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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."
AMERICA IS AWESOME!!!!!! We're #1! We're #1!!!! WHOOOOO!
We need a few innovators and a whole load of minimum wage drones.
...China is shit in one way, but America is shit in another.
Combine the best of both worlds and you have something good.
But combine the worst and you have something awful.
Polyculture, like many human endeavours, tends to increase both risk and reward.
Expect this to be misinterpreted as "We're #1!"
that is today's results. the results in 10 years might be the same percentage but China has 4 times our population that means they have 4 times as many "innovators" to come up with new ideas.
Meanwhile the US is failing behind In 20-30 years when the actual results will matter America is going to get left behind.
of course American politicians are short sighted enough not to see results 4-10 years later. the longer term view in china is going to bite us in the ass.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
American advantage boils down to 4 things
1) American't honestly think they are special. True competition would kill this. If you are the 10th smartest person in a class and you don't have head to head competition that tells you differently you can think you are the smartest. In asian you know you are number 10. This allows Americans to believe they are capable of great things. That means we try far more often and THAT is why we succeed more often in innovation.
2) Americans have more wealth. If you want to program buying a computer is not a big deal, or a milling machine for $10,000. In many countries the milling machine is impossible. Business takes money and living in a country with money and free time really really helps.
3) This is an advantage against Europe etc. America values success. Its a virtue. If you hate the 1% then doing something that causes you to be part of that 1% can actually be discouraged. Australia is a good example, there the most successful are mocked while in the USA the most successful are giving special privilege.
4) Americans can always go back to school. Many countries set in stone if you are smart or dumb with test scores and you have a much harder time going back to school for a premium education if you screw up your youth. This lack of class structure both in terms of education and in terms of inherited wealth makes for a more competition based economy.
And thats why I think we are not totally outclassed by the better education systems around the world.
Being good at general scientific reasoning requires a firm understanding of scientific philosophy. This is not a subject many people encounter directly unless they're on a scientific track at a university. Very few, if any, will pick it up just from engaging in scientific activity.
I blame those Japanese minorities, always bringing down our math scores.
Anyway, a rat race of artificial scarcity is a stupid way to run the world. 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.
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.
Yeah, American "school lag" does not matter, but it doesn't matter for a different reason. It doesn't matter because education is irrelevant in USA, there is no new manufacturing, old manufacturing is leaving. The people who care about their kids will send them to private schools and probably those kids will not have a 'lag' or it will be a smaller 'lag' and kids that are not sent to private schools are on a lower socio-economic status, probably would have been factory workers in the past, but since today there are no factories, they'll end up serving fries and in other various service sector jobs until the service sector economy melts down and once it does, it won't matter at all what your education was in the past life.
The only thing that will matter in the new life is how well you are able to survive in really harsh economic conditions, no jobs, no money. Does education lag matter in those conditions? Unlikely.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
An economist would say that, if you take away money, you don't become less wealthy. For a long time the wealth has been a measure of your ability to produce which essentially boils down to the amount of tapped (exploitable) man-power you (and your country) have
If you take away the minorities, the US would probably score like Japan. It's not popular to say that; but it's true.
If you take away the MAJORITY OF SOME minorities, the US would probably score like Japan. It's not popular to say that; but it's true.
I wonder how that will work out? Seriously, since at least a century, we often had the best and brightest immigrants and I wonder how much that is skewing results? Something that MAY NOT continue. Especially if our fortunes go down, or our IP laws appear too restrictive.
Perhaps it's too early to measure China, or they suffer from too rigid a school system, or like Japan, their language is cumbersome it takes up a significant portion of schooling to just learn it, or as the one Ted Talks suggest - normal schools built on the factory model kill creativity, and so the asian ones must be doing that to an even greater degree.
But at least, like the fast food model, they ensure a minimum standard coming out. But that is public school's entire downfall. One size fits all. The person who wants to become the next doctor or scientific researcher is forced to do the same basic schooling as the person who just wants to fix cars until a ridiculously high grade.
