Slashdot Mirror
New Education Performance Data Published: Asia Dominates
jones_supa writes "The latest PISA (Programme for International Assessment) results are out today. Since 2000, the OECD has attempted to evaluate the knowledge and skills of 15-year olds across the world through its PISA test. More than 510,000 students in 65 economies took part in the latest test, which covered math, reading and science, with the main focus on math — which the OECD state is a 'strong predictor of participation in post-secondary education and future success.' Asian countries outperform the rest of the world, according to the OECD, with Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macau and Japan amongst the top performing countries and economies. Students in Shanghai performed so well in math that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries. The study shows also a slight gender cap: in all countries, boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math."
Here's a spreadsheet listing each country's results. The U.S. ranked 26th in math (below average), 17th in reading (slightly above average), and 21st in science (slightly below average).
USA is 36-24-28. Sounds about right - top-heavy.
As Slate pointed out this morning (), the way that this study mixes data from individual urban areas with data from whole countries makes it impossible to perform fair comparisons. Note that 4 out of the 7 asian "countries" that the Slashdot summary refers to (Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau) are either city-states or aren't even countries at all!
Comparing non-countries (or city-states) with countries biases the results by comparing poorer, less educated rural areas with better educated cities.
Now China can cut some of it's educational funds in the city and divert them to more impoverished regions in the country.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
If countries want to score better they should teach to the test like the top countries usually do.
And not real real skill if they are not on the test.
Students nowadays cannot be punished for any misbehavior or disruption, its all illegal. Its common sense that standards are in the toilet. Students who succeed in the US now are succeeding despite our system, not because of it.
Students in Shanghai performed so well in math that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries.
Not sure about math, reading and science, but clearly my geography is bad. I had no idea Shanghai was a country.
In Asia, they are teaching kids Math.
In America they are teaching kids (and their parents) that the American educational system sucks. This helps keep up the funding for the educational-industrial-congressional complex.
South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any developed nation.
Japan is on track to experience negative population growth.
What do all these wonderfully educated youth have to look forward to besides leaving their native country to go find somewhere they can actually live
From the people who yesterday gave us that Gothenburg is the capital of Sweden, now comes the news that Shanghai is a country.
I'm sure the PLA will be thrilled to know this, and can pull out troops in Tibet, or near the Taiwan Straits, and redirect them towards Shanghai!
Can PISA do an assessment test on /. editors & their geography?
This is hardly surprising, considering that middle school kids have gray hairs from stress, and all the poorly performing students are shuttled out of view. Why don't we compare their scores to kids from upper class Manhattan families? While we are at it see how well they do at independent problem solving and creative thinking? This is just a red herring.
In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
In America, belief and opinion is weighed equal to facts and evidence.
That, in a nutshell, is what it wrong with the US educational system -- it has become a tool of drooling idiots who pass rules about things they don't even remotely understand, and act like their religion actually defines reality.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was. You just change the specifics of the religion, but the results are the same.
THIS is the comment that should be modded up.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Results among the states varies a lot. For example Massachusetts is fully competitive with the Asian countries. On the TIMSS exam (generally thought to be more difficult than the PISA test) Massachusetts finished sixth in the world in mathematics, and second in the sciences for it's 8th grade students.
High levels of achievement ARE attainable in the US. It isn't a matter of cultural problems, or the society we live in. It's a matter of politicians and parents adopting the attitude that it can be done, and sticking to that idea. Effective reform though is not something that can be done overnight. Massachusetts has been at it for 20 years.
http://boston.com/community/blogs/rock_the_schoolhouse/2012/12/massachusetts_aces_internation.html
Massachusetts has shown how to do it. Now all it takes is realization of what can be done and applying it elsewhere.
In America they are teaching kids (and their parents) that the American educational system sucks. This helps keep up the funding for the educational-industrial-congressional complex.
That's an interesting thought. If you tell people that their education system is bad, it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the students fail to learn only because they've been told they will fail to learn.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Much as I agree with you, that only affects the science part of the test (and then only the biology part). It has nothing to do with reading and math. I've never heard a fundamentalist preacher say that calculus is evil.
Either way, the end problem is that people in America view education as a propaganda system, rather than an education system, right?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You cannot pick-and-choose cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong or Singapore the put them against an entire country like USA. That is categorically absurd and looks the the results are being rigged to make a point instead of statistical validity. Instead compare Shanghai to say Boston.
