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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."
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.
"...: 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?
It's complicated. We're better off than countries where members of lower socioeconomic classes don't go to school. But our overall scores are lower than countries with better economic equality, because so many more of our citizens are in lower socioeconomic classes.
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.
It's complicated. We're better off than countries where members of lower socioeconomic classes don't go to school. But our overall scores are lower than countries with better economic equality, because so many more of our citizens are in lower socioeconomic classes.
It's simple. The scoring was done by American high school students. Obviously if it was corrected, things would be different =D
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
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!
Unfortunately it's easier to come up with scapegoats than address real problems.
For example, see how many people will blame Teacher's Unions or the Federal Department of Education rather than question how much emphasis the local school board puts on Football stadiums.
Short version is we're intentionally turning the USA into a 3rd world country including achievement, but forcing school attendance like a 1st world country.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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
In some countries, poor kids might not go to school, much less take the PISA test. Or, kids under a certain achievement standard might be taken outside of the public school system, skewing the sample. Extreme cases, like China for instance, might restrict testing to their wealthiest cities, or even hand-pick their test takers.
And there's the key. Our scores ARE abysmal, it's just that much of the blame goes to our failure to address the socio-economic divide rather than to our educational system.
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're worse overall because every a) Public School student are more likely to get tested, and b) since we've got high income inequality that means that we've got more poor kids then rich kids.
If you compare poor Swedish kids to poor Americans, average Swedes to average Americans, etc. we do fine. But due to a) you aren't comparing average Swedes to average Americans, you're comparing average Swedes to lower-middle-classish Americans, and due to b) we have a much larger lower-middle-classish cohort in the first place.
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!
It's simple. When you compare likes with likes (as far as socioeconomic class goes) the US is not any worse than other countries.
We look worse on the surface because (from TFA), "a disproportionately greater share of U.S. students comes from disadvantaged social class groups, whose performance is relatively low in every country."
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
It's no secret that the US education system is a joke, regardless of our "place", we need to improve it.
Uh, no. RTFA and all that, but the US Educational system does reasonably well to quite well -- when you control for exogenous factors such as kids who come to school ill-dressed, ill-fed, in poor health, sleep-deprived, etc. Other countries either don't send such kids to school at all (Turkey) or don't have nearly so many of them (Northern Europe.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
No, that's too simple. We actually are worse—we don't just look worse. But the reason we are worse is because we have a serious income inequality problem, not because our schools are bad.
but the US Educational system does reasonably well to quite well
If its purpose is to give people an education, then I would disagree. There is far too much rote memorization and teaching to the test for that to occur.
If, on the other hand, its purpose is to have students memorize material and then spew it all back on a piece of paper, then I'm sure it does a reasonably good job.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
14th to 4th? That's like 10 times better!
rewriting history since 2109
Well its a matter of opinion whether income inequality is a "problem" or not but the study is talking about the schools.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
There's two problems with this argument: the facts are wrong, and it's totally misinterpreting the original article.
First the facts. Some foreign countries (ie: Germany) have a system similar to the one you describe. Many others don't. Finland, for example, is the only country besides us actually mentioned in this article. They don't have a two-track education system until the age of 16, which is not that far off from when the US Community College vs. Real University distinction sets in. The tests they're talking about actually happen at age 13, so you are simply wrong.
Second the original article's point is that the students tested are poorer then the student body as a whole. They're saying that while only 23% of American students go to schools where most kids are in poverty (e: qualify for cheap school lunches), 40% of American kids tested go to such schools. Our poorest kids take the damn test at twice the rates of everyone else, which isn't good for scores.
See the American South(East) for failures of both.
And why I left there.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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
The way people "feel" is hardly an objective assessment of how a school is doing. A test like this *might* be a more objective assessment, but this article implies that there was a sampling bias which makes us look worse than we are.
Are people disgruntled because they didn't learn enough, or are they disgruntled because they keep reading we are 14th in reading? If it is the latter, perhaps the disgruntled people shouldn't be disgruntled when they find out that the ranking is skewed.
I understand that it is convenient to just manipulate scores to make yourself look better, but if there is a real sampling bias, perhaps this disgruntlement is actually just a case of people having formed an impression which was built on incomplete information. If I went through a boring, tough system and only came out 14th at the end of it, I might well question it. If I went through the same program, but everyone tells me that it produces the best students in the world... am I going to complain about it? Probably not.
Unfortunately it's easier to come up with scapegoats than address real problems.
For example, see how many people will blame Teacher's Unions or the Federal Department of Education rather than question how much emphasis the local school board puts on Football stadiums.
I don't need to justify firing them. They need to justify their jobs because they're being paid with money extracted from people by the threat of jail.
You want to take tax dollars to pay for your noble cause, the burden of proof is on you, not on the taxpayers.
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 !
Unfortunately it's easier to come up with scapegoats than address real problems.
For example, see how many people will blame Teacher's Unions or the Federal Department of Education rather than question how much emphasis the local school board puts on Football stadiums.
We should blame the teachers and the unions. If you do not meet a metric at work do you keep your job? Nope. How about ask for a raise when you dont?!
We spend more per capita on education and get consistently the worse results. We can't fire bad teachers and they have the nerve to demand raises and paid pensions while the rest of us have to work more for half the money we used to get paid. Fedex delivery drivers used to get paid $20 an hour. Now they get $9. Same with other blue collar jobs.
Bust the teachers union and start firing teachers who can't raise their test scores. I am in favor of educators being an organization who creates tests to make sure teachers are qualified or brings teaching issues to both state and federal politics. But I am not in favor of putting the teacher ahead of the student or tax payer. Washington DC schools I read spends $12k a year per student and is the worse in the country!
http://saveie6.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Income inequality is a problem because it causes massive amounts of lost talent. People who could have been on forefront of sciences, politics, military and so on instead are forced into menial jobs just because they happened to be borne into the wrong family.
Most first world countries view this as a massive waste of human talent that is unacceptable. US pretty much stands solo on the other end of the pond with most of the 3rd world in viewing such massive sacrifice of human talent as acceptable without any significant advantage for having this issue (other then saving on having to actually invest in proper general education and higher education to give these people opportunities based on their talent, rather then wealth of family they happened to be born into).
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.
Many? I doubt that. From what I've seen, many people don't seem to realize that they didn't receive much of an education from US schools. You see, we seem to live in a 'jeopardy society' where merely having a good memory or drilling before a test and succeeding is thought to show that someone is intelligent.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
An excellent approach. If you don't like the answer, change the question. Can we call this, "The Kirk Maneuver"?