I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are. But that's 6th grade and still 3-4 more years are wasted on keeping everyone more or less the same. I'm pretty sure gymnastic teams or iceskating coaches need that long to spot who will be the talent and who will be the also ran.
But this is more than spotting stars in order to nurture them. Not everyone who does bad in school does bad in life. But the answer for them isn't always perpetually more years of school. We bought into the hype that formal education is the answer to everything that HR departments are requiring degrees for every little job and totally ignoring education outside the classroom that may be much better suited for training towards the work at hand. (I.e. the German model of apprenticeships).
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.
asia is big on the TEST and cramming for a test.
And they also do solo work as group work.
If I'm understanding this correctly, what they're saying is that the average american does as well at reasoning problems as the average chinese person. Well, that's sorta obvious: Racial, cultural, and geographical differences in populations haven't shown to influence intelligence. But the conclusions they reach are total crap -- I could change the wording and say that "Why Nigeria's school 'lag' has never mattered," and make similar comparisons and reach similar conclusions, but few people are going to say that Nigeria's educational system couldn't use a big upgrade.
I can replot this data and reach a far less politically correct conclusion: The "lag" is based on economic averages, not most common realities. We have a massive wealth inequity problem in this country, but you'd never know it by simply averaging all the numbers together. Cut off the top and bottom 10% (the edge cases), and suddenly your data looks a helluva lot different. The helluva lot different conclusion is... we suck.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
... is that if you click through to the graph, on page 2, you can see that the US is stagnating, whereas pretty much every other country is bettering itself.
The US started at a relatively high position on the graph, so the educational issues haven't been too much of a problem, but the US is being rapidly overtaken by a whole host of other countries. It is disingenuous (see one of the articles between the summary and the graph) to claim that it has never mattered that the US's educational system is poor, so everything is peachy. Sure, it hasn't mattered *until* *now*... How does it go ? Past performance is no guarantee of future success...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
So what? One set of students is studying Chinese, which is not easy and a never-ending process. The other set of student is studying English. One set of students is learning how to clean their own classrooms, clean their own toilets, grow their own food, learn good socialist "morals", and learn to behave like a military unit. The other set of students is really not learning any of those things.
Besides even in China, there are vast differences between schools and between the different populations they serve. This guy is really comparing apples and oranges. He already has an opinion, and he's just picking up vague facts that sound like they might support his opinion. That's just too bad, because the question he was asking was actually pretty good. It would have been interesting to read an objective informed opinion on this issue.
America would not have made it to the moon without the nice SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Wernher von Braun before the Russkies, if ever (he was a glowing American in his role as a NASA director later). Two guys from my home town of 10000 people near Stuttgart developed films for the Corona program. They were gobbled up by America immediately after the war.
America has lived off solidly educated people from foreign countries for a long time. Now that supply has become a small trickle. China is running huge R&D programs in both government and academia and many good Chinese go back to their country. I guess Americans must ratchet up the standards or be relegated in the economic pecking order.
You will be no more valuable, economically, than a dishwasher, a fry cook or a gardener. What will you do then? Sorry, I had to ask.
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
India having solid education ? They are just parroting the stuff developed in America. Nearly no innovations by themselves. The Chinese have at least done some of their own engineering, looking at Huawei and their space program. They are highly disciplined while the Indians are all greedy cynics. India is still a shithole while Chinese discipline has made them more modern than America in some aspects (e.g. high speed rail). Of course not in all aspects.
Exocet missiles which sunk two anglo frigates
Building a missile which can hit an unexpecting ship is hardly what I'd call the peak of human engineering. The British military were known to have shit for missile defences and the warhead lodged in the Sheffield for a few days didn't even explode.
It is a partially french plane which is the largest in commercial passenger biz.
Airbus is certainly mostly European but I'd barely call it "French" as far as engineering is concerned. Anyway, single examples of excellent (and Airbus are excellent) are not what takes a country forward, but a wholly well-educated workforce. There is nothing productive in a university system which randomly kicks out people who have the potential to be perfectly competent (even brilliant) merely because they haven't passed some theoretical exams in the top x%. This is the worst possible way of nurturing talent.
