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Comment by mikefox | Hacker News Reader

One thing most people never get with this topic is the enormous variation between groups, whether regional, socio-economic, ethno-cultural, etc. Fareed Zakaria has said something to the effect that America could be cleanly split into two nations, where the children of one perform at or better than the level of European and even some East Asian nations, whereas the children of the other perform abysmally, on par with the poorest of the developing world. In America, aggregate measurements are meaningless.

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I think Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson do a better job of showing their work any time they write than Fareed Zakaria, and they point out that the top students in the United States are laggards by international standards, because they are underchallenged by the meager United States curriculum.

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

I can verify that statement because I have seen mathematics curriculum materials from other countries. (I read Chinese, and own dozens of Chinese-language mathematics textbooks from China and Taiwan, and I have found English translations of textbooks from several other countries in academic libraries in my town.) Doing thorough research on this subject, not the kind of research that a weekly magazine columnist or blogger does, but THOROUGH research, puts the lie to the idea that it is mainly demographic characteristics of the United States population that put the United States so far behind the top-performing countries. Review just how stark the differences in performance levels are,

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

and then check the work of researchers who are analyzing where the problem really is in the United States.

There is a problem of a bottom-performing group in the United States, but it is a problem of a bottom-performing group of teachers who are unable to teach primary school subjects. Encouraging the bottom 5 percent of teachers in the United States year on year to find new occupations would help enormously,

http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...

but meanwhile some people are showing the courage and research orientation to identify ways to help the learners in the United States who need the most help to learn more mathematics and other subjects.

http://www.teachingasleadership.org/

I was trying to test the same hypothesis too and the fact that there was only 1% increase in students with math proficiency told me that perhaps the gap between the two groups is not closing. Otherwise, you would see a much higher number of students with math proficiency today compared to a decade ago.

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