Only when they play Terran!
"While expendable, the massive losses of terran Marines during the Great War began to become cost prohibitive. The Medic's use of chemical modifiers has greatly enhanced the survival rate of UED forces, lengthening the expected battlefield life expectancy to over nine seconds."
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
No, more like there are two types of school in America: the good schools out in the suburbs where the kids are doing just fine compared with the rest of the world, and the shithole schools in the inner city that have to spend all their energy dealing with discipline problems and can't keep decent teachers. I bet Switzerland has plenty of the former, but does it have to deal with the latter dragging down their average?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Here
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/
You can take a sample test yourself. See how basic the questions are and feel appalled to see the % of students in your country that managed to pass each level.
For example, only 11% of students in my country (Argentina) were able to reach level 3 (identify the smallest value in a table). Highest rank for that question was Shanghai-China (89%). USA was 48%.
"If the aborigine drafted an IQ test,
all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was.
Yep, because the Supreme Court will stone you to death if you try to teach the truth rather than creationism.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But it has the net effect of fundamentally undermining the ability to think critically about things, and evaluate evidence.
Once you decide that some 'facts' are incorrect and don't match with your beliefs, you pretty much just start cherry picking the ones which are convenient.
And then you really see how this becomes a problem.
Your reading gets further undermined because people want to ban certain kinds of books, and people live in their own little echo chambers where they only see things approved as 'facts' by their religious leaders. Your math declines because you've spent time discrediting the math used in science -- and then these people get out into the real world confidently wrong in their beliefs and unable to reconcile them with reality, because they've been taught that their beliefs win over reality.
Those people then become adults who bluster around claiming to be right, when there's neither facts nor evidence on their side. And then those people go on to produce even stupider children.
Once you start down that road, it's a pretty steady race to the bottom.
Stupid is curable in most cases. Willful ignorance is a much bigger problem and much harder to fix.
It's not often that you get a community up to a nation that actually cares about education as a good in its own right.
Education isn't a guarantee of anything other than being educated. In particular, it cannot and never will be able to guarantee employment. At best it can help, but that's about all. The current bollocks of assessing everything all the time and declaring that the world will end unless every student isn't passing everything or worse, is "only average" is not enhancing the inherent value of education but destroying it.
It's ok to be rubbish at some things, average at other things and decent at a few. It's part of the human experience.
God help me, but Boris Johnson is right!
Now if only there were some way of American cities using two parallel school systems - one for students without discipline problems and a seperate set of schools for those with discipline problems so the later can't interfere with the education of the former.
No, that would never work.
Please note that the US numbers include ALL 15yr old students. In most of the Asian countries/cities, less intellectual students are shuffled out of the academic schools early on to different career paths. If you stacked private/gifted US school children against the Asians, you'd find no difference in performance. Apples to apples guys...please.
No child left behind! No child left behind! Title 1! Title 1! Title ONE!
Whites need to start competing in this world. Five centuries of colonization have created a sense of entitlement that won't help in the labor marketplace. Now that a half millennium of global blue-eyed rule is ending, humanity is quickly returning to the norm that has dominated since the Pleistocene, to wit, the resumption of Asian rule with the transitional period of job stealing and scholarship snatching.
The Fourteenth Amendment turned out to be the very suicide pact about which the slave owners squawked nearly a century and a half ago.
It didn't last time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Well, whole of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan ... Looks like the entire subcontinent is missing. China has a few urban centers represented. Africa is gone. So it falls into the bemoan the ... category.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
In America, belief and opinion is weighed equal to facts and evidence.
No. Only in a few small isolated areas, and Texas, and on Fox news. Not in the vast majority of the country.
That, in a nutshell, is what it wrong with the US educational system -- it has become a tool of drooling idiots who pass rules about things they don't even remotely understand, and act like their religion actually defines reality.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was. You just change the specifics of the religion, but the results are the same.
Yes, because in America we typically leave school board meetings over science policy, and go to the homes of our opponents and murder them. I really don't think you understand anything about the Taliban. Your level of ignorance is actually physically painful. Yes there are problems with people misunderstanding science and religion and trying to combine them. Overall you don't seem to understand the problem any better than they do, and are just as far from helping to solve it.