I could go on with this list for at least 200 more words.
Aim higher.
They do the maximum for their size of country.
In what sense?
As I said above, in spite of all your high education and expertise, you will be no more valuable, economically, than a dishwasher, a fry cook or a gardener. What will you do then?
And it also does not help that some of the tech and trades schools are being pulled into the degree system when they should more drop in / cert like.
Now when you have places like tribeca flashpoint that is only a 2 year program but gives you real work skills but you still have places like TV channels that want you to have a 4 year Communications degree to work master control.
Now master control is a very tech job and you need to have skills on how to work the hardware / equipment. Now a Communications degree at college is more on the theory / how to write (aka newspaper writing) then working with hands on part.
Not only does a college degree come with a lot of filler it also comes with a high level theory view and also at times is still stuck in some of the old medieval times views / ideas on college and some college classes are very slow to be updated for to days tech.
There are lot's field where what the theory is and whats in the books is not the same in the field and you do need the field skills and people in the fields need some of the book and theory but not years of it.
We don't need a factory full of foreman and we also need at least some of the foreman to be able to jump in from time to time to do the work. And we also need take the idea that not all works are cut out to be a good foreman / bosses. AKA the peter principle.
The US is littered with policies and regulations built up on shaky statistical evidence. As an example, the policy of student confidence correlation with academic achievement. The idea was that since they are correlated if we increase student confidence we will increase academic achievement. We rank freakishly highest in student confidence but academic achievement isn't increasing.
The nation of the top scientific reasoners are satisfied with such statistical garbage is beyond belief. Does any of these statistical measures mean anything? How much is theories POTA (pulled out of the azule) and how much is statistically tested with all the factors accounted for. Even respectable papers do a bit of factor hiding. There was a paper that found that overweight patients in hospitals survive more from illness than normal weight patients - completely hiding the age factor in the statistical analysis. Normal weight patients who are admitted for illness were much much older than overweight patients!
Then the reaction of these news stories is always the same patterns: people with preconceived world view trying to fix the news to their views. Ooh, it doesn't say what happens 10 years into the future, ooh it shows public school policy X is bad etc etc.
I have experienced a few education systems (including the US), some myself, some through my sister, some through a lot of relatives, some through my academic contacts' recollections and stories. And I have to tell there are several sides to this matters-doesn't-matter in the case of the US (you know, compulsory Babylon5 reference of the 3-sided sword: my side, your side and the truth).
So, thing is, the education in the US is as it is, but:
- There is a constant high influx of students and researchers from abroad, who become part of the system on the higher level, provide talent, and contribute to the US scientific and economic growth. There are not many countries for which this applies as well as to the US.
- Education in the US might be inferior from some points of view, but there are not many countries where e.g. university labs can afford to spend that much money as at many US universities. And that can count _very_ much, access to journal subscriptions, to expensive equipment, technologies which for a lot of university labs abroad are simply unreachable (some of them for financial reasons, other for export rule reasons, etc.).
Does it matter that the US education system is sometimes inferior? Well, in the long run it might matter, and I personally can't understand how the US managed to stay afloat from this point of view. You know, geniuses manage to find the way to the top even in a bad education system, but in such a system a lot of middle-average level people who might be very very important contributors to the economy might not raise to a level to actually turn out useful, but instead they remain below, simply beacuse the system doesn't help them enough to reach their full potential.
Hard and full and proper basic education (I mean sub-university levels here) is also very important, in some sense much more important than the university level, since this creates, establishes and retains the average level of intelligence of a country. I think this is a very important point and much more emphasis should be put there. Money-wise and policy-wise as well.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The [Chinese] students spent most of the time studying on math exams trying to mesmerize all the equations, while here in Finland we could take the equation book with us to the exam, and the test was about how well we understood and could implement.
For decades scholars have pointed out how Asian schools focus on rote memorization while western schools focus more on practical application. It has created an environment where the west invents and the east refines.
