Slashdot Mirror
US Educational Scores Not So Abysmal
DavidHumus writes "The much-publicized international rankings of student test scores — PISA — rank the U.S. lower than it ought to be for two reasons: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S. who are in the lower socio-economic classes. If one were to rank comparable classes between the U.S. and the rest of the world, U.S. scores would rise to 4th from 14th in reading (PDF) and to 10th from 25th in math."
So, we're worse overall because of our higher socio-economic classes? Or our lower socio-economic classes are better than other countries? or both?
FA says "Based on their analysis, the co-authors found that average U.S. scores in reading and math on the PISA are low partly because a disproportionately greater share of U.S. students comes from disadvantaged social class groups, whose performance is relatively low in every country."
Hmm, is the study arguing then that these students should be excluded? If so, what is the basis? Are they not really in the country?
Or are they sidestepping the issue of the massive difference in standards of living in the United States?
Granted, the source material may have handled this better than the summary article...
FA says: "As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations"
And the point is???
We aren't TRYING to be a class-segregated society.
We're (almost, kinda) number four!
"...: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S."
I read that 5 times and still don't understand it. Am I part of the reason the US is ranked low? Or is the writer of the summary?
So if the US had not had a disproportionally large underprivileged underclass PISA scores would have looked better.
Unfortunately it does.
It's no secret that the US education system is a joke, regardless of our "place", we need to improve it.
Uhh . . . wait a second!!1
How could U.S. scores rise to 4th from 14th, when four is less than 14??? They mean "lower"!
(Goes back to reading Texas high school math book)
I have lived in another country for a while while now.
What I have found is that schools will literally send pupils that would not test well home for the day while testing is being done.
Hence, the results are not quite as they have you think.
I am curious how wide spread this is.
So what you're saying is, if we move the goal posts and massage the data, we won't suck anymore? I love this solution -- solved not with expensive money and training but nice, cheap words. No really, that pretty much is the summary for the article: It's those damn poor people dragging us down.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"proportion of of U.S. students" ;)
Rich
All nations quake at the educational scores of the glorious Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
In fact this post was written by a Turing Machine designed by the dear leader himself.
That just means the rest of the world isn't as smart as we hoped it was.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I've seen this argument before. The basic gist is that other countries don't try to educate everyone to the same level like the USA does. Therefore our tests include scores from every kid, while theirs only include scores from kids in the higher achievement educational tracks that are going to schools that administer such tests.
What the USA is attempting with their educational system is quite noble and idealistic, but it ends up making their students look bad on international tests like this.
All they're trying to prove is that America isn't stupid. Gee, now what would have given the rest of the world that assumption?
Socio-economics should not be put into grading. It doesn't matter if you are poor or rich, it depends on how much you are taught. I know lots of students from the middle-class who are smart outside the class, but unwilling to do the work. I know plenty of "poor" kids who have come to school, straight As but unable to tell left from right.
Our educational system is based on rote memorization. In colleges, they teach you critical thinking. Both are completely different trains of thought and cannot be measured in numbers.
Having made the mistake of reading the article, I'm not sure this really changes anything. They are saying that the US has a higher percentage of students in the lower socio-economic categories. These categories always perform lower so that lowers the overall US scores. While I am sure all of this is true, it is a simple fact of the US. We do have more poor people and poor people do perform poorer on the tests, therefore the US as a whole does poorer on the tests. So yes, our top students do as well as their top students and our poorest students do as poorly as their poorest students, but overall they have more students performing higher because they are more students in the higher categories. This means they overall performed better.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Nobody wanted to say, "the US looks bad because of all the inner city Blacks". They went looking for people with similar socio-economic backgrounds in the countries that were thrashing us. Then they did a comparison that was more apples-to-apples and voila! We don't look so bad.
I like apparently many people don't really understand the headline. What i'm assuming is, it's similar to the "USA Has Best Healthcare"...
Yes, you do, but it's only available to a small percentage of society.
So what is being done in the US education system has improved the performance of those less fortunate.
But because of a widening socio-economic disparity the overall performance is decreasing.
I think the biggest lesson is to continue the improvements in the Ed system but look towards narrowing the gap between the higher and lower social 'classes'.
Vorlon tavutna chog!
So if we factor out the poorer-performing students, America scores better?
That is amazing!
Ken
We don't know what the true demographics are in the US, because US census takes are too unreliable and the US only reports on those unemployed who are employable, insured and collecting.