Doesn't matter how you shift it, the poor kids in the ghetto are still going to drag down the average.
In gaming out standardized tests...
that's all this is measuring...whose standardized test-prep is better...
this does not measure education level or mental ability
Thank you Dave Raggett
But it has the net effect of fundamentally undermining the ability to think critically about things, and evaluate evidence.
I agree, and in the real world that's important. However, it still has little to do with these tests. Reading tests are mostly about comprehension of what was written, not protracted thought or discussion about the material. That's also true of math, at least at that level. It teaches problem solving skills, which are important, but definitely not the same as the ability to think critically about things, and evaluate evidence.
In both Asia and America, they don't teach anything; they ask that students memorize formulas, patterns, and methods, and then ask that they regurgitate it all back on a test. Understanding not required. Intelligence not required.
No, more like there are two types of school in America: the good schools out in the suburbs where the kids are doing just fine compared with the rest of the world
They're not doing just fine, just like the other kids probably aren't doing just fine. These schools don't actually focus on understanding.
In Asia, they are teaching kids Science.
In America, we are teaching them that as long as almost all the experts agree, the science doesn't matter.
Worse, they're teaching them their personal feelings and opinions are as good as any amount of reproducible experiments and data.
No sig today...
TFS: "The study shows also a slight gender cap: in all countries, boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math."
PISA 2012 Overview: "Boys perform better than girls in mathematics in only 37 out of the 65 countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012, and girls outperform boys in five countries." (For the curious, they're Jordan, Qatar, Thailand, Malaysia and Iceland.)
The Guardian article didn't get this wrong. What the hell, submitter?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
You cannot flunk the dolts because, "it might damage their self-esteem."
Deal with it.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I hope they can keep more and more of this intellectual wealth in Asia, instead of having it usurped by the U.S. Asian governments and large corporations need to treat highly educated people to better job offerings.
Signature intentionally left blank.
The US dominates the Nobel prizes. Does it matter? Asia dominates math learning. Does it matter?
Probably not. Not economically. Not societally. You need a number of engineers, and accountants don't need mathematics to speak of. The modern-day services and industries need mainly good ideas. The rest follows on its own.
The main thing to teach teenagers is how stuff works (basic science, geography, history, English etc) so they can understand what is going on around them and make educated voting decisions.
Do people in foreign countries actually believe this? It's hilarious how some foreigners go to US websites and absorb US culture, but believe the most ridiculous anti-US propaganda at face value.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Yeah, they are. Here is an article on the subject. But this are the key quotes:
Among non-Hispanic white Americans, the average [PISA] score was 525 - not very different from Canada's 524, New Zealand's 521 or Australia's 515. All these countries are heavily white, and all ranked in the top 10 of the 65 participating school systems. The story is the same for Asian Americans. Their average score was 541 - somewhat below Shanghai, about even with South Korea and ahead of Hong Kong (533) and Japan. Again, all these other systems were in the top 10
. . . . . But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. In the PISA study, their reading scores were 441 (blacks) and 466 (Hispanics).
So, yeah, the affluent white kids out in the suburbs and decent neighborhoods are apparently learning just fine.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
Which US school system does this?
My girl friend is Asian and she agrees that North America has an education system that is about as "good" as toilet paper. By the time my girl friend was in grade 3 she was doing grade 8 level north american math. She was only allowed to eat dinner when all her homework was done and she had HOURS of homework a night. She didn't get a lot of time off school and if her marks weren't in the high 80's and 90's she got punished. When she came to Canada in grade 4 she was shocked. She told me that until grade 10 she wasn't even challenged and frankly that even high school was easier then her grade 3. So don't be surprised.
Only if you believe the tests test for anything important, which I don't.
The problem I have with these statements is that they do not resemble my (fairly recent, ending in 2004) American public education at all. I don't recall ever hearing the phrase "Intelligent Design," or the ideas encompassed by that term, ever in a classroom, period, let a lone a science classroom. I remember being taught the scientific method fairly early on and, though I was often encouraged to back up my opinions with evidence in all subjects, I have no recollection of being told that my opinion was "good enough."
You're right -- but instead of preachers, we have a large number of Americans who proudly wear their mathematical ignorance as a badge of honor.