The United States has started shifting towards a more eastern approach due to the federal "No Child Left Behind Act" which requires extensive testing using standardized exams. Dynamic learning is being replaced by rote memorization. I could see this significantly hampering creativity in the youth of the US. But many people like to see simple definitive reports on the progress of their youth. Standardized exams provide that. It is much harder to evaluate complex and abstract thinking.
You have the best schools and some of the smartest students, but you also have some pretty bad schools...
There are about 5 million Finns versus 300 million Americans. Even if Finland produces a higher rate of doctorates per capita than the US, the simple fact that the US has 60× the population means that the US going to produce more overall.
And a major problem is the US is that the quality of the schools are very inconsistent. In areas heavily populated by poor minorities or in the Bible Belt, schools will often be substandard either because they lack the funding or because the areas lack an emphasis on (or have an outright aversion to) strong education. Once you get out of those areas, the quality of education becomes comparable to northwestern Europe.
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.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-Samuel Clemens
I sense a little fallacy behind first comparing American education to the developed countries and then comparing them to China on scientific reasoning.
France is about 60 million people, the US about 360. BUT, they have
* their own fighter program
* an own engine for their fighter
* an own radar for their fighter
* their own ballistic missile subs (not designed by the US)
* their own ballistic missile (not designed by the US)
* their own nukes, which designed and tested BY THEMSELVES. Not like the lazy brits got them from America.
* their own tanks
* a first rate SAR satellite system (flown by Germany, designed by France)
* their own designed tank
* the leading industrial gas company (Air Liquide)
* still several car makers, unlike Britain
* CATIA (look it up)
* the TGV, which is the fastest wheeled train
* lots of nuclear power so that they can economically heat with leccy
* the reactors are their own design
* the nukes are of course built by themselves
* their role in Airbus certainly is the MAJOR role
* the major role in Arianespace, one of the most modern sat launchers
* a real, catapult-launched aircraft carrier
So, for a country of this size, you can simply not do more. And if they are kind of exhausted, it is exhaustion from very hard work. Don't believe the bullshit stereotypes.
America works right now because it has the capacity of importing the knowledge workers it needs. When I worked in IT in the NYC area I'm pretty sure that I worked with a greater number of non-Americans than Americans, overall.
With the United States getting ever more restricted and paranoid in immigration matters, that may not be possible for the future. Let's also not forget that the US's success in attracting that sort of immigration was pretty much entirely reliant on being the one big fish in the pond, which status will not last.
My sig is too lon
Much. Or at all when comparing across cultures and languages.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"Hey, China beat us again!"
"Aw, that ranking doesn't matter anyway . . . who cares . . . ? We're better, like, at, you know, stuff that you can't measure . . . got it . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That there edjumakation is fer city folk.
Lewann and me and the 8 wait 9 kids dont need no more book learnin we already have a sweet doublewide an all them welfare checks we gettin.
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!
I can outperform Watson on its own if I have access to Watson wired into my brain. Fusion of the strengths of human intelligence and machine intelligence will be far more productive than just machine intelligence on its own.
Unfortunately, it's not yourselves you will have to convince
If being inferior made no difference, why not go the whole hog and do away with all education once children can read, write and do basic arithmetic?
This would make the conservatives happy because they could keep more of your money.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
They removed that Mr Nixon because he had similar thoughts like you. There are countries who have the ability to wipe American civilization off the face of this earth. Look up "Topol M".
And, yes, it is good to have a bear who keeps you trigger-happies in check somehow.
Ya the guy you are replying to is an imbecile troll. But your post is pure idiocy too. What do you think happens when one or all of those ICBMs are launched at the USA? Hopefully your leaders are not as retarded as some Americans in power are becoming.
I went to school in Germany and we did indeed have to learn lots of facts such as the laws of Newton, Kirchhoff, Planck, Gauss etc. I never found that "boring" or "rote learning". Actually I was always eager to learn all that because I knew that all the machinery we use is based on these natural laws. I cannot predict the trajectory of a missile if I cannot apply Newton. I cannot build a car either.