I think most people who are on the short end of income equality would describe it as a problem.
They might, but it doesn't mean that it is.
Grading ourselves...
The issue being discussed is not grading "ourselves" but grading our schools. As for grading ourselves, well we are doing better than Finland in many respects including for instance per capita purchasing power adjusted GDP of 48K versus 37K. Would you live in Finland? I wouldn't.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
They NEED that skill so that they can build on it later
The only thing that's built on top of it is yet more rote memorization. Or do you think the mere memorization of equations is the same as understanding said equations, for instance? Because that's what happens, and things such as No Child Left Behind aren't helping.
and do the more sophisticated critical thinking stuff when they get into junior high and high school.
The thing that doesn't seem to happen?
"rote sucks" BS, and now we've got whole crops of kids who reach high school, can't multiply or divide
That's not a result of people trying to encourage the US education system to teach critical thinking. It's a result of people not getting an education.
You see, not everyone who wants critical thinking to be introduced in US schools hates all forms of memorization. You couldn't do anything if you retained no memories. As such, I have no idea who you're arguing with.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The only reason I wouldn't live in Finland is that my family is in America and I am not an EU citizen, so it would be a pain for me to live there. Adjusted purchasing power is a meaningless comparison if you don't take into account all the things that their taxes pay for, but that ours do not.
Since the "underprivileged" are the majority here in the U.S., it seems to me that if they think something is a problem, they have more votes than you do, so it's a problem, whether you agree it is or not. Keep letting the problem get worse, and eventually you will get to witness what happens when a society stops caring about the common welfare: either you will be living behind a concrete wall topped with broken glass and hiring bodyguards, or you will be wishing you could.
And yet even with a "massive waste of human talent" the US leads the world in innovation, scientific achievement, per capita GDP (at least compared to countries that matter), military power (even in comparison to pretty much the rest of the world put together) etc etc. Why are there no European Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. Do you realize that huge majority of the largest and best companies in the world are US based? Do you realize that 70 of the top 100 universities according to Times Education rankings are in the US? Just imagine what we could do if we didn't have that "massive waste of human talent".
Or perhaps the answer is that relative economic liberty that enables economic growth and innovation cannot be separated from inequality. You can choose one or the other.
Europe is rotten economically and politically to the point where a new wave of dictatorships and wars (a regular occurrence in that part of the world) is not unthinkable anymore and the reason for that is not unrelated to sacrificing liberty for the sake of equality i.e. sacrificing some people for the sake of others.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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?
The socioeconomic divide is largely due to immigration, and solving that would destroy what made America into what it is. That said, poor children can still learn just like everybody else, so focusing on how to educate them efficiently might help improve the scores.
That's not quite right. Higher economic status is correlated to higher scores. This is true everywhere. The article has two claims related to this:
1. The US was badly sampled. It should be the case that a student in any economic group has the same probability of being included in the sample. However the sample they took has a disproportionately large number of students in lower economic groups. As an example, students attending schools with half of more of their students in poverty represent 23% of the total population of US students but 40% of the population of the test sample. Due to the correlation mentioned above, this lowers the measures scores of US students.
2. A higher proportion of US students are in lower economic groups than in other countries.
The first is clearly a methodology fault, and given the big difference in the example group of 40% vs 23% it could have large effects. The article doesn't discuss the details of the second group. It could be that the socio-economic divide is larger in which case it would be justified to say that still represents the country fairly and doesn't invalidate the comparison. Or it could be that children in lower economic groups are more likely to be students in the US than elsewhere. In that case it would seem perverse to claim the US educational system is worse than others because it attempts to educate poor kids. It could be both of these things or something else.
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.
Again, it's blaming the poor for the problems caused by the rich. The rich sabotage the school system to get vounchers and such out, harming the children. Just like the "subprime" crisis was named by the old rich white male bankers who caused the problem, to blame the poor for the problem they made.
If the poor just got jobs and paid taxes, we'd have a balanced budget. It's all the poor's fault.
Learn to love Alaska
I agree, I just left the US for a better place, which is ranked higher, though I didn't find the "corrected" rankings, just comments about where the US would be, so no idea if I moved to a place still above the "corrected" US.
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, exactly. That's even shorter than my short version! :)
Short but wrong, because both versions assume the problem is getting worse. Test scores are going up world-wide, and have been for decades. But they are going up even faster in America.
White kids in America do as well as white kids in Europe. Black kids in America do as well as black kids in Europe. But America has more black kids (and poor hispanic kids too). This explains ALL of the difference in test scores. We need to do better, but we should not be looking to Europe as a model, because, for similar demographics, they do no better than we do.
We are grading ourselves. We were given an international test. We "failed" it. So we looked at the test and eliminated questions we got wrong, until our score comparatively increased. We graded ourselves.
The point being we feel we must be the best at everything. The reality is the US peaked long ago, and has been in a serious decline for the past 30+ years and will collapse within the next generation. Lying about our performance helps keep people positive about the situation, because depression causes depression. We are number one (for very large values of one).
Learn to love Alaska
Funny how when a fraudulent contractor talks a bunch of people into unnecessarily expensive work, he gets convicted, but when a rich fraudulent banker talks people into an unnecessarily expensive loan, he gets a bailout.
I haven't seen much if any evidence that immigration is a substantial problem there. We have plenty of low income American kids whose families have been here for 200 years.
1 would be a methodology fault. 2 wouldn't be the school's fault, it would be a failure of our social policy to level the playing field appropriately.
American's can't even spell colour properly. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
well from my own person experience from 2002-14 yrs ago. What screwed me up was when they did the alternate track for math and i was put with the 'slow' kids. i ended up just going to geometry in highschool. I had to hurry up and learn stuff on my own the last year so i could get the basics to get into college. That sucked and was an hiderence to me even trying to do something more advanced then networking and computer repair. I have to say the teachers are what make a difference in these areas not the students. If the teachers are bad then the students are worse. If the teachers are helpful and give a damn then the students will at least try to learn. As with all things there is so much gray its hard to see what is black and white.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
Go class!!! Wear number fore!!!
That depends on the cause for #2.
If the cause is that the US chooses to educate a greater proportion of students in lower economic classes then it's hardly a failure to level the playing field. It would be the opposite. An attempt to level the playing field causes the test scores to decrease, that is if you consider educating kids on lower economic groups to be an attempt to level the playing field when compared with the alternative of not educating them.