Take Mass. and throw in the kids aged 0-5 and their parents from the "bottom-10" US states together into a hypothetical state and initially keep everything else the same including the attitudes of policy-makers and educators and the attitudes of the "existing" Mass. parents and students.
The net result is that the average attitudes will initially drop, the average family income will initially drop, and the amount of state and local tax money available per student will initially drop.
Wait 10-15 years and see what happens to social attitudes towards education, what happens to average family income, and what happens to education spending from local and state taxes. Whatever the result, it will probably correlate with the scores these kids make 10-15 years down the road.
Odds are high that they will be somewhere below what Mass. is currently scoring but somewhat above where the "bottom 10" states are currently scoring.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We calls it likes we sees it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Asian countries are known for lying about their test scores and faking them to make themselves look better. There are a couple others in there like Turkey that are infamous for doing the same. I don't believe one single word of this entire report.
I always wonder about the validity of these tests. Looking at the Wikipedia entry there is a nice study that shows what happens when you segregate the US results by poverty level and then compare. For poverty level 10% USA ranks number 1. Continue down the list and poverty levels, USA consistently beats countries at similar levels. All of these studies suffer from the same problem, go to Asia and they don't test the rural poor, the USA tests everyone.
Apples to Oranges.
Or maybe the Swiss have social policies that stopped their cities being as bad as yours?
SOCIALISM! where is my gun?
Parallel schools, students segregated by behavior, not skin color. What, you don't think Blacks can control their behavior? Racist!
You do Its money and access to public schools
We believe it just as much as Americans believe that we routinely kill off the elderly in The Netherlands (*), smoke dope all day while walking around on wooden shoes, all while tending to our tulips :)
(*) We do, but only on special, state-appointed holidays.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The fact that you need a Supreme Court to solve such trivial issues is enough stupidity by itself.
The bottom 10 states are atrocious. They are permanently mired in poverty and elect corrupt and ineffective politicians to run their sad excuses for states. People born into these states have little hope of climbing out of poverty - the American social contract does work there.
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
Some sort of Federal minimum standard needs to be imposed on their education system to pull them into at least the 20th century if not the 21st. I'm hoping that the Common Core Curriculum will effectively be that. But I don't expect real results for quite a while. Even Massachusetts took 20 years to reach their current state of grace.
What I despair of is the current stagnation in this area. Repeating failed policies and expecting the same results is insanity. Even worse is the partisan gridlock that blocks almost all real reform in this country.
Well done. You've completely missed my point.
How "parallel" do you think these schools will actually be? Of course, the best extracurricular programs and the best teachers will want to work with the well-behaved kids more, so they'll try to get into that one more heavily, giving those good students a better chance at a good education. The "bad" kids will be stuck with the worse programs and teachers, reinforcing that there is no escape from a life of crime and violence. Sure, we could legislate that programs and teachers are assigned randomly... but that doesn't change the fact that every day, the kid walks into school knowing he's "bad".
Separate is never equal, regardless of what criterion is used.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
My favorite question for those types of rants...
So what are you doing to help the richest country in the world change things?
Reading and calculus are only evil when taught wrongly, such as to young women who should be at home learning to be proper wives and mothers as God intended, rather than having their heads filled with what their menfolk should be taking care of.
So not at all, then? Good.
You have to take into consideration that US demographics are extremely diverse where as china's stats are pretty much uniform.
Point being... we have a lot of stupid people in the US. Just stupid. Not a lot to be done about it.
That said, we also have some of the smartest people in the world. And what is more, we draw smart people to the US from all around the world. And they come here and have children.
Are they massively outnumbered by the exceptionally stupid? Yes. But we have them all the same.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And we have at least an equally large number who proudly wear their illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Many here on /.
How many people don't know the difference between loose/lose, there/they're/their, wait/weight (no, this one's not from /., saw it elsewhere on the web this AM), etc.?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I was from China, and I am a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.
Regarding education - back when I escaped from China (that was some 40 odd years ago) the schools in East Asia (countries which were/are heavily influenced by the Confucianism school of thought such as China, Korea, Japan, Singapore ) were pretty much based on the top-down rote-learning mode - whereby the students have no say, and they must do EVERYTHING their teachers told them to do.