So I tried my best to learn all that. My teachers would give us "Aufgaben" (problems) where we would have to apply all these laws. We were supposed to solve the problems on paper and give numeric results. It was always interesting to me, but certainly some of my classmates considered it boring.
Do we have to cater to these people ? Definitely not. In the free world you can make the deliberate decision to never become an engineer. If you don't like Physics, get out of the way of people who do want to learn it. Don't complain about the teachers, the school and all that. You had the opportunity, you threw it away, now live with the consequences. Laziness is a moral vice and we have to pay for vices one way or the other. Don't tell me prostestant work ethics is old-fashoned. It got us so rich and efficient. Your lazy ass is only surrounded by all these gadgets because some people had excellent work ethics. Get out of their way.
Well, back in 1980, we didn't have the internet, the fastest and most efficient cross-pollinator/broadcaster of ideas the world has ever known. That's a game changer.
The French have their idiosyncrasies, but calling them a failure is ignorant. They have one of the highest hourly productivity in the world. It is a very rich country with a very high quality of life.
Their education system is just... unique. It makes internal sense, but its two main fault is that it does not value research enough, and it is wasteful in that many very capable individuals don't make it through. Those that do are pretty good, though.
You know, while I understand the problems inherent in racism, it makes me wonder how racism itself is the cause of economic hardship over a long period of time. While it is certainly true that slaveowners and whites would have had a hugely disproportionate amount of power at the end of the slavery era, and certainly Jim Crow would cause some practical difficulties with education and advancement, I wonder how long it actually requires for a former slave group to finally turn things around.
Probably every race on Earth has had members of itself enslaved at one point in the past. Wealthy Romans tended to be taught by educated Greek slaves. Egyptians enslaved their own kind and others. Muslims in the medieval period enslaved Christians who ended up becoming Janissaries and other court officials. Although slavery itself is a violation of human rights, from everything I have seen, it has been no bar to the eventual rise of the slaves to at least a parity position, despite the inequity of their positions.
This is not a new argument, but I'm just going to come out and say it. The reason racism is more than a problem of a generation or two is because the former slave populations have internalized their disadvantage, and even made it part of who they are. We feed this sense of them being "owed" something because we feel guilty about people in the past having enslaved their ancestors. Well, that hasn't happened in well over a century, and even segregation ended over a generation ago. No one alive today has enslaved a black person in America, and the people who thought it was okay to remove their ability to have an equal opportunity before the law are dying off too. The excuses are starting to show up as just that, excuses.
With all of the programs, anti-racism laws and education out there, there's still racists and still minority poor, and there always will be. Former slave populations didn't end their enslavement by ending racism, they took responsibility for their own actions and made of their lives what they could. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't right, but even if it was, no population can do anything while they wait on someone else to right the balance. If they won't do it themselves, who will?
Being a disadvantaged population over the long term is something that comes from inside that population. It's a permanent inferiority complex that is mistaken for culture. It is cutting their own legs off. It's something the blacks in America do, and its something that the Palestinians do in their own country. They define themselves by what makes them weak and by their failures. When you are proud of your gangsters and terrorists, you are proud of your failure as a population to rise up on its own and you will always be a dependent, slave society while you allow that to continue.
There's nothing that makes a white person smarter or better than a black. What has turned the tide is the cultures that happen to have come out of the European struggle to not be second-best to the guy over the hill. While you denigrate people for "acting white", when in reality "acting white" is merely dismissive for humans doing what it takes to be successful, white or black, you are enslaving yourselves.
I'm tired of this tired notion that people can be "kept down" if they have the will to succeed. The type of person who does have the will to succeed will do what it takes, even eschewing their own retrograde culture, if needed, to make a better life for themselves. If I was an American black today, I'd be ashamed to be called African American. Africa in general, is the equivalent of a failed state, its own cultures frequently based on the the taking of their own kind as slaves. How do you think most of the black slaves got to the slave ports to begin with? They were brought in by their own people first to the Muslims, and then to the Europeans for their slave trade. Today, they're a culture that is perpetually under the thumb of this or that dictator, and the democracies that do exist are rotten
Without Germany, you would probably still use horse carriages and steam engines. You would never have been to the moon. You would not have MP3 players. There would be no Xray machines. No Aspirin. No Gaussian distribution.