On the other hand if the cause is that the US has a greater economic divide then that could be construed as a "failure of our social policy to level the playing field appropriately" at least if you consider a divide to be inherently a problem and the goal of social policy to eliminate that divide.
Finally, it could be that the US is just generally poorer which would yield more kids on lower economic groups without their being a divide. I think other economic indicators suggest this is not the case.
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.
That was covered. Amongst the 1st world, all have universal education.
This has exactly nothing to do with "having to justify" anything, but rather FIGURING OUT WHAT IS BROKEN
Interesting interpretation. My interpretation was that it was a flimsy attempt to deflect blame. It's anyone and everyone other than the only party, the teachers, who actually are paid to teach and who have the explicit responsibility to do so.
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
White kids in America do as well as white kids in Europe. Black kids in America do as well as black kids in Europe.
The article doesn't break it down by race, but by class. What they say in the article:
But the highest social class students in United States do worse than their peers in other nations, and this gap widened from 2000 to 2009 on the PISA.
So we've got more lower class, and our upper class is worse. We have relatively uneducated children.
Europe is rotten economically and politically to the point where a new wave of dictatorships and wars (a regular occurrence in that part of the world) is not unthinkable anymore and the reason for that is not unrelated to sacrificing liberty for the sake of equality i.e. sacrificing some people for the sake of others.
US Economics are in worse shape than Europe. The issue with Europe, the only reason we are hearing about it, is that what's good for one member state isn't good for another. With the US, we are all as bad off as Greece, so there's no economic turmoil about a plan benefiting CA more than AL. Somehow you are trying to spin that into a good thing.
Learn to love Alaska
We do that in the US too. Anyone in the bottom 15% is excluded. They put my nephew in remedial classes for a few days to keep him from taking a standardized test, so as to not reflect poorly on the school. So, despite what people claim about others, I've actually witnessed it in the USA. But that doesn't count, because we *must* be better than the rest of the world. Always, even when we aren't.
Learn to love Alaska
Entrepreneurism cannot be easily taught. That because formal education typically teaches what has always been done. That's why so many of the big innovators didn't come out of Business school. They created industries. Now the business guys may be important for managing an established business but you aren't going to get much innovation.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It's weird. I get it and don't get it at the same time. I think I need a lie down.
That isn't quite right either.
If you want to compare how our schools are doing, then you need to minimize the effect of outside forces (race,wealth). {sarcasm}However, if you want to improve your expectation of the average student that then the clear way to do that is to limit the number of students who have outside factors against them and increase the number of students who have factors favoring them. Obviously, limiting the number of children that the races that perform poorly and making everyone richer is obviously the easiest way to achieve this.{/sarcasm}
Well, partially sarcasm anyhow. While technically this would work, it isn't fair and won't be a popular answer. The US wasn't known as the land of the rich. It was (is?) known as the land of opportunity. Not everyone strives for success, but for those that do, you have a better chance here than (almost?) anywhere else.
Sorry, I couldn't find that in the article or the full report. Could you point out where?
but when laws are changed in the name of equality, forcing bankers (through competition) into giving loans to people who really can't afford them, then some people get to live way above their means for a while until they come to their senses (or more likely broke) and then get to declare bankruptcy and shift the burden of their overspending to the rest of us who didn't
There, fixed that for you.
Test scores are going up because the test scoring system is bogus. As an example, in North Carolina, when physical science had an EOC (before all this MSL garbage) for a student to be considered proficient a score of 81 (or a 3 on a scale of 1-4) they only had to answer 31 of 60 questions correctly. It is easy to claim test scores are going up when the scores are being manipulated. The reality is, the students I teach today learn a quarter of the content I learned. Even then they are barely able to form a coherent thought or solve a simple problem.
"Why are there no European Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. "
Because Europe is not completely a fascist state like America is. America is basically corporate utopia, don't think so? The bank bailout was huge evidence corporations are privileged above everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
Facebook would cause huge concerns in Germany because of germany's history for instance. Europe because of internal strife and war is weary of concentrations of corporate power and otherwise. In america having big corporations own the government is seen as just peachy. Just look at the slap on the wrist microsoft got when it was under investigation in the anti-trust case during the 90's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft.
well from my own person experience from 2002-14 yrs ago. What screwed me up was when they did the alternate track for math and i was put with the 'slow' kids.
If you think that 2002 was "14 yrs ago", then maybe they made the right call when they put you in the "slow" math class.
Your point actually is very important; there is not strong correlation between test scores and economic performance.
Seriously? Look at the OECD school scores, and who do you see down the bottom? The likes of Greece, Mexico, and Turkey. The poorest members.
I suppose it depends what you mean by economic performance, but standard of living definitely correlates to school test scores - both in average IQ and quality of education.
It saddens me to see such a post get moded 5 "informative," while being so wrong. It shows how ill-informed about education we are on Slashdot.
We white guys tend to think of black and Hispanic cultures as uninterested in education. This is simply not the case, at least not in Chapel Hill, NC, where I live. The truth is that kids who don't get enough to eat and who don't know if their dad will pay the rent this month have much bigger problems to worry about than spelling and math. I visited our local black and Hispanic communities, and found that those where home ownership was high had good test scores. Neighborhoods of shabby rentals where the kids are underfed do poorly. I also found that very poor white families did almost as bad as poor black and Hispanic families. In Chapel Hill, 90% of the achievement gap is explainable by the gap in severe poverty.
A few years ago my neighborhood was redistricted in a way that the school my kids were zoned to could not succeed. Some a-hole in Southern Village "won" the redistricting contest, and while the rest of the district was rezoned mostly wisely, this guy booted most of the blacks and half of the Hispanics out of his daughter's school and concentrated poverty in another one. He threw our upscale neighborhood (not in Southern Village) into the school just to make it look a little better on paper. That's when I decided to check out what was really going on in these schools. By the way, the school is shutting down now, due to poor performance.
Carrboro, where our school is, has some desperately poor areas. The illegal immigrant population is so poor, many of their kids don't get enough to eat. Also, there's old mostly black mill town neighborhoods that are owned by slum lords. I talked to several black families there to get a feel for what they were looking for in a school, and what they felt were the challenges, because at the redistricting meetings, not one parent from any poor neighborhood showed up. I tried and failed to talk to any Hispanic family. When I knocked on their doors, all the Spanish language radio stations were silenced, lights turned off, kids were quieted, and the door was not answered. I assume this is what they have to do to avoid ICE.