It operated that way because the basic tenet of the Confucianism teaching is that the young uns are SLAVES to their elders (it's pretty much based on the blind obedience mode).
When I reached the West I was totally astounded when my classmate actually questioned the teachers !
That was a super NO-NO in Asia.
Back then, even if the student asked a totally legitimate question to the teacher in class that student will be summoned to the headmaster and/or discipline master's office for punishment.
That was how the Asian school had operated back then.
Now ... except for Korea, which is still practicing strict Confucianism as what it has been doing for the past 2,000 years ... many schools in the East Asian countries (those populated by yellow-skin folks) have drastically improved their teaching method.
Nowadays students are encouraged to solve problems, rather than to remember the facts laid out by their teachers.
From Singapore to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Taiwan, everywhere I go I see great improvements.
As for the other East Asian countries, those which are being populated by the brown skin folks such as Indonesia or the Philippines or Thailand, their schools are still as sucks as 50 years ago.
I see that there are people here trying to justify their own country's failing by saying that the "comparison is not fair", that the comparison is comparing "cities to countries".
For those folks, what I see is nothing much but sour grapes.
Yes, comparing schools in Hong Kong or Singapore to schools in the United States of America is comparing schools in CITIES to a LARGE COUNTRY --- but so what ?
If the schools in the United States of America sux, it's STILL SUX, no matter if it's in the city of Detroit or if it's in the city of Little Rock.
How many of my fellow Americans have been to the public schools ? How many of you have seen the effect of gangsterism in the public schools in America ?
I have.
I have 2 friends who were teachers in public schools in America who were MURDERED by their students.
On the other hand, I have a lot of friends who teach in schools in Asia, and so far, none of them have been killed by their students yet.
When I asked my teacher friends in Asia about a recent news of a math teacher in Boston who got her throat slit by her student. all of them were horrified by that news.
But when I post that same news to my friends who used to teach (and some are STILL teaching) in American public schools, they just shrug.
This reflects how bad the American school system has become.
You guys may want to deny it as much as you can, but for one who was from afar (I am not a product of the American high school system), the American school system has failed.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
In America, belief and opinion is weighed equal to facts and evidence.
No. Only in a few small isolated areas, and Texas, and on Fox news. Not in the vast majority of the country.
dude irony...
3 alternate links. Take your pick:
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell120313.php3
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/12/03/a-challenge-to-our-beliefs-n1756023/page/full
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/120213-681322-blacks-working-class-whites-were-similar-before.htm?p=full
Well done. You've completely missed my point.
How "parallel" do you think these schools will actually be? Of course, the best extracurricular programs and the best teachers will want to work with the well-behaved kids more, so they'll try to get into that one more heavily, giving those good students a better chance at a good education. The "bad" kids will be stuck with the worse programs and teachers, reinforcing that there is no escape from a life of crime and violence. Sure, we could legislate that programs and teachers are assigned randomly... but that doesn't change the fact that every day, the kid walks into school knowing he's "bad".
Separate is never equal, regardless of what criterion is used.
My guess is that while demographics would not be equally represented in both schools, it would actually be better for black students because the ones that actually wanted to get out of the ghetto would see that all they had to do to stay in the good school was clean up their act enough to not disrupt the education of others. Their reward for this would be an education not interrupted by others. Inner city kids would finally have a chance at getting a good education if they wanted it.
It does not matter that the good teachers would mostly go to the good school, that's what it's there for.
...
OK, let's do it this way, then; let's only test Americans in the poorest neighborhoods in which academic achievement is least valued, and test only the children in the wealthiest neighborhoods where academic achievement is most highly valued in China and see how the results come out.
Or we could test all of their students and all of our students and compare, examining the average, median, worst, best, standard deviations.
Or only test the top students in the top US schools and compare them with the top students in their top schools for a change.
Can you see the differences such selective testing produces from universal testing?
While Asian countries are often accused of taking jobs from the West, the President of South Korea's Hyundai Motors visited factories in Russia and the Czech Republic. He said he was impressed by the quality of workers who were far superior to South Korean workers -- they never staged strikes and had far lower wages. While a South Korean factory takes 30 hours to make a car, the Czech factory takes 16. The visiting Korean managers could not keep up with the pace of production, so they received help from local secretaries in their 20's to fill their checklists. South Korean industry has been crippled by constant labor strikes demanding ever more wages and shorter working hours.