Indeed Germany has lost some innovative power during the last 30 years, but German rationality and modesty have built things like SAP, MP3, SAR Lupe, AIP submarines and lots of little innovations in cars. Google is not the first company to have autonomous cars. Daimler had that 15 years ago.
Germany had enough of belligerence since 1945, while the US was fighting one war after the other and that pumped tons of money into high tech. It also weakened many economically important sectors such as auto or tool machine making. All the smart guys they needed were busy building radars and computers to kill some more vietnamese. Smart germans were perfecting cars in the meantime. Pays off, imo.
The article tries to associate test scores and attainment levels with the 'US being a titan of innovation' despite them. To innovate you need incentives, funding and a set of highly talented individuals. And I mean innovation in the real sense (and not like bounce-back lists on your phone). Doing poorly in attainment levels implies that we are not doing too well creating that talent pool. When you have cash and you can provide incentives to people to do that work you just get a bunch of immigrants to do that work for you. In countries like China and India education is easy to get for those in the middle class or above. For peanuts in fees they can get the best education the country can provide that people in America can't because their government pays for it. This is something someone in the US can't pull off without exhausting a good amount of her parents savings or taking on a sizable loan. Oh yeah: before you say thats socialism and its 'bad' consider: these countries look at it as an investment (much like a businesses put into training programs for their employees) though its too bad that some of these will leave the country (or business in the analogy) for greener pastures. America has always had the policy of attracting and retaining the best in the world. Its just that having poorer attainment levels in the US undermines the workforce in the country and slowly substitutes it for another. A consequence of this is that the policy effectively translates to saving money in educating this generation because its cheaper to skim off the cream from other countries. I think this article does a great disservice by pretending that the attainment levels are irrelevant by looking at the results in innovation and ignoring underlying issues.
Mod him down if you like, but it's true.
Among the highlights:
-Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai , China's financial capital.
-White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
The normal quoted newborn survival statistics are in fact from the CIA world fact book, which is quoted as "the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year", thus not really warped at all.
The US comes in at 174 from 222 (222 being the best), slightly better than Croatia, but worse than (say) the EU (by one-and-a-half lives per year, in this case). The US is still significantly better than Afgahnistan though, by about 115 lives/year.
You can lie with statistics easily enough, but sometimes what's in plain sight is just that.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
But if you took away the scores, the American kids would be left scratching their heads wondering WTF to do.
What always fascinates me about this debate is how much cherry-picking of statistics is involved. In all cases, someone in the media or on a blog, cherry-picks some statistic out of the PISA test, then writes a headline like "Oh no! The US is falling behind and we're DOOMED!"
I've actually read the results of the PISA test. The results are surprising. The US is approximately average among the OECD countries, virtually indistinguishable from France, Germany, or the UK. Even the vaunted German education in science, is only modestly better than US education in science: 539 vs 502. Even Japan, which has a reputation for non-stop studying and cram schools and so on, scores 539 on science, vs 502 in the US. I'm using science as an example because it's the middle case: the US performs slightly better relatively on reading, and slightly worse on math, but not to any significant degree.
Most industrialized first-world countries are not very different from each other on the PISA test. China is much better, however China is widely known to cheat on this test, and they cherry-pick students from an elite high school in Shanghai rather than randomly from the population, so the Chinese results were prefaced by an asterisk on the PISA results until recently. Aside from the Shanghai Chinese results, most industrialized countries are not very different from each other. Take the science test as an example. Spain performs very poorly, at 489; and Japan performs very well, at 539. Almost all large, industrialized countries are within this range. There are one or two outliers (Finland is an example) but not many.
The only way in which the US educational system is demonstrably inferior to any other large, industrialized country is the proportion of students who score a 6 (the top score) on the math test. In this regard, a few countries (like Japan, Switzerland, and Korea) have ~7% of their students which score in the very top category of the math test while the US (and most other countries) has about ~2%. This is the only worrying statistic. China (Shanghai) has a fantastic score in this regard, but again it is cherry-picked.