On the other hand, in lower-middle class neighborhoods in north Chapel Hill where ownership is high, black and Hispanic kids do very well, almost as well as the white kids, even though they are poorer on average. It seems that once you have a place to live, enough food, and maybe a car, then regardless of cultural and racial background, the next priority is educating your kids.
I keep hearing from liberal friends that we need to spend more on education to give the next generation of black and Hispanic families an equal chance. I hear from conservative friends that spending more money wont help, because the school system is fundamentally screwed up, and because black and Hispanic families fail because they don't try and don't care - it's their fault. Both sides are wrong. The problem isn't that schools are underfunded or teachers aren't good enough, nor is the problem that black and Hispanic parents don't care about educating their kids. The problem is severe poverty. What we need to do is dramatically reduce poverty. We can do this, but as a nation we've decided that it's OK for blacks and Hispanics to be poor. Just like in our days of slavery, we see poor blacks suffering, and do nothing about it. We haven't lifted a finger to help them get ahead, and probably did a lot to hold them down. We're generous with tax dollars when it comes to building jails to lock up them up, and ICE has plenty of funding to deport Hispanics, but we don't do a damned thing to help these people find a way out of poverty. We're OK with blacks commiting crimes in poor black neighborhoods, and we're OK with illegal imigrants picking all our strawberries for us. In short, we do poorly in education because we're still racist. It's not overt racism like before, but whites in the US are OK
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The article doesn't break it down by race, but by class.
TFA does not break it down by race, but it is broken down by race in plenty of other places. Blacks do about one standard deviation worse than whites. If you correct for socio-economic status, some, but not all, of the disparity will go away. But blacks do worse even when compared with white classmates of the same family income.
So we've got more lower class, and our upper class is worse. We have relatively uneducated children.
This is because the USA has more racial minorities in all socio-economic groups. When you break it down by demographic group (both race and income), America does just as well as other countries.
Of course, we should not consider any of this as justification for complacency. Race is not destiny, and blacks today do better than whites did a few generations ago. But we need to make sure we learn the right lessons. Looking at other countries as examples of the "right" way to educate children is misguided, because they actually do no better than us.
What idiot voted this up? All it's missing is "USA! USA! USA!"
The EU has a combined economic output that is comparable to that of the USA. The wealthiest nations have a much higher standard of living and quality of education than you, too. A few of those countries have better political represenation of their people, with many different parties making up a representative government rather than two right wing ones. The only country that is becoming "a new wave of dictatorships" is really Greece. And there are no new wars starting in Europe, not even close.
I wouldn't call having the largest armed forces a good thing, especially considering how since the second world war, the USA has made it it's duty to smash any country that does something it doesn't like. Being a bully isn't a good thing. Maybe European countries remember how shitty imperialism was and remember how thousands of years of war tore the continent apart. That's one reason for the existence of the European Union, by the way, because a single European economy makes it much harder for any nation to go to war with another one and promotes a diplomatic resolvement of any issues.
It's also worth noting that Europe became an economic power similar to the USA after a devastating war that destroyed many of its people and industries, as well as a cold war that split the continent in two and threatened us with total annihiliation from the Soviets. And yet we still didn't go on a witch hunt in order to serve the interests of capitalists.
And finally, if liberty equals economic growth, shouldn't China be dirt poor and starving to death right now? That device you wrote that garbage on wasn't made in the USA, you know.
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 ?
Bravo! Well said, sir! There is absolutely nothing wrong in the US, and in particular, nothing needs to be done about income inequality!!! No need whatsoever to worry about the trade deficit either, because we're well on our way to reshape the world into a mirror of ourselves: a free and open market, dominated by corporate interest, which will make the non-problems of income inequality and trade deficit disappear instantly!!! It will be grand! Everyone will be so grateful that they will be struck with awe and bow at our feet!!! Our superiority is like our infrastructure; once it's there, no money or effort needs to be spent on maintaining it!!! There is absolutely no need to carefully look at other developed nations and talk to people who lived both in the US and abroad, because we merely have to turn on the TV to be told that they're all much worse off!!! There is no political paralysis at all in Washington, DC, whereas the European union has never been able to make a single pragmatic decisions about how to cope with the worldwide recession!!! Europe is at the the brink of a new wave of dictatorships and wars - just look at Greece, isn't all of Europe like Greece?!!!
*Shudder.* If anything will ever bring the US to its knees, it will be this line of thinking. Sounds a bit like what the North Korean government tells its citizens, come to think of it.
and pretend that we're doing just fine.
It means our white kids are as good as your white kids.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
Actually, you broke it so badly I barely recognized it. I think you may have cool aid poisoning.
Absolutely nothing in the law suggested that they should even grant first timers loans for a McMansion, much less talk them into one but that's exactly what they did. The time bombs they built in were also not mandated in the law.
They COULD have fully satisfied the law by granting small loans for starter homes to a few less qualified borrowers (in fact, that was the intent of the law), but that wouldn't have been as profitable.
The law CERTAINLY did not suggest repackaging toxic waste as AAA investments, but they did a lot of that too.
Not really, for example in Germany they have a rigidly tiered system where kids are divided by potential between the 4th and 6th year of primary school. Children of lower socioeconomic status are almost always excluded from the college prep track due to a host of issues, but dominated by a lack of free time on the part of the parents in the preschool years (the same is true in the US which is one of the things the headstart program was aimed at remedying).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Aye, but who are the talent making these inventions? Are they born US citizens, or are they immigrants brought in by economic power of US?
We don't have to ask this about post WW2 might, which is what made US what it is today. That boom was driven by European talent trying to escape the war and all its problems as well as horrifying aftermath, which caused unprecedented concentration of bright minds in US after the war. It can be argued that one of the factors behind US's decline is failure to attract as much talent and complete failure to foster its own population to replace the losses or existing talent pool to aging process.
Not really, socioeconomic mobility in the US is largely a myth we tell people to keep them working hard.
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.[13] Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. link
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I didn't say university was universal, I said education was. Primary school is education.
Wrong, conforming FHA and CRA loans had similar and lower default rates than conventional prime loans in the same neighborhoods, it was mostly fraudulent loans (so called liar loans) that defaulted leading to implosion of improperly rated mortgage backed securities. In fact even non-conforming loans at most traditional lending institutions had only slightly higher default rates than during previous recessions, it was mostly the fraudsters, enabled by the large brokerage houses, that caused the runup and subsequent implosion.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I agree with just about everything you say besides this: "Both sides are wrong." The left isn't as single note as you're putting them here - there's a pretty widespread understanding that poverty is the root cause of inequity, and that education is just one of many places that desperately need work.