Do students who score high on achievement tests demand higher wages, cushy jobs, and become less internationally competitive?
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20131203-00000030-xinhua-cn
http://japanese.joins.com/article/999/178999.html?servcode=300§code=300
At what point did he say "in all ways, in every place"?
Look, I'm an American and I live in America where the above is true. Some states are okay, but not all. The cultural/religious war on science and education is a perfectly mainstream thing that ~50% of Americans apparently approve of. They are real people, really voting for these guys. It's easy not to see it if you're in a liberal filter bubble, but this is something that is going on.
Many experts would attest that the PISA scores are utterly meaningless. The first link contains quite a bit of historical context.
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/03/my-view-of-the-pisa-scores/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10488665/PISA-Poor-academic-standards-and-an-even-poorer-test.html
http://educationnext.org/the-international-pisa-test/
The U.S. news media completely ignores the facts while proclaiming the headline. Monty Python had this pegged when they compared the IQ scores of BBC executives to those of non-English speaking people and penguins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtfizONYOc
Overall I don't know if this has much of an effect on the average performance. Yes it hurts some students but this tends to be in lower population areas (barring Texas). However the performance in the very highly populated cities is also terrible; it's not necessarily because they don't teach science but because they bother teaching anything much of the time. Students who are seen as failing are routinely ignored. With No Child Left Behind which attempted to solve this most of the schools instead teach to the test which does not do a good job of teaching.
And science is just one part of the issue. If it was only about science then we'd expect to see low science scores buy high writing and mathematics scores, but instead it's bad across the board.
Despite good intentions over the last couple of decades we're still in the same old rut that student performance correlates to wealth.
These are often just typos here on forums. Basically spell checkers fixing up things without the writer bothering to proofread before hitting submit. It is relatively easy for touch typists to get there/their wrong because the word gets typed nearly automatically, it's only when going back to proofread that these sorts of errors can be spotted.
Overall I see the badge of honor for not knowing math or technical geeky stuff being more prevalent whereas pride in being illiterate or making grammar mistakes to be relatively small.
Naw, it's more like 20-30%, and even them most of them aren't hardcore believers in anti-science but instead are just following along after being whipped up into a frenzy.
We still have this system, it's just very informal and not discussed out loud. Rich schools have great student performance, poor schools have really lousy performance. It's been a standard for most of my life that once one is categorized in school that this will follow the student throughout the education. Student is seen as being a bad learner and the system stops trying to improve them; but when student is seen as smart and special then there may be enrichment programs to help even more.
One key thing in many of these countries is that they focus on making sure everyone is learning. Yes people will point out horror stories about endless homework and strict teachers in Asian countries while overlooking that the poorly performing students are not allowed to slip through the cracks or get shunted off to the dummies class.
If you refuse to see that a problem exists then there's no need to fix it.
Which problem am I not seeing? I see lots of problems with our 'education' system. I'm not even impressed by the schools in these "decent neighborhoods."
Then you get a young man beaten unconscious in a stairwell serving the same 5 day suspension as his attackers. Then after successfully defending himself a second time being ask to leave the school because he was a disruptive influence! The thugs could roam the halls freely. Very few student would need to be placed in the "motivation" school, to use a Marine term. Those who need to be are stealing the others chance for an education. I had technical school in the Navy. Those foolish enough to disrupt the class found themselves on a bus back to the fleet to spend the rest of their hitch swabbing decks.
Since you mentioned that you are an American expat working in Singapore, it won't be too far fetch to say that you are NOT the only "expat" working in the firm.
You are surrounded by colleagues who are NOT from Singapore - and many of them are from neighboring countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Vietnam and Malaysia.
Those colleagues are yours might be ethnic Chinese, but if they came from Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines, they were taught in school systems that, as I outlined in my original message regarding countries with "brown skin folks", are in really terrible state.
Coupled with the religion problem - Malaysia and Indonesia being majority of the people are of the Islamic faith, their school curricula were/are routinely tempered with by the authority, for "religious reason" (to dumb down the students instead of making them brighter) so that when they grow up they wouldn't know how to question the authority.
I have companies set up in that region as well and I have co-workers from those places. I know the way they think (very narrow) and their timidity (never question authority) seriously damn down their real potential.
