papers per year now than any other nation ... of course the quality over quantity can be argued.
Don't be afraid to look at yourself critically -- if you don't how will you ever improve?
My work here is dung.
Additionally, the latest study released by Universitas 21, a global network of research universities, concluded that the United States ranks No. 1 in the world in higher education — a metric that partially relies on scientific research output. (Sweden came in a distant second.)
From the description this seems like a stupid metric that would be obviously skewed towards countries with higher population. With a Sweden's population of almost 9.5 million verses the USA's 315 million one would HOPE that the scientific research output is significantly higher. While TFS doesn't go into depth about the actual metric, I figured I'd need to do some reading through some links.
I just looked at the report and it looks like the metric is more than that.
It has things like
So it looks like that might not be that bad of a metric after all. It's far from perfect but there are probably few if any that are. All in all, I'm impressed that the USA is ranked number 1.
When looking through the ACTUAL scores of the different countries the USA scores a dismal 37 out of 50 in the "Proportion of international students in 3rd ed and proportion of articles co-authored by international collaborators". Where the USA far and away blows away the rest of the field is in the actual scientific article output (weighted by gross and per capita as noted above).
All in all, it's an interesting report that seems to fly in the face of most of slashdot's readership's (mine included) perception of the direction of the education system in the USA. Maybe most of the bad news is at the secondary education level?
Claiming that the US is #1 in the world-- check.
Vague accusations of anti-Bush bias-- check.
Implication that teachers can't stand to be held accountable-- check.
Assumption that the government spends too much on education and wants to spend more-- check.
Hinting that Obama is subverting the system for political motives-- check.
Whether or not the article has a good point-- it may be true that we're not as badly off as we think-- the article is written in a divisive way by someone who clearly leans toward the Republican end of things. Throughout the article, there's the running implication that all the doom and gloom is a scam, perpetrated by Democrats, in order to get more funding for education. However, even if we stipulate that our educational system is good, there's still another explanation: As a rule, people throughout history have believed that "the system" is falling apart and they were witnessing the downfall of civilization.
However, I would offer another interpretation of what's going on. For one thing, I would be very careful about trusting any particular standardized test, and even about trusting standardized tests in general. When you say, "Students scored higher on the ABC test this year than the year before!" you can't necessarily assume that students have been educated better. It may be a reflection of changes made to the test. The increase may not be statistically significant. It may be that the teachers started "teaching to the test" at the expense of other lessons. It may be that the school system pulled some other shenanigans to manipulate the test scores. It may be that the test was simply poorly formed in the first place, and is not actually a good reflection of the educational level of the students.
The article begins with a quote about how education is suffering, and then goes on to note that the quote is from *all the way* back in 1983. This may be a sign that the doom-saying has been going on for a long time and does not reflect a real problem. Or it might mean that the educational system has been suffering since at least as far back as 1983. In fact, I'm sure that there are people who would claim that to be the case.
...I would guess that the answer is poverty. My wife and I went to see Cornell West speak several months ago and one of the things he pointed out about our educational system is that if you take out the test scores of children who are living in poverty, the U.S. ranks at or near number one in the world in education.
Currently the U.S. has the second worst child poverty rate of the 23 countries listed here, and higher education rankings general correlate with lower child poverty rates.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Why are people here so damn obsessed with religion VS science debate? It's not a significant issue (queue up apocryphal stories...). Virtually every scientist in the history of science was religious and science has progressed nicely despite the fact that the vast majority of the human population is religious.
People tend to focus on these obscure side issues like creationism, etc. I am as conservative as they come, I was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and spend all my time with people who are religious to one degree or another. No one I know sees a significant conflict here,
The whole science vs religion thing is a straw man. The idea of the rational unbiased scientist is also somewhat mythological. This history of the big bang theory, the current prevailing cosmological theory on the original of the universe, is quite insightful. The theory was offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Some of the leading scientists of the day dismissed this theory merely because it was developed by a priest, they dismissed it as "smelling of creationism".
If you want to make a claim that some group is anti-science it would be accurate to say that *some* churches may be so. The truth is that many other churches are perfectly fine with science. That scientific observations and discoveries are not in conflict with faith. Again, the whole notion of the universe originating in a big bang billions of years ago came from a priest. The western tradition of the scientific method was promoted by a bishop and other members of the clergy. The Roman Catholic church operates a world class observatory doing serious cosmological research in cooperation with other leading world class universities.
To say that religion is anti-science, well, that seems to display a mindset awfully similar to some preacher claiming that the earth was created six thousand years ago. Both comments delivered with absolute authority and passion, both comments being objectively and demonstrably false, both comments none the less held as as articles of *faith* of their respective mindsets. Reality if far more complicated than either of these mindsets believe.
