America's Problem: The World is Beating Us in a Battle We Don't Want to Win

Beyond this, I would argue that the good schools in rich areas aren't the problem. I went grew up in the shadows of NASA and my schools were all excellent -- my teachers all had masters degrees in what they were teaching, they loved their job, and they were well compensated for it. The issue is one of this achievement gap between the well funded suburban schools (my HS marching band had a budget ~500k/yr) and impoverished schools (both inner city and elsewhere). For those on the other end of the achievement gap, having a standard set that roughly equates to what is required to be an educated member of society seems entirely appropriate. Keep in mind that standards, at least in my experience, don't fetter education. For example, when I was in school, it was generally understood that if you were in calculus as a junior, you could probably pass your algebra I based exit exams so we spent our time on calculus.

Also, keep in mind that school is intended to teach you more than just history, math, etc. This is also where we learn to socialize. I guarantee you that my introverted self wouldn't have kissed a girl as early as I did if I wasn't forced to socialize with people for 170 school days a year. I learned how to make friends and how to balance my need for solitude with deeply fulfilling relationships -- something that would have taken much longer has I not been in school.

This isn't to say that my experience is biased towards the upper end of the achievement gap. In fact, while I'm in grad school in Boston, I'm volunteering at a charter school in its inner city and trust me, there are many problems with inner city education but the least of which is standardized testing. Traumatic home lives, poor materials, no cultural understanding of the value of education, etc represent far larger hurdles.

Indeed, I believe we should quibble about the standards and have a national discussion about what an educated member of society should know instead of debating the value of a standard at all. I believe that these standard have gone too far (plumbers probably don't need calculus, for example) but having a base-line of education is never a bad thing.

I'm not sure you read the article thoroughly.

His point in putting in the test score table is to say it's focusing people on the wrong things.

Just note the title: "America’s Problem: How the World is 'Beating Us' in a Battle We Don’t Necessarily Want to Win". The battle is the test score battle. The scare quotes around "Beating Us" mean that he's calling into question the notion. And in case that isn't clear, he then says explicitly: we probably don't want to win.

Yea, I still can't get my head around letting a 16 year old specilise based on some sort of long term plan. The problem with a lot of 'education reform' ideas is they take a more is better approach without separating those things that are useful for everyone vs. the foundations for continuing to focus in that area.

IMO, there are basic skills that everyone needs, such as understanding compound interest and letting students decide they don't need to know the basics is a horrible idea. That said being able to name the platonic solids is not a life skill. IMO, have some basic stills you need to graduate, let students test out of classes, and have stream lined versions of subjects that focus on what's important vs. what's been traditionally been taught.

PS: I question why someone would think a semester of Drivers ED is optional for anyone that's not blind, but we still need 4 years of English to graduate irregardless of actual proficiency.

In quality assurance, you need to be very careful what you measure, because you will always optimize towards what you do measure. As I've watched my kids' schools deal with crap like No Student Left Behind, I'm completely convinced we are not optimizing for learning or creativity in any way.

When you look at how well kids can learn when they are interested and curious and how little our schools use that curiosity, there is no question that things can be better. Just because we've done it for 100 years doesn't make it the right or best way (especially when schools became factory training grounds in the late 19th/early 20th centuries). Test scores are a horrible way to measure success in education because it fails to show anything about creativity and ability to continue learning, which are the things a knowledge-based economy need more than anything.

There are a lot of really good teachers out there who are completely hobbled by the structure of the system. It's a complex problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to come up with better solutions.

FWIW, I think we should start smaller. I would like to see students move through their education not with an age-based cohort, but rather a capability-based cohort, and they can get pushed back to a lower cohort if they aren't achieving (my understanding is this is how China's system works; if I'm wrong here, please correct my knowledge). That would remove the "bored smart kids" that cause problems in class and who fail out as soon as they hit something hard (that almost happened to me in college) and it would remove the "frustrated dumb kids" who give up on being "able" to learn from the equation. Both of these groups would just be challenged at their level, and the teacher would be able to focus the lesson plan around it.

We may be discussing different things, but I don't agree with your assertion that specialization comes later in educational systems outside the US.

I lived in france when I was 12-13 (and attended French schools), and at the end of 3eme, I filled out a form indicating whether I intended to focus further science/math or letters. My dad wanted science/math, I wanted letters, the whole thing was resolved when we went back to the US.