We do, however, know that US education leaves students bitter and cynical about schools, that many feel they went to school for indoctrination, to learn useless factoids or to be out of the way of adults until grown up. Extremely few students feel they went to school to learn about how to learn, study and reason. SAT tests do not look at your ability to think, they look at your ability to regurgitate. Universities that grade according to attendance can tell you who turned up, but not who tuned in.
Conclusion: Schools in the US are not teaching useful material and deserve their low rank - and possibly deserve an even lower one. Education in the US is simply not acceptable.
So, it's OK that Americans are achieving less academically than other countries because the reason is known and can be controlled for in studies, removing the reason and its consequences as a source of difference in the comparisons?
How about if we found that poor teachers result in poor academic outcomes? Would they say that American academic outcomes are not worse than those of other countries because, once you control for the preponderance of poor teachers in America, the outcomes are the same?
...we start looking pretty good!
Even if this was correct, test scores don't mean much to me. Schools seem to be all about teaching to the test and rote memorization, and I couldn't care less about test scores because of that.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
And the point is???
The point is to evaluate how successful our education system is; where it is succeeding and where it could do better. And in particular to learn whether the approaches taken by other countries is working better or worse than us, so we can adjust our approach accordingly. The school system can't change the socioeconomic breakdown of the country; they have to find the best approaches to serve the students they have. Blindly comparing schools that have mostly rich kids to ones with mostly poor kids will always give misleading results in favor of the rich school, even if the methods used by the poor school are superior. This is true whether you are comparing within a city or internationally. Therefore in order for results to be useful to evaluate educational programs, rather than just a chest pounding exercise, you must adjust for distribution of socioeconomic status.
Hmm, is the study arguing then that these students should be excluded? If so, what is the basis? Are they not really in the country?
No, I think they're arguing the problem isn't the educational system, but instead that we have a larger proportion of the population that is a member of disadvantaged social groups than the countries we're being compared to.
FA says: "As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations"
And the point is???
That instead of focusing on improving education purely by looking at schools through programs like No Children Left Behind, we should focus on the economy, how to lower unemployment in the blue-collar section and other strategies to improve the economic status of a large portion of our population, because that's where the problem is.
14th to 4th? That's like 10 times better!
rewriting history since 2109
Even in the developed world the education isn't free. One example: South Korea. Only the elementary education is provided at no charge. It would be unfair to compare US which provides free education up to high school level to one like South Korea where unexceptional poor students are out of the education system by high school.
So only poor schools are doing the PISA tests? And because they are poor its ok for them to do poorly just next time we will have less poor students do the test.
So there is in fact no data on how poorly US school students are doing? Or should we just fudge the figures?
So what is everyone else in the world doing? Are they biased by the tests or are they stacking the test so they can appear better..
No I believe the US does have an educational problem. Its affecting the poor and middle class more than the wealthy (they will all ways have top notch education) but its a problem that is going to get worse and it needs addressing.
Hmm, is the study arguing then that these students should be excluded? If so, what is the basis? Are they not really in the country?
The point is that, allegedly, most other countries effectively fudge their numbers, whereas, again allegedly, the US reports relatively accurate numbers. Therefore, comparisons of the US to other nations using these tests are not meaningful.
I'm so tired of the "US schools teach only rote memorization and not critical thinking" BS. Certainly that's partially true in the lower grades, but definitely not in high school.
Guess what, you can't CRITICALLY THINK until you have SOMETHING to critically think about. That's where rote memorization comes in. This "rote memorization" BS comes from elementary school teachers who weren't forward thinking enough to realize they were going to spend a substantial percentage of their time wiping little noses, washing little hands, and preparing ROTE MEMORIZATION exercises... all of which must be incredibly boring, but hey, that's the gig you signed up for, whether you realized it or not. Besides all that, rote memorization is actually a valuable (foundational) skill that, just like every other skill, improves with use. The ability to memorize things translates into countless daily activities. Stop dissing memorization! It's necessary!
You don't get to wax eloquently to six-year-olds about the intricacies of the plot of "Pride and Prejudice." You don't get to teach my seven-year-old "Godel, Escher, and Bach" as an exegesis on the complexity of perception, in their math class. They first need to understand that 3 * 4 = 12... sorry it's so boring... maybe you should have paid closer attention to the guidance counselor when you chose this path.
If it was your intent to submerge yourself in that level of academic discourse, perhaps you should have taken the extra courses to be able to teach high school or undergrad college.... don't wreck the foundation of my kids' education because you're bored with teaching multiplication tables. They NEED that skill so that they can build on it later, and do the more sophisticated critical thinking stuff when they get into junior high and high school. Some schools have gone off the deep end (like my local district) on this "rote sucks" BS, and now we've got whole crops of kids who reach high school, can't multiply or divide, but can talk your ear off about why it doesn't really matter than they can't multiply or divide. That's just plain stupid.
