U.S. Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests Show | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests Show

nytimes.com

34 pointstokenadult60 comments

Interesting they cite Finland and then immediately claim the answer is more schooling. That's not how Finland sees it. In Finland school starts at age 7 as it is considered that before 7 you should be playing, not bored with academics. For those who wish it, a year of "preschool" is available at age 6, the same year the US starts first grade after a year of what is often mandatory Kindergarten, which is now academic and has homework in much of the US, and which follows 1-3 years of preschool and daycare. There is pressure to make preschool academic as well in the US.

Also in Finland, mandatory school lasts 9 years, not 13 years, and you're done at age 16. If you wish, you can at your choice then continue either with college prep or vocational finishing school for three years at no cost with content comparable to a good american community college.

Many systems that do better than the US have kids in school for fewer hours, have less bureaucracy, and cost less to operate than american schools, yet more hours and more spending are always given as the only possible answers to america's supposed school problems, along with dismissing the things that do work in the US, namely homeschooling and private schools which get much better results at a lower cost.

I always wonder if problems like these are exacerbated by our (comparatively) massive population in the US. We have somewhere around 311 million people to Finland's 5 million and we are all spread out over 50 states. Is it any surprise we can't manage a nationwide school system well?

The US is also more ethnically diverse than Finland, which I'm sure impacts teaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Its a well known problem.

Really interesting point about Finland. Has there been any research into what aspects of the system are most effective?

Anecdotally, I wonder if this solves the story of the "smart" kids who are bored and thus under perform due to a lack of challenge. By condensing the time to learn, I could see having more focused curriculum with less review between years. Also, by having children start later, it might generate more natural curiosity, rather than spoon feeding knowledge.

Last I dug into the studies, the 'problems' in US education seemed most-tightly correlated to social problems revolving around social-economic class, available services, etc.

Which is to say: the low-scoring kids in the US are living in poverty, living with high-crime neighborhoods, living in one-parent homes, don't have access to health-care, may not have food security, etc.

The schools have zero control over those factors. Yet the "more school" they can throw at these kids, the more they can isolate them from those factors.

That is: extending the school day to the point that it becomes reasonable to offer breakfast provides an opportunity to actually get breakfast into these kids. Which does impact test scores. Providing "study hour" type classes after a traditional school day not only provides a safe and equipped place for these kids to actually do their homework, it also keeps them off the streets and lowers the risks that come from no child care. And that also does impact test scores.

So there's this really horrible bind that American educators find themselves in. They know damn well that more hours of instruction doesn't really increase test scores. But they also know the best approach available to them -- to improve not only scores, but outcomes -- is to trump up "more hours" to ameliorate the risks and challenges facing these children that society-at-large is refusing to address.

More school doesn't isolate people from poverty, crime, health care access issues, food security problems, etc. No matter how long the school day is, those schools exist in communities with those issues and the staff, parents, and children in those communities have to deal with the realities of those problems every day.

> That is: extending the school day to the point that it becomes reasonable to offer breakfast provides an opportunity to actually get breakfast into these kids. Which does impact test scores.

Breakfast food programs originate with the Black Panther Party running breakfast programs for poor children, not with school systems.

> Providing "study hour" type classes after a traditional school day not only provides a safe and equipped place for these kids to actually do their homework, it also keeps them off the streets and lowers the risks that come from no child care. And that also does impact test scores.

The solution to this is to provide access to child care in a way that is useful for the community, not provide de-facto child care by keeping children in school as long as possible each day.

> They know damn well that more hours of instruction doesn't really increase test scores. But they also know the best approach available to them

This is a contradiction, if hours of instruction don't increase test scores, then the approach of increasing the length of the school day will have nothing to do with providing better test score outcomes. Also, test scores are not a reliable way to gauge student learning and success.

You are right that social instability and poverty play a big part in keeping US education from being successful, both those issues need to be addressed in a direct way rather than try to provide band aid fixes via a school system that already does things in a way that does not work for a substantial amount of the students in the country.

> This is a contradiction, if hours of instruction don't increase test scores, then the approach of increasing the length of the school day will have nothing to do with providing better test score outcomes.

It's not a contradiction. Increasing the hours of instruction incidentally decreases the amount of time spent outside of school, which does increase test scores.

You suggested having more accessible child care as an alternative, but that would have to be carried out by the HHS, right? The educational establishment is solving the issue using what tools they have available (namely, longer school hours).

"decreases the amount of time spent outside of school, which does increase test scores"

Do you have evidence of that or is it something you assume should be true?

Internationally, more school hours is weakly correlated with lower achievement, not strongly correlated with higher.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/13/more-school-...

For example, Poland has 595 hours of instruction, far less than most countries, and has very high academic achievement.

Finland, Norway, Australia all have below average hours and yet do better than average.

Mexico mandates 1058 hours and has among the worst scores internationally.

Based on actual empirical evidence I have seen over the years, the claim that more hours in school increases scores is false and unsupported by evidence.

