Slashdot Mirror
Why America's School "Lag" Has Never Mattered
The Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum of the top 34 developed economies, has released an annual education report, and guess what? The U.S. has once again ranked poorly in relation to many other developed countries. An article at TechCrunch argues that we needn't worry because it doesn't matter: "However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.
'The results suggest that years of rigorous training of physics knowledge in middle and high schools have made significant impact on Chinese students’ ability in solving physics problems, while such training doesn’t seem to have direct effects on their general ability in scientific reasoning, which was measured to be at the same level as that of the students in USA,' wrote a team of researchers studying whether Chinese superiority in rote scientific knowledge translated into the kinds of creative thinking necessary for innovation."
We need a few innovators and a whole load of minimum wage drones.
Is that they report the mean result, when they really should focus on something like the mean of the uppermost quartile, or somesuch.
You don't need the whole herd to drive innovation - you need just need to make sure you have a critical mass of sufficiently creative and intelligent people.
There's this common perception that throwing money at education will solve the problem. History has shown that this isnt true. Why is it that charter schools get better results with fewer resources? It's simple: they don't have teachers unions. Teachers unions allow them to get high pay for doing a shit job.
I know this is anecdotal, but in the movie Waiting for Superman, they covered a teacher who was filmed by a student reading a magazine while his students were playing craps. The principal fired him. Because of his union, a year later he got his job back and received back pay for all of the time that he was off. They also showed a room that they would have all of the teachers who broke the rules just sit in and do nothing all day while getting paid a full salary, just because the unions prevented them from getting fired.
There was also that story on slashdot a while back about how teachers unions were trying to block online education in the name of their job security; education be damned. And of course, that famous video of a speech of a union bigwig saying that the union isn't about the students or about education, but about power, and he was cheered on by the audience.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Fine, China isn't any better than the U.S. at training skilled workers. But India is, judging from the accents I hear in the workplace.
Anyway, the OECD rankings are about skill levels, not classroom hours. More teaching doesn't necessarily translate into skills, but better teaching certainly does.
And let's not forget that we not only can't afford to lag, we can't even afford to just keep up. Americans don't work cheap, so if they want to work, they need to work better.
What matters is not that we're the best, but that we're good enough - to maintain nutrition, health and shelter. Everything else can be done at leisure.
Was it Finland or some other Scandinavian country where the goal of their education system was sorta like that? Just teach the kids, let the kids be the kids and the learning will come.
As a result, not only do the kids actually learn but the kids are happier and more creative because they are allowed to let their minds roam and just be kids and NOT BE FUTURE WORKERS IN TRAINING.
School is to have an educated electorate: not for free training for business.
If businesses can't find people who are trained well enough for them, then they need to go all old school: train them. D'uh!
Again, socializing the costs (in this case job training) and privatizing the profits.
"I don't want America to be like Europe!"
Famous Presidential candidate.
Indeed.
The ratings you see in the OECD summary are averages. The thing is that the US has a much more diverse population and spread in economic status than most other, often much smaller countries in this measurement.
Results in US suburban schools are generally as good as the top rated countries, and the results of the top students in these schools ranks very highly indeed.
In any society you don't really need that many innovators to propel growth - and the US has a good population of high achievers due to the broadness of the distribution of educational results it gets.
The real problem with US society is the size of the tail on the other side of the curve. This represents a real drag on the US economy.
Isn't it odd how the most socially and economically advanced production powerhouses like Germany tend to have strong unions?
Isn't it interesting how desperate, fallen empires like the UK and the US are to demonstrate that unions don't work?
Also a union is not "about the students or about education", in the same way that you don't take your paycheque home at the end of the day "for your company". The purpose of a union is to address the interests of the workforce, not the customer / service user. It can do that well, by resolving differences between labour and management, or it can do that badly, running the organisation into the ground. IOW "power" is exactly what a union is about - strength in numbers.
If you take away the ones with the least financial backing, making it less likely their offspring will attend post-secondary and more likely that they have to get jobs as students and have less time to compete with others, you'll see a huge difference in any country. Sadly, removing the minorities will remove most people with poor socioeconomic status, but they are not equivalent actions. There are brilliant and productive members of every minority I can think of, as well as members of the majority who detract from their country's performance as a whole. One of the reasons your statement is unpopular is because it is focused on skin colour, and not the actual root cause: racist members of society or racist past policies that denied millions of capable individuals the opportunity to capitalize on those capabilities.
Even so, doing this will still not produce a "fair" comparison unless this is done with every country in the study. If those of us in North America want to make our part of the world better, we need to find a way to make sure each school age student has no undue concerns. Once every student has caring and supporting home environments, no apparent risk of starvation or lack of other needs, no abuse from any source, no problems with racism, etc. then the country's performance (assuming the school curriculum is properly designed) will improve dramatically. If those conditions are met world wide, I would expect to see little or no variation in studies like this one.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
So kick the asshole students out of public schools. They were the reason I hated school. Not only do they cost more to educate, but they drag down the other students. If they want to be janitors when they grow up, so be it, we could use more janitors, garbage men, and cotton pickers. Reform is always possible later in life, they can change later if they want to, but don't allow them to fuck everybody else early on.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
How about we roll back that premise first, because they don't.