Where the hell are all the adults in the modern US school system -- the people who themselves are supposed to be thinking critically about how to frame up a good education, rather than swinging from fad to fad?
It seems pretty simple:
Lower socio-economic groups tend to get lower grades on the tests.
We have more people in the lower socio-economic groups than the countries we are compared to, so the scores reflect an inaccurate position for the US.
If we only count the higher socio-economic groups and a portion of the lower groups THAT WILL PUT THE PERCENTAGE IN LINE WITH SIMILAR COUNTRIES we would get similar scores.
Hunh.
So what they are REALLY saying is this:
get rid of half the poor people in the US of A and test again.
Hmmm, maybe a better long-term solution would be to get more money from the higher socio-economic groups to pay for better education for the financially handicapped portion of the population..
Nah, the corporate shills (aka Tea Bag Party types) would never go for that.
Just get rid of most of the poor people.
If you control the test scores based on test score then all the scores worldwide are the same. It isn't fair to compare students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, because *of course* the students from wealthy families will have all the advantages and score higher. In fact your test scores is a pretty good indicator of how wealthy you are. So what I propose is grouping people by their test scores and only comparing those groups. We group people who scored 100% in the same group, 99% in another group, etc, all the way down to 0%. If you do this, it turns out that every country has equally smart "smart kids" and equally smart "dumb kids". We are all equal. The only difference is how many kids in each group each country has. But I don't see how that's important. /s
It depends on which American high school you're talking about.
I've been to some high schools that are packed full of high achievers and I've been to some high schools where each and every students have to gone through a metal detector before they are allowed to enter the school compound
There's just no justice to do any comparison between the two because their differences are so great they are much more like school systems from two very different countries
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The sampling frame
All NPMs were required to construct a school sampling frame to correspond to their national defined target population.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/50036771.pdf
quoted from the PISA 2009 Technical Report, which gives detailed information about the sampling procedure, stratification an bias corrections. they make complete sense considering the report's abjectives. and since they're very clearly defined, they mike kinda total morons of those guys at EPI (and slashdot) who seem to totally fail to grasp the purpose of such a study.
of course i have no say regarding the honesty/rigor the sampling procedure was actually carried out, but this is not wat the counter-study challenges. as said, absolute morons. there goes your elite, guys!
Just base it on race. White vs. white, black vs. black, you get the point.
If the US doesn't maintain its low status in these rankings, what other reason would they have to liberate more money from us and throw it into the fire of public education?
Why, exactly, should the study give the US a pass because it has more poor students? From TFA:
As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations: U.S. rankings would rise to fourth from 14th in reading and to 10th from 25th in math. The gap between U.S. students and those from the highest-achieving countries would be cut in half in reading and by at least a third in math.
That's interesting, sure, but um... the results probably should reflect that we have worse economic disparity here, and the fact that low SES students fare worse, right? If you want to just pick and choose only the best students, and ignore the ones who are being failed by the system, I'm sure you could make any country look better.
Ahh, I love Americans...always moving the goalposts until they win.
Bravo!
Part of the problem the us has with its education system is how it deals with under-performing students and schools.
If you have a school that has a large percentage of under-performing students, you would think you would want to give that school more resources and help to improve the student learning.
But the way it works in the US is exactly the opposite of that. If students are not doing well enough, the school and the students by proxy are Given less help and less funding to help improve. Where as the higher performing schools are given more money, better facilities, and able to hire more skilled teachers so they can have smaller class sizes.
Basically what happens is the higher performing schools get better and the lower performing schools get worse widening the gap.
American's can't even spell colour properly. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In asia it's all about the test and not if you can do stuff out side of the test.
And all NCLB did is push the US school system down the same road.
I believe it was Ricky Bobby's dad who said it best: "If you're not first, you're last."
Going from 25th to 10th at anything is nothing to brag about.
A: acceptable
B: bad
C: crap
D: don't come home with one of these
F: you are a f**kin idiot
"U.S. scores would rise to 4th from 14th in reading (PDF) and to 10th from 25th in math.""
Still pretty embarassing.
I thought we were all Americans?
From the article:
"Based on their analysis, the co-authors found that average U.S. scores in reading and math on the PISA are low partly because a disproportionately greater share of U.S. students comes from disadvantaged social class groups, whose performance is relatively low in every country."