If your friends genuinely just think it's an education problem, well, there's something screwy there - but we genuinely DO have deep inequity built into our education system, much of it coming out of the 80s and 90s, much of it in the guise of "measurement" or "achievement-based funding."
But seriously - it's kind of just that sentence, and only in that it implies equal blame, when it's really more of an 80/20(but still benefiting from the results) kind of thing. The left has been a pretty useless ally, but the right is actually working hard every day to make it worse.
Your opinion of the parent poster is spot on, and, as someone who did a lot of subbing in Sarasota, Fl. (the most segregated city in the U.S., btw.) it's really, really true - poverty, much of which is directly the result of the insane racism we as a society still cling to, is the root cause of this shit.
Primary school is only an education if you're a pre-industrial farmer, secondary education is the bare minimum to really participate in the international economy and do better than living paycheck to paycheck. In much of Europe the lower class are locked out of effective secondary education at a young age, the US may do so de facto but the European model does it de jure, I think the US model has more chance of eventually fixing the problem than the European model.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
they best be building them very high, because i can climb very well.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
most of those companies are full of engineers trained in the USA university system, but are not born citizens of the USA. They come over on visa's and some of them stay, or the train aborad and are brought in from over seas.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
Not that this has anything to do with the original point, but the trend seems to be going the other way. In the U.S. fewer and fewer can afford university (reversing a long trend) while more and more employers are requiring it.
You said "that was covered," and now you say it actually wasn't. Now you say it's "common knowledge" when it isn't. You're right about Google and the sky though.
I haven't seen much if any evidence that immigration is a substantial problem there. We have plenty of low income American kids whose families have been here for 200 years.
Just because you have never studied the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 23% of immigrants and their US born children live in poverty, compared to 13.5% of natives and their children. That means immigrants are almost twice as likely to be in poverty.
Source
http://www.cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-population
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
We spend more than we take in, the only difference is that people are still willing to lend to us. It wasn't until people threatened to stop buying Grecian debt that they had problems, and as soon as US debt isn't bought, we'll hit harder and faster than Greece did.
Learn to love Alaska
Actually, it's the other way around. Other countries get the benefit of being smaller... Industrialized country #1 is 1/10th the size of the US, and has lots of rich people, but their neighboring country (#2), with the slums and poorly educated children, doesn't get counted against country #1's scores. And hey, country #2 may be so badly off that they don't even get counted as industrialized, and aren't ranked at all! Everybody wins!
Now in the US, if you were to divide it up by state, you'd find some do extremely well compared to other countries, while others do extremely poorly. If we follow the model of the rest of the world, we can just throw them out to create their own country, and stop being a drain on the rest of us, and lowering our average scores all-around.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Are you kidding? There have been numerous changes to law that (allowed/forced) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two largest holders of mortgages) to accept lower qualified loans than they previously were prior to 1980. If you didn't know, a large majority of mortgage loans that are sold by 3rd parties mirror their requirements of F&F (Fannie and Freddie) because they will often turn around and resell the mortgages to them to free up capital to sell more loans. That has been the case for as long as I can remember. So when they start playing around with the rules that F&F have to play by, every 2-bit mortgage company follow the same ill conceived rules. Of course, the 2-bit mortgage companies flip these mortgages over so fast they rarely really care if the mortgagee can pay for the loan beyond a few months because they know they'll get sold to F&F.
FHA & CRA loans were bad, but so were the sub prime loans (remember, there were no such thing as sub-prime loans pre-1980). And the "toxic" loans that got bundled into those batches that were getting resold? How do you think they were approved in the first place? Through sub-prime lending. For those that don't know, sub-prime lending is those craptastic loans given out to people that had bad credit. Couple that with silly things like not actually requiring proof of income or employment and you've got a major recipe for disaster. Sure, bad mortgage companies were figuring out new ways to get these loans approved because they wanted their quick origination fees and other misc closing costs and then shuffling the risk (the risk they knew was higher than what could/would be shown on the loan application), but it was the crazy lax requirements forced on F&F that allowed it all to happen.
Don't believe it? Go do your own research. Remember the presidential calls for "a house for every American" or "Universal Home Ownership"? You see, that included even Americans that couldn't afford the damn house in the first place, but you get a bunch of damn asses making silly laws to try and get more people into houses (that they shouldn't have been in), and what happens? You get a bubble as now a huge amount of people who couldn't (and still shouldn't) be able to buy houses creating a demand for houses that outstrips the supply. Housing prices go up as a result, and more and more people start buying houses they can't afford unless they continue to go up. Of course then reality sets in, the high risk loans all start to default and you get foreclosures everywhere. Housing prices start to drop, and now those to depended on house prices going up to stay afloat now are defaulting on their loans as well. Then you have those that are now badly upside down in their mortgages, have no other assets (or less than the amount they are upside down), and they decide to walk away from the house rather than continue to pay. One very big avalanche of shit.
I'm sorry, but I remember when I bought my house some nearly 20 years ago what it was like. You pretty much HAD to have 15% down payment, and it was a lot better if you had 20%. If the mortgage+other fixed bills exceeded more than 25% of your income it was difficult to get a loan, and nearly impossible if it was over 30%. You always had to have proof of income, employment, and if you weren't employed for at least 5 years, you had to have a reason (Just graduated college, just got out of the armed forces, etc). They wouldn't even consider it if you weren't employed at least for 2 years in your most recent job. Oh, and you credit score had to be at a minimum of 720.
Then comes the crazies, and all of a sudden you can get loans with no job, no income, a credit score in the low 600's and no down payment. Of course, there were a lot of people who felt they were entitled to a house even like that, and the mortgage brokers were more than happy to give them one. Yet, you seem to think the few fraudsters were the issue? Just WOW.
Typical American. Despite proof, still thinks the US is the best shithole on Earth, and believes it so strongly he's willing to stake his reputation on it by posting AC.
Learn to love Alaska
I know he's wrong. You know he's wrong. But for some reason, the poor must be blamed for everything, and he proved the point by repeating the lies told by the rich (especially the racist fat white entertainers with radio shows).