In college, I spent a year at trinity (in Ireland), and I found that "majors" focused almost exclusively on one subject. Medicine and Law were done at the undergrad level, starting at age 18 or so (though they lasted longer than a typical bachelor's degree in the US). Math students studied math almost exclusively - to the extent that they branched out, it might be physics or CS. The "general undergraduate requirements" were far more considerable in the US.

Lastly, as a grad student here in the US (at UC Berkeley in Industrial Engineering), I definitely noticed that much of the initial coursework appeared to be review for the international students. This may partly be due to strong math education overseas, but I also think that the earlier specialization had a lot to do with it - when you only focus on math as an undergrad, you can do a lot more of it. I actually think this may turn out to be a big problem for students who came up through the US - I see some merit to our more generalized system (I think Paul Graham referred to it as a "late binding" educational approach in an essay). But in grad programs with high attrition rates, the US educated students may be at a disadvantage the first couple of years even if they are very talented.

EDIT - It occurred to me what you might be saying here... students may specialize in a subject earlier overseas, but the curriculum for that subject is much more standardized than it would be in the US. I can see how that would be the case.

> we are shown a table showing the PISA score of a lot of countries and we see the US in a very bad position

The whole premise is broken. While USA's PISA scores may be far from impressing, that is mostly because the American educational system is fighting a different battle than its counterparts in other countries. When you put them on the same battlefield (by correcting for demographics, immigration), it has nothing to be ashamed of: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

It's not just "American education", it's almost all education systems around the world.

Yeah, as a Lean Startup advocate from before the term was coined, I think the LS angle here is purest bullshit.

The Lean Startup methods are not a magic potion that you can pour all over everything that you think sucks. It's a very specific toolkit for a very specific problem space.

In particular it requires a reasonably short feedback loop and the ability to minimize consequences of mistakes. Neither is true for education, which is a 10- to 20-year process, and in which failure can harm a person for life.

And as long as I'm on the topic of Lean Startup bullshit, everybody please keep an eye out for the oxymoronic "Lean Startup for the Enterprise". Consultants have discovered there's no money in selling to startups, so they're packaging the new hotness for their best clients: people with more money than sense.

He actually starts out by pointing out that the American education system is not very good at creating "interchangeable cogs".

Aargh. Microsoft didn't become Microsoft because of cogs. Microsoft is DYING because of cogs.

> I agree so much with the idea that Americas public schools are no place for kids that my wife and I juggle our careers so that we can homeschool.

It really depends on where you live. I will concede the vast majority are likely no place for kids, but there are noteworthy exceptions. My personal experience with being amazed by what public schooling can do is from both attending and observing school in Howard County, Maryland. They have incredible opportunities for kids to get engaged in STEM fields and otherwise customize their public school experience away from the "standard" curricula, and those opportunities aren't extra-curricular activities either. They're as much part of the schooling as "standard" subjects and factor into graduation requirements just as much.

I'd argue that unless you've got a good amount of money and time to invest in setting up a warehouse full of equipment and hiring knowledgeable industry veterans just for your kid(s), homeschooling can't come close to what a program like the ARL can offer to kids.

http://arl.hcpss.org/

Well, the teachers usually have a masters degree and it is quite a popular profession, so it is somewhat hard to get into the University to be a teacher.

Finland is also very egalitarian, or socialist if you will. This means that there are not so many good or bad schools, all schools have pretty much the same resources. Of course there are differences, but nothing as flagrant as in the US.

Private schools are practically non-existent (less than 2%).

So while the Finnish system lifts the average, I'm not sure how much the top performers benefit from it.

I really don't like arguments of the form "It's hard and I can raise some questions, so we should stop thinking about it."

Also, it's generally unhelpful to say "solution X is totally wrong" without then offering a concrete solution yourself. Poking holes is certainly fun and satisfying on some level, but really, the status quo doesn't need a lot of help.

"The five rules"

?

> the US always ranks at the bottom of standardized test scores

We don't, we rank about in the middle when compared to other Western countries.

> Once in a while you see a report where someone filters the test results for only honors or AP students in the United States before comparison, and in these comparisons US scores are pretty much the same as other industrialized countries.

Or when you filter by race: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Beep, wrong answer.

The PISA test the article quoted is given to 15-16 year olds. Those kids have not yet taken the vocational track, at least not in Finland.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/faqoecdpisa.htm#The_Test_and_Questi...

Pisa tests measure and rank average. Finland for example can keep the average high, which is generally good for the nation. But average alone does not tell the whole picture.

I think the original articles only merit was in raising the discussion about education, which is always good. It did not convey any profound knowledge of education and the problem space, not to me at least.