The lesson of the PISA test is this: most rich countries are quite close together in almost all regards. However a few of them (Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan) have a small portion of their populations (less than 10%) who score very well in math.
I don't know where you come up with the idea that charter schools are mostly in poor and minority areas.
The reference in the GP post specifically says so. There are plenty of references that say this listed on the Wikipedia Page.
I know that many of the ones I know of are in middle-class predominately white areas.
Could this, perhaps, be because you live in a middle class predominately white area? The city with the most charter schools, by far, is New Orleans, Louisiana. That is hardly a "middle class predominately white area".
1) They can be selective with their students.
No they can't. They are required to have the same admission standards as the public schools.
2) In most areas charter schools are exempt from many regulations and almost all mandated testing.
This is complete nonsense. Charter students take the exact same standardized tests as the normal public schools.
So you're saying that when you remove the motivated children and parents from the public school and they perform, that proves that the charter schools are not better, they just have better people in them?
Sounds good to me.
You know, if the way to get more parents to participate and volunteer to help out motivated kids is to have charter schools, I'm all for it. Unless you're suggesting that the alternative: those kids in public schools where they are unmotivated and no one will volunteer is actually better.
Some kids just aren't going to measure up. Some parents aren't motivated or cannot be. Its a real problem that needs an answer, but I'd rather not drag the motivated kids down with the ship. If anything, once the unmotivated kids are concentrated, you can start working on the problems that the unmotivated kids have, and stop boring the motivated kids and bringing them down. The trick will be making sure that the poor kids get those resources, but let's be honest, if they don't want to learn, you will have a lot more trouble teaching them no matter what.
If you take away the minorities, the US would probably score like Japan. It's not popular to say that; but it's true.
If you take away the MAJORITY OF SOME minorities, the US would probably score like Japan. It's not popular to say that; but it's true.
More specifically, take away the poor and we'll score near the top. Minorities just tend to be poor.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
They have the ability to wipe all civilization off the face of the Earth, not just American. They got it a while after we did. The US is not trigger happy, despite the actions of megaroid GWB. He did however prove that we defend ourselves quite vigorously. If you fuck with the Unites States of America then you had better pray that we have mercy upon your soul as we did with Japan and Germany.
Of course they have the highest hourly productivity in the world. They need it, because they don't actually seem to work that many hours.
And yes, I've had the pleasure of working for a French company before. It's not bad or anything, just very, very different.
A major problem for the US is that it has all sorts of inconsistencies. It's a heterogeneous country made up of natives and an immigrant population that is actually the only reason that the US has a population growth rate, as opposed to a rate of decline. Finland is what you would get if the US kicked out anyone who wasn't white and Protestant and put up a forcefield around the borders preventing any immigration except the most skilled of individuals. (Not saying that Finland has a forcefield, but they have other things that discourage mass immigration).
In the short run, we'd be more stable and less wracked by internal turmoil, with better schools and better programs, but probably less stable over the long term as our population collapsed on itself.
The US tends to welcome, even attract people who believe in lots of different things and when they get here, they can cause holy terror. It doesn't mean, however, that it can't dig deep and pull out the very best of the best, it just means the average can be a little uninspiring sometimes.
You post a google cache of a white supremacist group's "science" as your evidence?
Did this silly study control for poverty or other socioeconomic factors? No, didn't think so. Go back to Stormfront, troll.
http://slashdot.org/~AlexLibman/comments
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...while in the USA the most successful are giving special privilege.
That's not quite true - only the most wealthy are given special privilege because US society defines success as wealth. Regardless of what the average US teacher is like there are undoubtedly some truly excellent and successful teachers in the US. However these would never be regarded as successful individual's there because teacher's pay is so low that they never make enough money to become successful by their society's standards. Valuing education and societal contributions over wealth achieves a far better balance because in many respects wealth is its own reward - society does not need to reward wealthy individual further just because they are wealthy.