Learn to love Alaska
Sorry, I should include the disclaimer. One of the companies I own is one of the largest in their specific area within the mortgage industry. I don't run it, but I still do a significant amount of technical work there. As such, my views are not indicative of any of my companies and are my own and my own alone. My views have no effect on sales, procurement, resells, rates, or anything of the sort but I am definitely more knowledgeable than the average Joe on the subject, and there are very few loan "experts"/brokers/originators that I would consider more knowledgeable, but they do exist.
However, in your scenario, country number two would raise our reletive position in the rankings (but not our absolute position).
We could as a nation prioritize economic wellbeing for all rather than for the few at the top.
I noticed that you didn't address the specific fact based information I provided but rather rambled on about how it was everyone's fault but the fraudulent lenders who systematically falsified information on loan applications and paid the ratings agencies to AAA rate their toxic mortgage backed securities so that they could offload loans to Freddie and Fannie through the backdoor that they never could have unloaded through normal channels. It wasn't properly vetted loans to low income people that blew up the housing market, it was crooks who found every way they could to get around the properly regulated normal mortgage practices.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The U.S. has one of the more extreme work ethics in the free world. The fact is that you can easily work hard all your life starting from the lower class and end up slightly higher (or slightly lower) in the lower class. Upward mobility is more like the lottery than anything else. Everyone pays in with years of hard work and 1 in a million wins.
Children out of wedlock are not the cause of the divide, they are a symptom. When it happens, it certainly dowsn't help matters but I se plenty of complete families trying and failing to get on the 'right' side of the divide.
Productivity is at an all time high. GDP/capita is at an all time high. In fact, it's up by a factor of 6 since 1960, so why aren't people 6 times better off?
Sorry, that should have said partially own.
No, they didn't get a bail out. They didn't need one. We didn't partake in any of the fraudulent stuff that went on, and we actively steered away from it, sometimes losing business because of it, but my hands are clean and I sleep well at night and I wouldn't change that for anything.
Also, a substantial amount of stocks I own are tied up in some of the companies that DID receive a bailout, but I did not own it prior to the meltdown. I had no prior knowledge of it coming other than what was known to the general public. I had no insider knowledge, but post meltdown, I can see a bargain when they present themselves, and I've profited from those stocks. I am not rich, and I took a severe hit from it just like everyone else, probably (highly likely) even more so.
Your stats have little bearing on the issue though since natives outnumber immigrants by a significant margin. Send them all away and we still have 13.5% living in poverty and that's QUITE a divide.
So I still haven't seen any evidence that the socioeconomic divide is largely due to immigration.
You are right, I only indirectly addressed it because there is no defending the actions of those who made fraudulent loans. I just said that most of those fraudulent loans were even possible to be made because of the relaxing of the regulations. Many of those "fraudulent" loans would not have been even possible in prior years. I say "fraudulent", because in many cases the loans weren't really fraudulent in the strictest sense. Many were borderline, where the loan applicants were coached on what to put down on the applications where technically they were correct, but they misrepresented the applicant. A real lender would/could/should have called shenanigans on them but weren't because the originators simply didn't care because they had very little risk involved. They just shoved it on down the line and collected their upfront fees.
With that said, the mortgagee signed the loan application. Are you claiming they (the mortgagee) had no knowledge that what they signed to be true wasn't in fact true, or at the very least misleading? Yes, simple things like employment being rounded up from 1 year 6 months to 2 years is fraud. Shouldn't the mortgagee know that was wrong or are you just trying to blame just one party when there was two involved? There are too many people in this world with very little morals or ethics willing to lie, cheat, or steal if it means they get what they want (or think they want).
Of the actual real fraudulent loans that were made (not all the hyped up numbers that the media likes to portray), and even including those would not have caused the housing catastrophe. Your argument while correct, at least partially, is similar to blaming the guy who picked up the $10 bill the thieves dropped as they were running out of the bank they robbed and then trying to make him the cause. Yes, it was wrong, but hardly the most important factor in the big picture.
Absolutely nothing in the law suggested that they should even grant first timers loans for a McMansion, much less talk them into one but that's exactly what they did. The time bombs they built in were also not mandated in the law.
No, it was the relaxing of the loan regulations that allowed them to start offering loans that they previously would not have. It was politics that started the heavy push of trying to get more people into homes that previously couldn't afford one, let it be damned that there might have been a good reason why they couldn't previously afford it.
As for the time bombs? What time bombs? You mean things like ARMs, balloon mortgages, and the like? Are you trying to say that it's the fault of the salesmen? That the people who were actually applying for the loans, signed, and agreed to the terms of the loan have absolutely no responsibility? Was I the only person who when they bought their house actually sat down and understood what it was I was agreeing to before I'd sign it? You sound like the guy who wants to sue McDonalds because eating big macs 3 times a day for years has made you fat. People have absolutely no personal responsibility these days, and everything that happens to them is someone else's fault because they were too lazy/too ignorant to try and understand their own actions. Sorry, but I don't buy that.
No, it was the relaxing of the loan regulations that allowed them to start offering loans that they previously would not have.
So what you're saying is that the evil government forced the bankers to do stupid and unethical things at gunpoint by not absolutely forbidding it (due in no small part to intense lobbying by those same bankers)? Does that mean that if we permit bankers to bash their own skulls with a brick, we;'ll have an epidemic of skull fractures?
As for the time bombs? What time bombs? You mean things like ARMs, balloon mortgages, and the like? Are you trying to say that it's the fault of the salesmen? That the people who were actually applying for the loans, signed, and agreed to the terms of the loan have absolutely no responsibility?
I would say all of the blather about how you'll be able to re-finance when the time comes, no risk! might have had something to do with the problems. If McDonalds advertised that 3 Big Macs a day would give you perfect health (complete with fake doctors in the ads), you better believe they'd get sued (and lose).
It's notable that until recently, there was a strong incentive on the part of the lender to help the borrower select a loan they would actually be able to pay off. Not only was that the incentive, it was SOP and expected. That went out the window when the lenders figured out how to re-package those hot potato loans and get them sold (and re-re-re-re sold) before it blew up. Don't you think all of that had a part in the problem? Do you see nothing wrong with talking people into loans you don't think they will be able to pay off and then selling it off as a AAA investment? I would call that fraud twice over.
It's telling that the re-re-re-selling got so extreme that banks are frequently unable to produce any paperwork showing that they actually hold the mortgages they are trying to foreclose (and in some cases the homeowner has been able to show that they certainly DON'T).
Caveat Emptor is great advice to the buyer but it is a terrible ethical guide for the seller.
For the same reason there is no US-American SAP, Evonik, Ericsson, BASF, Fraunhofer Society and so on.