WTF, another union bashing post? There are lobbyists everywhere - think textbook publishers, Universities, people that want to privatize the public educations system, etc. that would all gain by downplaying the success of the education system.
When you look at the pay, I don't think you can call a teacher's salary high by any standard.
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I think TFA and TFS misses the point: The problem isn't that we don't have decent science education; the problem is that we don't create scientists.
Look at any science or engineering school in the U.S. and it becomes pretty clear. There are many, many more foreigners than Americans. Now go look at the liberal arts programs: Nothing but Americans. The country and the world don't need more out-of-work English majors. There not a shortage of tech jobs right now, particularly in engineering, but also in other hard sciences.
Maybe if "we" got out of the mindset of wanting to pay third world wages, people would move to these kinds of fields?
It is funny, in my opinion, the ones to the greatest extent setting wages ( trying to keep them low ) seem to be the ones lamenting the fact that people don't want those jobs, and all the while praising the market for all the magic it can do ( and it can ).
The union problem is not necessarily teacher salary. There might be a problem where some teachers make little to no contribution to benefits like health care and retirement, but that is a really complicated issue that can't be generalized. Contracts can vary from place to place, some reasonable, some not. The real union problem is probably union support for teachers who are not good teachers. The unions no longer seem to be the guardians of their craft, enforcing their own high standards of quality upon their members. Unions used to kick out members who couldn't perform to high standards. Today some claim that some union leadership is essentially a part of the educational bureaucracy protecting the status quo.
Teachers are not the enemy and it makes me sad to see an anti-education screed on Slashdot.
Let's deconstruct your post.
First off, "officials" -- also known as "teachers" and "local school board members" -- hate the No Child Left Behind Act because it is an unfunded standards-based mandate for additional instruction. The second standards rear their ugly heads in classrooms you start seeing rote learning, AKA "teaching for the test." No one benefits from rote learning. Not even the businesses that depend on the school system to turn out creative and innovative thinkers with a broad knowledge base to draw on. And while it may be responsible for an increase in test scores, students suffer in ways standardize tests can't measure.
Second, school spending. I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, so I'll have to improvise. The federal goverment's per-pupil spending (you may find how influential federal money really is enlightening from a big-picture perspective) has barely kept pace with inflation, and that's without going into all the ways the feds twist the arms of desperately underfunded local school districts with laws like NCLB, which cuts funding to the underperforming schools that need it the most (in the name of "competitiveness"). If you really want to know how much is getting spent per-pupil you should take a look at the detailed breakdown from the Census Bureau (warning, PDF). And yes, salaries are the biggest number in the list. Because the most important resource in education is PEOPLE.
We also need to talk about per-pupil spending in general, where the fundamental inequality inherent in education funding is most readily apparent. You can't just say that one area's per-pupil funding level is adequate for another's thanks to things like cost-of-living and property values. Most schools are funded at a local level, which opens you up to all kinds of funding issues brought on by things like population density and the economy. You know who was hurt the most by the recent foreclosure crisis? Here's a hint, it wasn't the homeowners, it was the school districts that depend on their property taxes.
You know what else bothers me? That all the amounts discussed in the above links are counted in the millions of dollars per year. We blow billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. It really shows you where the nation's priorities lie.
Exactly. Would they except this standard with anything else? 65% of students being literate, for example?
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
I tell you what, show me the science tests where kids fail miserably at an understanding of evolution but score crazy high on common place science matters like basic physics and chemistry and I might begin you think to have something there.
The bottom line is that it matters little when you question evolution if Little Johnny can't understand high school Physics 1, Biology 1 or Chemistry 1. To date I haven't seen of a religious group that's trying to get f=ma or the earth orbiting the sun tossed out of the science classroom but I bet you there are more students who don't understand these concepts as there are those who reject evolution.
You make it sound like there is a substantial number of people in this nation who are still following Christian dogma from the 6th century and this simply isn't true. The questions where religion and science are likely to conflict are so few that they're not going to have an overbearing effect on the testing. Little of what's taught on the high school level is controversial.
Stop making religion your punching bag for ten minutes and consider *where* these students are failing in science and math and you'll see that religion isn't a problem. At least not as much of a mountain as you make it to be from the molehill it started from.
That site you pointed to hasn't got anything close to accurate data for teacher pay. Take home is typically closer to half what that site says. Here's the North Carolina (where I live) official teacher pay schedule.
Starting salary for teachers with teaching degrees is $34,550. With > 30 years experience, a teacher makes $58,860. Now I wont argue the benefits aren't good, but you've got wildly inaccurate data.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Did you even READ the frickin' question in the poll? Your conclusion is not based on the evidence.
Did you? It's actually worse than portrayed. When asked directly "Do you think Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years is definitely true, probably true, probably false, (or) definitely false?", 39% said definitely true and another 27% said probably true.
If that's not outright rejecting the scientific thought process, I don't know.