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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!
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.
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.
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.
... 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!
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.
Ah, but the inequality adjusted HDI (you know, the one that measures the quality of life based on the median, not the mean) has Germany at #7 and the US at #23, according to this. We're only 3 spots above Greece, and their economy has completely collapsed. It's great that there's a bunch of total wealth in the US, but if I never get any of it it doesn't do me much good.
Inequality-adjusted HDI puts the US between Italy and Estonia. Not very far from Greece. Also cost of living comparison are shit: a German citizen will have better retirement and has access to a generous system of socialised medicine throughout their life. Basically, a random German will in general have a better life than a random American.
But the topic is innovation and schools. And something must be said in favour of the US system: it has a remarkably high proportion of very highly achieving students. This seems to be at the cost of a pretty poor average. There is a reason for that: it give a greater emphasis on creativity, at the cost of structure, and this benefits the brightest.
In turn, this is could be good idea from the point of view of the economy: when progress is fast, the winner takes it all, and generating more winners is a good strategy. However, the computing revolution is finishing, and there might not be much innovating left to do. If it turns out that a well-educated workforce (on average) is paramount in the future (as opposed to highest proportion of geniuses), then America's strategy will be a losing bet.
Personally, I think that the US is a terrible case to study the value of education right now: it has been propped up for a large part of the 20th century by massive immigration of very highly qualified immigrants from Europe, and now from China and India. These fluxes are drying up, and the current political mood is set against immigration. So we will know with some certainty only in 20 or so years whether the US system of education is a disaster or a great design.
I disagree with you on a few fronts:
1) Thinking that the #1 problem in education is anywhere on school grounds is provably wrong. The #1 problem in the US education system is at home where the majority parrents are not spending enough time teaching their kids that education is important, and that teachers are to be respected. Just look at the animosity that is spewing out of the Republican canidates right now. Just immagine you are a kid and are hearing your parrents spout off about how horrible teachers are, how much respect do you think those kids are going to pay their teachers?
Remember in the last 3 generations we have gone from a society where Mom was expected to stay home and raise the kids (including manage their education), to one where there is no way that the majority of households could afford to have either parent not working full time. This change has put a lot more GDP on the plate, but has come with its own costs.
2) Competition works best when people have the reasonable ability to say "no" to a product. But in areas such as education and health care there is never a supply-demmand balance, and saying no is not a valid option (insert hand waving here). Everyone always demands the "best" so prices are always going to spiral out of control.
3) Competition works well when you buy multiple of the product you are purchasing over the life of your purchasing it. For example if I really hate the food at one restaraunt then I will go to another one the next time. But for practical purposes it is silly to talk about third grade the same way.
4) Universal schooling is something I consider a fundamental building block of "the American Dream". It is how someone who is born into a poor family can have a fighting chance to make it in our society. But market forces ("competition") are always going to focus on where the money is, which is not in poor neighborhoods. And people from poor neighborhoods often do not have the means of trnasporting their children to schools in better off neighborhoods. So the only people who are going to benifit from voucher systems are the people who have enough money that they already don't need them. So all you are doing with that is to give more money into alredy well-off schools, and further starve schools that are never going ot be able to recover.
5) I have never seen any study show that privatizing schools has ever shown any cost or quality difference, when applied to the same populations as a similar public school. Remember a public school has to take all comers, it can not reject students because of bad grades, bad behavior, or phisical/menatal handicaps. Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
I know that many schools keep multiple lawyers on retainer (and often use them full time) to keep defending themselves from law suits from parents of needy kids who want more and more services to flow to these kids. Trying to compare the results of private schools to public schools is a comparison that has the public schools competing with one hand tied behind their backs.
The push to a voucher system is just the push to make sure the rich only pay for their children, leaving the poor with meager scraps.
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.