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?
More specifically, take away the poor and we'll score near the top. Minorities just tend to be poor.
Yes, even in (especially in!) countries where these "minorities" are the majority.
Wonder why that is?
Hundreds of years of colonial rule, perhaps?
I agree between the high end college graduates and immigration we probably have a near enough engineers and scientists in the US (despite spot shortages of programming fad of the year). However, we may not have enough of the broad middle-trained technicians to operate computerized machinery for manufacturing and clerical work. This is a niche where vocational schools, now rebranded and work-training community colleges could be expanded. However, during economic turmoil these have been under-funded.
1. Using what objective methods has anyone proven US inferiority in education? Truth, two US states have tested their secondary education students using a standard test similar to those in Europe. One state ranked even with Europe and China, and One state blew away the curve. The OECD methods are purely subjective, with a load of statistical analysis thrown on top. American inferiority is purely dis-information regularly thrown about by government bureaucrats trying to get us to cough up more of our earnings in the form of higher taxes.
2. The US educates ALL of its young citizens and non-citizens without regard to economic means or higher education proclivity. All other countries in the world, including Finland, educate and test ONLY their college-bound (typically the upper 10%). So, ALL of the US homogenous group is being compared to the upper 10% of the rest of the world. And we are either even, or immensely better.
3. Other than financial and political chaos, what has the rest of the world contributing to the betterment of mankind in the last century? What invention? What Medical breakthough? The US is vastly ahead in Nobel Prize winners. Even our President got one for doing nothing, because he does nothing better than all the other world leaders who do nothing.
Having worked in both the US and Europe, I really believe in US exceptionalism. I think our cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, political and generational diversity in every area of human endeavor creates an unmitigate strength in Science, Medicine, and the Arts. We feed and protect the whole world. You can dislike us, but you cannot argue the facts and the outcome.
Haven't visited Chicago lately or looked into the racial make-up of various schools in the Chicago Public Schools system, have you?
All statistics are warped in some way. The issue isn't whether the baby is 100 days old as GP said, but what counts as a "live birth". This page has some discussion of the complexities. Apparently some, but not most, of the US's poor record is due to these issues.
Sorry to reply to myself, but this CDC report says that the main reason the US does poorly is that it has a larger proportion of preterm births.
Why does the US have more preterm births? This article mentions a few factors: a greater percentage of mothers may be teenagers or older than 35, mothers may have worse preventative health care, and/or mothers have higher risk factors like diabetes and obesity.
So anyway it seems like a complex situation; I'm sure there's plenty in here anyone can cherrypick to support their political views.
USA was the land of opportunity. Now there are so many burocratic rules, nasty (lawsuits) customers, and ugly corporation-politician mafia that frozen innovation with patents. You would be better off paciking and going to Asia, where they teach students to work every minute of their life, to obey their masters, and never complain.
Almost all USians are religionists, that should be the only indicator by itself.
So are you stating that just because someone is a religionist he or she is unable and/or unwilling to learn, especially about science? Attitude is but one of the problems facing education in America. The other problems also stem from inadequately funded schools, lazy teachers, lazy students, and misplaced priorities (Where television shows like American Idol and Big Brother as well as sports are more important than academics).
But it goes further than that.
1 in 5 USians believe that the sun revolves around the eart.
1 in 5 USians believe that the sun isn't even a star.
1 in 2 USians believe in creationism (I.E. the earth is less than 10k years old).
1 in 2 USians believe that global warming is fake.
Would you cite any of your sources for your claims? I would love to read them.
Conclusion : Nearly all USians believe that science is evil and should never be taught.
If that were true then why is science even being taught in schools to begin with?
No wonder the US lags all developed nations and is starting to fall behind even the developing nations. Time to switch global trading to the Euro, the USian economy is going to fail and fail big time.
Ah, I see, a troll post. Which explains the need to use the terms "USian" and "religionists". First America is the name of a country, hence the name "United States of America." Second not all religions are the same and not everyone in each religion is willfully ignorant when it comes to science or anything else.