Yes they do. And they don't. It all depends on how you interpret the statistics. Charter schools tend to be located in poor and minority areas (because there is more demand for them there), which lowers their average results. On the other hand, more motivated parents are likely to choose charter schools over public schools, which raises their results. By correcting for one of these factors, but not the other, it is easy to skew the results either way.
From what I can see, charter schools don't make much difference in student performance, but they do tend to give comparable results at significantly lower cost. So they still offer some advantages over traditional public schools.
The Chinese education system is great for rote memorization at the high-school level. If businesses could be developed from the fact that you can pass high-school algebra or geography, then China would have us beat. But unfortunately for them, businesses happens through people that push the state-of-the-art, instead of just getting by with a passing grade. And the state-of-the-art is still at a very high level only achievable by few. Maybe post-grad linear algebra or combinatorics would be useful, but at this point China competes against the US university system, of which there is no peer.
And it's not necessarily through engineering that pushes the state-of-the-art, but through the other fields as well.
For example, can anyone name a single high-end chinese fashion designer, or a movie director? LOL.
They are more well-functioning than American unions, but it's nothing to do with their being altruistic - on the contrary, they give power to their members. Indeed, German unions are far more powerful than American ones. But German unions tend to handle themselves better, partly thanks to a government which understands the need for (i.e. provides law for) management and labour to cooperate for the good of both sides of industry.
Neither the UK nor the US get this - even though unions create a low-turnover workforce interested in productivity and self-improvement because workers know that, in return, they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment.
lol
Allow me to elaborate. It's the culture, stupid. While the older generation has a tendency to proclaim that the younger generation is somehow in decline, I think that the objective truth that it may just be the case here is made a bit more real to TechCrunch's reaction to these numbers.
So, essentially, the OECD is saying once again, "Hey, America, you're still hopelessly behind." Now, we have TechCrunch taking a teenage attitude about it. Absolutely amazing.
What are these mystical "gainful market skills" anyway? How are those measured? I've met more than enough HR bunnies and management majors who can't reason their way out of a paper bag. They got their job because they're an alumnus at blablabla university and know so-and-so, not because they even understand basic principles of even keeping an accurate employee roster on file. But hey, solving their asinine problems makes me money, so why am I complaining?
It's clear that the USA is running on little more than momentum anymore. Maybe it's true that all you need is a few innovators, but for every Elon Musk who got lucky and made it big, there are 10 rent seekers who got lucky and made it big and 100 "innovators" who are of the same caliber as Musk but just didn't make it big. All that talent is wasted working meaningless jobs where the only innovation they may do is to innovate how to take a broken, unorganized spreadsheet of employee info and somehow feed it into a computer system for tracking absentees.
Where's a job where I can actually put my talents to some gainful use for the human species? They aren't there, because the market wants someone who can talk buzzwords, foresee "what if" scenarios while being wise enough not to confuse the client by discussing contingencies in a rational manner ahread of time, and somebody whose talents are wasted on reorganizing spreadsheets for arrogant, egotistical figureheads who only have their position because they knew somebody.
Most people call me the arrogant one, and I'm sure I'll get more than enough flames agreeing. For a long time, I worried that I actually was arrogant. What I learned though is that I'm not arrogant; I'm merely talented. It's the figureheads who are arrogant, who confuse their 6 figure income with having talent. Instead, what I've learned to do is to stroke egos. What a waste. But hey, it pays the bills.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
No, the US has pretty terrible standard of living: source. Americans tend to think about success as a checklist. The big house, the 3 cars, the 6 figures salary, the "good neighbourhood", etc. Those things are frequently impossible in Europe (no space for the big house, no such strong separation between rich and poor), but what Europeans consider a good life is similarly hard to impossible to get in the US: good public transport, guaranteed health care, holidays.
I am not convinced most American would in fact prefer the American way if given a choice.
It is usually called alternative education & it has shown very good results for those kids. They do graduate, maybe a bit later. The bonus is getting them out of regular school.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
...even though unions create a low-turnover workforce interested in productivity and self-improvement because workers know that, in return, they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment.
Oh, if that were the case. Right now, they know they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment, so in many unions, it's damn the productivity and self-improvement, it's all about senority...
Like any other monopoly, at leat in the US, the unions stopped caring after they formed a monopoly (e.g. through mega-mergers like the AFL-CIO in the industrial age). If the AFL-CIO was a bank, I'm sure people would be screaming bloody murder anti-trust. Of course they got a pass. Thus started a era of decline in US manufacturing...