Your examples are also quite interesting, it is telling that you consider a tech fashion manufacturer, a webshop and a social network website actually innovative.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Black kids in America do as well as black kids in Europe. But America has more black kids (and poor hispanic kids too).
Well, Spain is full of Hispanic kids. I think nearly 100% of the kids are Hispanic...
Does not matter. US scored low, so obviously there is something wrong with a benchmark.
The law probably also mandated them to convert all that debt into bonds, then wrap in in incomprehensibly complex financial "products" and selling them like fool's gold to fools, while at the same time investing in their downfall buying CDSs like there's no tomorrow. Probably the law also mandated the rating weasencies to give these financial turds a triple-A rating.
Wow, the law is sooooo naughty. It made the poor bankers weep. Bad, bad law.
Yes, here in Europe every country has an African country on its border to compensate, just like you explain over there. It was quite hard to bring all those countries from Africa up here, but we made it. The hardest part was fitting them in between the existing countries, but we just used shoehorns and it went smoothly. Here in Portugal we wanted Niger, but it was hard to fit such a big country between us and Spain, so we settled for Senegal.
Now seriously, what the FUCK are you talking about?
AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!!!
The unintended racism in your post aside, an easy way to explain rising test scores in America is that standards are constantly lowering in this country. It's much easier to graduate today than when I was in high school. When I was in high school it was much easier to graduate than when my parents were in high school.
My stepfather was an accountant, working for the government, with no college education. Good luck with that today. From his generation I've also known designers, programmers, and even a vice president of marketing who all lack any education higher than a high school diploma. The difference is that they were all required to understand basic English in order to graduate high school. They all took calculus in high school.
Today, one can get a high school diploma with a less than comprehensive understanding of basic algebra. I've tutored first and second year college students who I would label as functionally illiterate, who don't know the fundamentals of American History (and our history doesn't even date back that far, unlike the Europeans and Asians).
White kids in America don't do just as well as white kids in Europe. White kids from affluent areas sometimes do well. Everyone else, including white kids from blue collar areas, do extremely poorly. They do such a terrible job that for decades schools have consistently been lowering their standards and since No Child Left Behind they've been teaching to the test. Another important factor when examining race in America is that race is becoming less and less of a factor. There's much more diversity. Unfortunately, this isn't because minorities are climbing the socio-economic ladder but because middle class whites are falling off of it.
An example of America's low standards: A high school in Akron gave LeBron James a high school diploma, and he can't utter two sentences without disgracing the English language. Terrelle Pryor was enrolled at Ohio State for three years and could have returned for a fourth, despite the fact that the fundamentals of grammar escape him (also basic ethics; according to Terrelle, "Not everybody's the perfect person in the world. I mean everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, whatever.") Maurice Clarrett attended Ohio State for a year and maintained his eligibility by taking athletic electives such as bowling and golf. Sure, we coddle our athletes, but we also have a system in place where one can be dumb as dirt and still receive accreditation.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
But that doesn't count, because we *must* be better than the rest of the world. Always, even when we aren't.
Easy, when you're not "better" than every one else on the planet, just change the definition of "better" and you're done!
So only count the white kids, Mr. Birch?
You, madame, have obviously been home schooled.
Lameness like that could only come from a Rachel Maddow fan.
This has exactly nothing to do with "having to justify" anything, but rather FIGURING OUT WHAT IS BROKEN instead of firing from the hip.
So the Donald "Duck" Trump style "you're fired!" approach makes little sense unless you are actually firing someone who is heavily contributing to the problem. And this is not proven at all wrt teachers and how schools work.
Except that millions of people are firing the public school system, even while they're still paying taxes for it.
I've been in both public and private schools, and the public schools let students run around like madmen. I've even been back to volunteer at public schools, and some inner city schools are so loud it's like walking into a jet engine. Students just do whatever the fuck they please, teachers are dispirited and all looking for transfers.
But that's just an anecdote. In Chicago, the real educational authorities have spoken: almost 40% of Chicago teachers have fired their school system, sending their kids to private schools.
The whole notion that we have to continually prop up a firm that is failing is bullshit. That's what got us "too big to fail" with completely broken banks or companies like GM. Those firms should have been liquidated and someone else given a chance to make something that works.
And the same is true of schools. There is nothing special about the public school system that makes it the ideal vehicle for educating children. If anything, it's probably going to be obsolete in 20 years time.
Sad, but true.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I guess you should take some time abroad, just beware of the cannibals eating you as soon as you arrive at the airport (Some plain grass area, roads weren't invented up to now) - but it would help you to escape that severe loss of reality you have ;)
Or in short for you to get at least a little impression of the reality, so you're not totally shocked once you get confronted with it:
Leading in innovation, scientific achievement and GDP: Those are switzerland, finnland, japan and so on usually, never seen US there.
Military power: True, just nothing to be proud about in my opinion. I'm just happy that playing war belongs to the past for germany (Where I come from).
Companies: You seem a bit limited to IT here, even if germany got SAP at least. For cars this looks completely different for example. Germany is still leading here when it comes to quality, next come some other european countries, japan etc., who totally sucks at this seems to be the US (You produce cars, but from what I heard even from US citizens they're mostly crap).
Universities: Answered somewhere else too, but pretty clear since the US is much larger than most other countries.
Economy: You need some geography-updates too, Greece != Europe. What I heard the US is really down when it comes to this though, probably Bush was playing war too much? Germany reduced it's debt the last year, so we're doing very well.
Politics: Uhm, another geography-update, Egypt not element of Europe.
Wars: Last one was the second world war, as said earlier I'm very happy that the nazi regime is gone and we didn't have another war since, even if I wasn't born back then (Probably an update too if you thought Hitler is still alive: He isn't).
Regular occurence: Uhm, now it's getting creepy, could you write down an overview of that fascinating view you have of europe? At least to my information the US started most major wars of the last years (Pretty much all of them because of oil... - uh, I meant evil terrorists of course).
Liberty for equality: Wow, it's getting more and more distant, but another geography update here: China not element of Europe. At least that stuff you wrote sounded like communism?
Just mediocre
So what you're saying is that the evil government forced the bankers to do stupid and unethical things at gunpoint
First, no, the government isn't evil. They just have a different set of priorities from my own (and different from most people). The government should be protecting law and order in the union, and make sure the laws balance between protecting my/own rights as individuals and doing what is best for society as a whole. However, in many cases what they do is neither one of those, and simply doing what will please the majority of the people in the next few years regardless of whether it is best for them. But as to forcing bankers to do stupid things? YES!
