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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.
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)
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
"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
So if we factor out the poorer-performing students, America scores better?
That is amazing!
Ken
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.
No, what they're saying is that if you want to make comparisons between any groups, you better make sure the comparison groups are indeed comparable. This paper tries to do that. Take it or leave it.
Imagine if a study of health outcomes compared, say, the obese of one country, say, the United States, to the non-obese of another country and then tried to make claims about the health outcomes of the *general population* of each country. Would you then say, "Oh, so now we're supposed to just claim that Americans aren't fat?" No. American can still be fat (or dumb). They're just saying they might not be as relatively fat (or dumb) as they appear next to other countries.
Equal comparison groups constructed through randomization are the fundamental building block of medical research that saves lives by making causal inferences about treatments.
I won't fault some economists for trying to apply the same methodological standard to research in economics and education where randomization isn't so easy. It's good science.
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!
to make sure their failure to educate the students goes unnoticed.
It actually just proves that the teacher failed to teach to the test properly, not that tests have much to do with education.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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
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.
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 !
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/
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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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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."