Of course things are starting to changing in the US, some of the biggest unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella, the SEIU, the Teamsters, and the UFCW are starting to disentangle from the AFL-CIO (officially breaking ties forming the change-to-win federation), primarily because as the old-guard unions seem to stop caring about union issues and more about (Democratic Party) politics. Of course Obama and the Democratic establishment (which relies on their backing) are trying their best to rein them back into a monolithic block. Hopefully, this whole episode will bring about better union leadership in the US, but probably only if the Democratic Party can stay out of it...
I don't know where you come up with the idea that charter schools are mostly in poor and minority areas. I know that many of the ones I know of are in middle-class predominately white areas. But since neither of us has more an anicdotal information I think we can call that a wash.
But you are perfectly correct starting down the list of unfair advantages they have:
1) They can be selective with their students. Sudents with bad grades, poor discipline, or any sort of handicap are routinely excluded. Those kids are enormously costly in terms both of money (think special access equipment), administrative overhead (each one needs to have multiple meetings to decide their Indivual Education Plan, and those meetings regularly have school system lawyers in attendance), and teacher time. Getting rid of most of the overhead costs really makes them seem efficent. But that is not a meaningfull cost savings, unless you are going to exlude them from the final system.
2) In most areas charter schools are exempt from many regulations and almost all mandated testing. So many of the costly reporting and complicance areas are simply wiped off the map. That is great for an experiment, but the moment you add these back in (as you would have to do in a non-expeiment) then suddnly you are back at square one.
3) As you have indicated, the parents who went through the hoops to get their kids are generally more motivated. So there are volenteers in the classrooms, and engaged parents making sure their kids do their homework. And the parents generally aren't telling their kids how awfull teachers are. Not only does this benifit the school by having all of these engaged parents in one place, but it also starves all of the other schools of the best resources. How again is this then compareable?
When it comes to top brains, on the other hand, USA is indeed #1 by a huge margin.
Actually that link shows it has several of the top universities, ranked by files they put up on the web (and the visibility thereof). Top brains? not proven. Even if those are the universities where the top brains congregate, it's far from clear that those brains are American ones.
It's also doing rather well in R&D
That source, a Wikipedia article whose own source is no longer accessible at the relevant hyperlink, says that the U.S. spent more than any other country on R+D in 2010. In percentage of GDP though, you're down around fifth or sixth. Ok, so you spend a lot on R+D. But is it effective? efficient? no answer there.
tech achievement
Ok well this is measured, in your source, by 4 things:
1) Patents granted and royalty license fees received from abroad, both per capita
2) Number of internet hosts per capita and percentage of exports that are "high or medium technology"
3) Telephones and electricity consumption per capita
4) Years of school and enrollment in math and sciences.
I'll give you number 2 and maybe even 4 as a reasonable measure of technological development, but with a broken patent system churning out meaningless patents, and a wealthy population hooked on cellphones and wasting electricity, the deck is stacked here in favor of the U.S. in a way that has nothing to do with technology. And you still come in behind Finland.
corporate governance
Wikipedia offers a spartan PDF with literally no context or explanation. Corporate governance by what metrics?
And for what it's worth, your suggestion that some people aren't important in an assessment of national intelligence is bunk. It's often up to the public to make informed political choices about scientific issues, from evolution to global warming to birth control to etc. etc.
It's important that the entire populace, hookers and all, is educated enough to make the right decisions.
USA has actually spent much of the last 70 years holding back its own development so it could support its allies in Western Europe and East Asia against USSR and China...
You do realize that the dominance of USA for the last 70 years has more to do with it not being one of the countries on the territories of which large-scale armed conflicts were fought during that period, right?
America is a country of immigrants
Since its independence, the United States of America has been replenished with bright brains from abroad.
The fresh minds were either fresh from the boats (Example: Albert Einstein, Leon Chua ) or sons and daughters of those stepping down from the boats (Example: Thomas Edison).
In human society, it has always been the ones with brightest brains travel greater distance.
America has been the "land of choice" for those with bright ideas simply because they (those with brain ideas) are not appreciated, while on the other hand, in America they get more opportunities to try out their ideas.
If you go to any top research lab in America you will find 40% to 70% of the researchers were either fresh immigrants or sons and daughters of those who immigrated from foreign countries.
Without those imported brains, I am afraid the United States of America would fair no better than England, or Korea, or Italy, or Japan, or Spain, or China, or Poland, or India, or Russia.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Spot on analysis, but I'd like to add this:
You can look at peak numbers, but what good is it if one percent of your population "knows science" if the rest lives in trailers unable to read or do simple calculations? You'll end up in a world where religion takes over and people will want creationism to be taught, or sharia to replace the law. Conflicts will get resolved by force and health care will only be available to the rich. You need people to learn this stuff, whether they'll be extremely good at it or not. Even if they won't be using a lot of it in their daily use, they will be able to tell fairy tales from reality. This will enable to trust people that know their stuff to make proper decisions, also known as "democracy". Education has a lot more purpose than creating genius, those tend to create themselves regardless of education anyway.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?