Which means that in the US, there are proportionately more disadvantaged students compared to other countries.
Am I wrong in thinking this is an even bigger social problem than how well the students in US score ?
and pretend that we're doing just fine.
"lies, damned lies, and statistics". This quote was popularized by Mark Twain (among others) who attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli.
So apparently we can bend the numbers however best suites our needs. Want to look OK, bend 'em one way. Want to look bad, bend 'em another.
Start? Really? Have you not been paying attention the past few years?
What's the name of dat big river in Egypt?
De Nile?
Much better to argue over the scores than admit you have a situation that needs fixing, then move ahead?
Pretend the scores are right then, and that you do need to focus attention on better education. Use it as an excuse to forge ahead! You'll get more mileage out of that than spending all that time and effort to make yourself look better relative to these scores.
Just adjust the moderating rods to your white-hot national ego, okay?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It might be interesing to do the comparison, painstakingly, county by county in the US. It may reinforce the scholastic performance/income - but quantitatively validate other factors noted in the enormous number of previous posts. For example Fairfax, VA county and Montgomery County MD, certainly rank among nations best public school systems. How do they compare on intl scale? And do other countries segregate, create tiers for effectively separating magnate students from those identified as having low academic potential. Looks like a great 'R' study.
Every single country I know has published such a study. Miraculously, PISA apparently always cherry-picks the worst students and "makes us seem worse than we are". Now stop whining and improve your education system.
So only count the white kids, Mr. Birch?
Just mediocre
Statements insisting that "all is fine with America" typically compare America to the rest of the world. The underlying assumption is that America is fine as long as it is better than the rest. In my personal opinion, these comparisons do not hold America to the high standards that it could reach. The same could be said of other nations. Don't compare to everyone else. Rather, compare to what what should be possible. That means you compete with yourself and thus you rise to ever-greater accomplishments and standards.
I think the home environment and parental attitudes are overwhelmingly more important than any other factor influencing educational attainment, including the quality of schools. For that matter, school quality is also highly determined by where parents choose or can afford to send their kids to school.
My wife and I are both physicians, and we have one daughter, who is in high school. We were both high educational achievers, and we have been extremely engaged in our daughter's development and education her whole life. Now she is in the honors curriculum in a very strong school and is getting straight A's. I don't think it is a coincidence. As proud of a father as I am, I have to think that the overwhelming majority of children would be successes in a similar setting. I'm not talking primarily about money so much as growing up with the attitude to take school seriously, work hard, be honest, respectful, well-organized, etc. But economic advantages absolutely do help, or at least remove some hindrances. Also, the reason low-income households are low-income often has a lot to do with suboptimal behavior by the parents.
So, the reason I feel sad about the USA is that we have so much socioeconomic disparity. Asking a low-income kid to compete against my daughter academically is ridiculously unfair. Social disparities beget educational disparities, and of course the corollary is also true, so these cycles continue. I don't feel like we have found a good way to break to cycle of poverty->low educational achievement->poverty in the next generation.
Just when I got used to scrolling *down* to progress through an article, they change it so we have to swipe *up* to do the same thing!
(not quite 100% kidding - I was just away from "real" computers for a week holiday and on return found myself trying to mouse in the wrong direction when browsing the web at my desktop.)
The article is really ambiguous about the cause here. Is it
- Non-academic-track kids in non-US countries don't take the test , or - the US has a lot of poor kids who don't get adequate schools because they're poor, and we'd have better test results if we didn't have so many poor kids?Both factors are true, but I can't tell from the article whether it's saying "US ranking would be this much higher if the non-academic kids on the other countries took the tests (yay, US!)", or "US ranking would be higher if we didn't include the poor kids (sorry, doesn't count.)"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Within the context of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy PISA results are devoid of truth
Casteism
If one were to rank comparable classes between the U.S. and the rest of the world, U.S. scores would rise to 4th from 14th in reading (PDF) and to 10th from 25th in math."
Or, if you prefer:
The HTML version includes some links, including a link to a response to a PISA response to the paper, including the PISA response itself (PDF).
(I didn't check all the pages to make sure the HTML version was complete - the last page of the PDF says "page 99" - but I did a quick-and-dirty hack, wherein I selected all the text in the HTML version, copied it and pbpasted it to a file, did the same with the PDF version, applied a tr hack (tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n", as per the man page), and then ran wc -w on both files; it reported 45040 for the HTML version and 45596 for the PDF version, so, unless one of those steps severely mangled the document, they're probably the same.)