They are products of the environment they grew up in - like me, I grew up in China, but luckily for me, I escaped China when I was still in my teens and got the chance to learn from both the East and the West.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I've met plenty of engineers from cultures where questioning and innovation are highly discouraged and they couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag
... and I have met plenty of gangbangers from the hood who would think of nothing else when challenging the authority, with anything they got.
As for their innovativeness ? Many of them don't even know how to open a paper bag.
Assuming by richest country you mean USA (e.g not going by GDP or income per capita) then the answer is: post stuff in the hope that enough of the voters of the USA wake up and finally change things?
What other ways do you want nonresidents to do to change things?
It's worse than that, even. In a claimed attempt to "catch up", politicians and business leaders developed "Common Core" - a set a principals that all schools should go by. Notice I didn't say educators. They weren't allowed to work on this. After all, this would kill the "teachers are to blame" notion that politicians/business leaders have been pushing for years.
Now, with Common Core, we are paying big companies like Pearson millions of dollars to design curriculum that teachers MUST adhere to and paying them millions more to give horrible standardized tests to our kids. Normally, tests help teachers gauge how good students are doing and where they need help. These tests, however, are sealed. Neither teachers nor parents are allowed to see them. Results are posted the following year (after the kids are with different teachers) but the results dictate whether the teachers get to keep their jobs. So teachers have a strong incentive to teach ONLY what is on the test and focus on test preparation. If it's not on the test (Math and English), it doesn't get taught or somehow gets "folded" into Math and English. (History has become a side-topic to teach during English. Science is a side-topic during Math.)
What if the schools keep failing? (As they likely will given that kids aren't really being taught anything well.) Well, businesses have an answer for that also: Charter schools. These are schools run by businesses, for profit, but using public school money. So the businesses open charter schools, get to choose which students they accept, get to hire anybody as their teachers (no degree or background in education required), and don't need to take those tests I mentioned before. Meanwhile, the public schools have LESS money, need to focus on tests MORE, and are left with all of the kids with special needs. So the public schools fail more and more charter schools take over. It's a win-win... for businesses and the politicians who get their lobbying money - not for the kids.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
At least we take the time to try to understand you before badmouthing you.
Americans just dumbly recite the propaganda about "...whatever the place is called, who cares - they're all stupid anyway, it's like, they can't even speak English, dumbfucks..."*
[*] comment I overheard on plane whilst flying through the US.
- Foreign Person
I have to wonder if the US schools are failing to educated the students as well as Asian countries or rather if the US society is failing to provide the schools with students as ready to learn.
If I remember correctly the US has near the highest child poverty rates, teen pregnancy, teen incarceration, and divorce rates in the OECD. Not to mention a culture that often undervalues education.
I've been teaching for almost a decade and every time a new popular video game comes out, I have an extra couple kids in every class missing for the next few games, and a handful more that are falling asleep in class because they were up to 4AM playing. I have students every year who miss 2 weeks because they go on vacation (because it's cheaper than going in the summer). Every time we need to take notes a full 1/4th of the class doesn't have paper and/or pencils. I highly doubt this is whats happening in Asia.
It's cultural, and socioeconomic to some extent, and I wonder what the scores would look like if we had socially and economically stable families that cared about their kids education.
These are often just typos here on forums. Basically spell checkers fixing up things without the writer bothering to proofread before hitting submit.
Writing is writing and publishing (even on the web) is publishing. If one doesn't care enough about what one publishes to proofread a post before hitting send, one probably doesn't care enough to do a good job at anything - autocorrect or not.
That is all.
They are permanently mired in poverty
Oh ye of little faith.
There is a big difference between "permanently" and "probably for the lifetime of anyone alive today and possibly the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren."
Odds are at least one of these states will have greatly improved socioeconomic status relative to the rest of America within, oh, 100-200 years.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was.
Yep, because the Supreme Court will stone you to death if you try to teach the truth rather than creationism.
You know, my initial reaction to this was "Yeah, probably." It actually took me a moment to realise that things are not quite that bad - at least not yet.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
It's beyond absurd to compare the performance of single cities to the performance of entire nations. There's so much money riding on making US schools look bad so that they can be privatized. It's unfortunate people keep falling for these bullshit statistics.