Indeed -- the page seems broken even when I enable top-level Javascript. Whatever happened to just using HTML to present your ideas?

Works if you mask Opera as IE for the website. Shitty coding gone bad.

That extreme is frustrating. Working with a bunch of characters who all want to be in charge and change the world is irritating as well.

The cynic in me says that you will never have a shortage of people who are willing to be led. It's less work, less responsibility, and less blame when things go wrong. All other things being equal, there will be plenty of people willing to take the path of least resistance.

If everyone is leading, who's doing the work?

I hate this vision. Tell every child they're the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, and then let fail over and over again (which is the fate of most startups in the valley), and watch them get discouraged and drop out when they figure out that, structurally, only a few can win big, and a few more win enough to make a living.

The article is the worst sort of magical thinking, that because some people did X and became Y, we should all start doing X. Ironically, it decries the interchangeability of the current products of the education system while arguing for a different sort of interchangeability: A system where we're all entrepreneurs instead of factory workers. How does any idea where "we're all" something seem even remotely plausible?

I'm on record saying that I'm willing to ignore every last ed reform effort if it means we can actually fix poverty decisively. As I said, "You'd still have all the problems I like to complain about, but they'd be way less important."

I call this out as a crap link because the Hacker News welcome letter specifically says, "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Not to be rude, I'll assume that you are posting that link in good faith. Now I will discuss for you and for onlookers why I don't think that link is a thoughtful comment on school performance in the United States. The link is full of logical errors.

First, the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."

The Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

A similar statement is found as footnote 7 in the Census Brief 2010 "Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010"

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf

"The race categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and are not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race question include race and national origin or sociocultural groups."

Second, anyone who thinks that United States "black" persons in general receive a primary and secondary education just like United States "white" persons is profoundly ignorant of life in the United States. Mathematician Patricia Kenschaft's article from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society "Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics,"

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

reports on her work in teacher training programs for in-service teachers in New Jersey. "The understanding of the area of a rectangle and its relationship to multiplication underlies an understanding not only of the multiplication algorithm but also of the commutative law of multiplication, the distributive law, and the many more complicated area formulas. Yet in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle.

"In those innocent days, I thought that the teachers might be interested in the geometric interpretation of (x + y)^2. I drew a square with (x + y) on a side and showed the squares of size x^2 and y^2. Then I pointed to one of the remaining rectangles. 'What is the area of a rectangle that is x high and y wide?' I asked.

. . . .

"The teachers were very friendly people, and they know how frustrating it can be when no student answers a question. 'x plus y?' said two in the front simultaneously.

"'What?!!!' I said, horrified."

Until provision of primary education is brought up to the best standard achieved anywhere in the United States for ALL pupils in the United States, of course there is more to do to improve schools here. And no one who is knowledgeable about schools in the United States claims that all teachers teach effectively in the core subjects of primary schooling.

Third, the statement in the link ignores the better performance of several other countries by comparing only population means rather than comparing national score distributions with interquartile ranges. That how-to-lie-with-statistics trick doesn't fool me, because I have seen the national score distributions.

http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/TIMSS2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1....

(See Exhibit 1.1 for country distributions of scores in mathematics.)

Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.

The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore mathematics materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. It would be good for the United States to take advantage of its greater degree of linguistic unity and childhood wealth to reach the educational standard of the top-performing countries in other parts of the world.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

Specifically, the idea that we do well by able students is directly disagreed with by scholars who have spent years studying the issue.

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

"Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

Fourth, the statement that the United States does as well as any country of the world, ancestry group by ancestry group, is blatantly false on its face, as I know from my own experience. I run an ongoing course in advanced mathematics (prealgebra mathematics for elementary age pupils) that draws clients from throughout the native-born and immigrant community in Minnesota, a state with strong public schools. My course location is in one of the very best school districts in Minnesota. But parents who are American-born and graduates of MIT, and first-generation immigrant parents from China, from India, from Poland, from Romania, from Ghana, from Korea, from Pakistan, from the Philippines, from Egypt, and from other countries I may have forgotten sign up their children for my courses, even though they already live in school districts that are considered good school districts, because they know very well that American schools don't do as good a job teaching foundational mathematics as schools in many other countries.

http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf

I learned this in Taiwan, where the school system in general does better at lest cost than in the United States. It is the basis of my current occupation that people living in the United States who are actually aware of the situation in other countries seek mathematics education besides that which is poorly provided by United States public schools.