Fannie and Freddie acquired large amounts of subprime PLS because, in the words of their regulator, these securities were “goals rich” (Lockhart, 2009). Fannie and Freddie were required to meet affordable housing goals, set annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in accordance with The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992. The purchase of PLS backed by subprime mortgages counted toward meeting these goals because the underlying mortgages tended to be made to less-than-median-income borrowers or were collateralized by properties in “underserved areas” (HUD, 2010).
In testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (2010) argued that it was the supportive bid provided by the GSEs for subprime PLS during 2003-2004 that caused mortgage yields to fall relative to 10-year Treasury notes, “exacerbating the house price rise which, in those years, was driven by interest rates on long-term mortgages.” Because these purchases were made in pursuit of affordable housing goals, Greenspan argues “a significant proportion of the increased demand for subprime mortgage backed securities during the years 2003-2004 was effectively politically mandated, and hence driven by highly inelastic demand.” By acquiring 40% of all PLS collateralized by subprime mortgages, Fannie and Freddie stoked demand for risky mortgages that contributed directly, in Greenspan’s telling, to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. Similar points were made in Rajan (2009).
Does that mean that if we permit bankers to bash their own skulls with a brick, we;'ll have an epidemic of skull fractures?
No, but if the government steps in and says that any banker who fractures their skull will be able to retire and get disability equal to 100% of their pay with guaranteed raises of 6% per year (Just to insure against rising costs and inflation) for the rest of their life no matter how it happens, you will indeed find a sudden outbreak of bankers with minimally fractured skulls. And quite honestly, you'll also find a bunch of dead bankers as well because most of them aren't doctors and will mess it up.
I would say all of the blather about how you'll be able to re-finance when the time comes, no risk! might have had something to do with the problems.
I don't know of any banker that came out and said everyone would be able to re-finance no risk. They may have played down the potential risks, but I've never heard of any that said "no risk" outright. That said, many "bankers" (loan officers/brokers) aren't really any smarter than your average person and probably didn't know any better than the average person of all the risks involved. Some may be able to follow a trend, and yes, given the trend at the time, it was very little risk. Assuming the applicants standing remained the same (employed for longer, continued to pay all their bills on time) except now they have a history of being able to responsibly handle a mortgage as well.
That said, yes, lenders sold loans to people who simply couldn't afford them, or if things turned to the worse,
The sad part of your comment is that , until I got to the last two sentences, I wasn't sure if you were being serious. I have heard people say almost exactly what you said, seriously.
It is similar to North Korea, yet here it's not the government that is saying it. It's "private" media outlets like Fox news, HLN, or MSNBC. No, I don't think Fox is the only one who says stuff like this.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
I do know people who were told NO RISK! Of course they were then showered with weasel words in fie print. My wife's parents had to threaten to walk out in order to be offered the modest and financially responsible mortgage on a decent home rather than a risky mortgage on way more house than they needed.
That said, many "bankers" (loan officers/brokers) aren't really any smarter than your average person and probably didn't know any better than the average person of all the risks involved.
It's their job to know more about it than for example, a plumber. Just like it's a plumber's job to know more about plumbing than a banker does. A banker isn't expected to know that connecting copper pipe directly to galvanized iron pipe is a recipe for disaster for example. If a plumber did that in a banker's basement, would you claim it was all the banker's fault for not telling him no?
Nothing in what you said in any way refutes or even mitigates the fact that those sub-prime loans were fraudulently re-packaged and sold as AAA. None of it shows that bankers were FORCED to do any of the crap that they did to cause the financial crisis. They saw a mistake the government made and they jumped on it with extreme gusto knowing fully that their actions weren't terribly ethical and in some (perhaps many) cases weren't terribly legal either.
Nothing in that in any way excuses the continued abusive behavior surrounding foreclosures. Abuses so rampant that more than one Sheriffs office has ceased even pretending to process eviction orders related to foreclosure.
Britain went through a similar decline after WWI, and then did some pretty amazing things after (e.g., Bletchley Park). There's no need to despair; indeed, by doing so you make the outcome you claim to see as bad more likely. Of course, despairing is fun from a rhetorical perspective, but just remember that you're going to have to live in that 30+ year from now future unless you die first. You can affect the future, particularly if you start now.
All we need is a nice little world war to drag us out of depression and get us innovating again. Or do you think that Bletchley Park would have happened if there was no threat to the UK?
Learn to love Alaska
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
Germany borders the Czech Republic, Italy borders Slovenia, as does Austria. Go a little further east and the disparity is far more significant. Nordic countries border Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.
And there's simply no denying European countries are smaller than US states, often quite drastically smaller. That's a huge sampling bias. Canada may do well on tests, but they're only 1/10th the population of the US. Let's lump them in with Mexico and watch their average test scores drop drastically.
The smaller your sample size, the better the chance of extremes.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not true. You missed the point. If your country were larger, it would encompass "country number two", and your average scores would drop. eg. Merge Canada and Mexico. Merge Germany and the Czech Republic. etc.
That's all fine and well, but misunderstanding statistics isn't a good basis for making new policies.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Americans used to be bold. Nowadays, they will invent any lame ass excuse for not being the best at something. Did you conquer the West with that attitude?
Please take a look at this. If your had any point, there should be an immense difference between the "rich" countries you mention and the "poor" countries they supposedly offset their "education deficits" to. There's no such thing. Using your own examples, Slovenia ranks better than Austria and Italy. Germany ranks better than the Czech Republic, but that's not so surprising, because Germany ranks better than most European countries! Germany has a population of 80 million people. Is that not comparable to the US??? WTF???
Nor is gerrymandering in an attempt to suggest the U.S. is better statistically when broken into pieces. It's simply not a valid operation if you want to see what the stats say about an entity.
Sure, if we jettisoned the poorest states/people, we would have better stats. Sure, some locations in the U.S. have better scores than others (the better off areas, naturally). That only proves my point that we have some work to do leveling the playing field.
However, if you divide up the U.S. without gerrymandering, it doesn't make us look any better once you (properly) average the constituant parts back together.
Yeah, I had Poe's law in mind when adding those last 2 sentences.
Within the context of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy PISA results are devoid of truth
Casteism
And there's simply no denying European countries are smaller than US states, often quite drastically smaller.
France is smaller that which US states?
Rhode island is bigger than which European states?
(By the way, are you talking population or area? If it's area, wtf?)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.)