No, I have no evidence. I'm just basing it on common sense. If you spend any time in American inner cities, you will quickly learn that it is not a place that you would wish any child to have to grow up in. The more time you can keep them away from that environment, the better, even if it is by mandating longer school hours.

The subculture of urban America is fundamentally broken. It is not really comparable to other countries' subcultures, with the possible exception of Gypsies in Europe.

Well, if you spend time in some inner city schools and school systems, you can see that being at school vs. being at home isn't a solution to the overall problems in those communities wrt poverty, health care access, and a bevy of other things. Longer school days in such environments won't really do anything for those communities.

And that's where you're wrong. In a well-managed school, there is a significant environmental difference between school and home.

> "Breakfast food programs originate"

Ok? I mentioned breakfasts because it's a successful program that's delivering results and underscores the distinction between what can look, on paper, like "Administrators want to throw more hours of instruction at students" and what is, in reality, more about schools deriving results from decidedly non-instruction services.

But good on the BPP for creating a positive social program and good on the school administrators who took a successful model and pushed it out to even more students.

> "This is a contradiction"

No, it's drawing a distinction between "instruction" and "school hours". To give context to seemingly counter-intuitive policy proposals.

> "test scores are not a reliable way to gauge student learning and success."

Agreed. And, again, I'm not promoting The Way It Should Be. I'm giving context to The Way It Is. And, tragically enough, US schools aren't measured by outcomes, they're measured by test scores. Until that changes, any hypothetical administrator who prioritized outcomes over test scores would either have to mask that priority and sell every policy based on some impact on test scores, or find themselves replaced. [1]

> "those issues need to be addressed in a direct way rather than try to provide band aid fixes via a school system"

I absolutely agree. And I vote for such policies every chance I get. But, until my neighbors and countrymen deliver a mandate for solutions [2], I'm not about to advocate we do nothing nor chastise and criticize schools for doing what they can around the edges.

I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. I'm saying school systems are in a horrible bind. They can do this and have some limited positive impact, they can follow a Scandinavian model which would exacerbate the effect of the socio-economic problems, or they can do nothing and sit idly as the human suffering continues to mount.

It's all just context one needs to keep in mind when they look at US school "reform" proposals and wonder why we'd (continue to) push things that are at odds with how better-performing school systems operate.

[1] Often enough, around here, they find themselves replaced by Charter Schools who are unaccountable for outcomes or test scores and are measured only by profits.

[2] At this point it's fight-enough to defend what limited solutions currently exist.

For the breakfast programs issue, I wanted to point out an important aspect of the history of those programs: they were created to respond to a need that those communities had by individuals outside of the country or state government school system.

When we talk about the issues with US education, we have to realize that many of those issues are caused or made worse by the top-down nature of implementing policy. As you rightly point out, those policies don't necessarily (or usually, even) come from within communities to address their specific needs. Indeed a lot of current state and federal policy revolves around more top down influence: using standardized tests to remove individual consideration of performance, replacing experienced teachers with less experienced teachers to reduce money spent on salaries and benefits, attempting to template-ize teaching curriculums instead of relying on teacher's professional training and experience, opening more state and federal dollars to charter schools (which as you point out have less oversight and accountability even by current metrics).

When we talk about the Scandinavian model, those things are essential to helping to address the needs of communities most harmed by the aforementioned policies. We need more professionalism from staff, more opportunity for people in those communities to shape the programs that serve students. School systems were never designed to be social services institutions that attempt to alleviate all of the social ills that exist in the community. Since schools currently do not accomplish that kind of a mission, to increase the school day and push for more time in school is a form a punishment where you are intentionally removed from your community, family, and friends for simply existing in a poor community (a community that is likely to be color, no less).

> fewer hours, have less bureaucracy, and cost less to operate

Sounds like the US healthcare system, tax system, etc.

I read the first hour's worth of comments here before posting my own comment. I attended the official United States Department of Education webinar announcing these newly released results this morning before posting this news report here. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News four years ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

after earlier years of noticing that Paul Graham writes from time to time about education policy issues. I'm glad to see that so many HN participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. Plainly, the United States continues to outperform a lot of countries, as it has throughout my lifetime. The countries that have disastrous education systems seem to be especially concentrated among the countries of the Arab League, and to a lesser degree in Latin America.

On the other hand, the report reveals some examples of countries that have consistently outperformed the United States throughout the time that TIMSS testing has occurred (since the mid-1990s) and since PIRLS testing has occurred (since the turn of the current century). Most of those countries are concentrated among the newly industrialized countries of east Asia, with a few other conspicuous strong performers to be found in Europe.

A key difference between United States schools and schools in countries with better performance: American teachers show a method and then expect students to repeat applying the method to very similar exercises, while teachers in high-performing countries show an open-ended problem first, and have the students grapple with how to solve it and what method would be useful in related but not identical problems. From The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (1999):

"Readers who are parents will know that there are differences among American teachers; they might even have fought to move their child from one teacher's class into another teacher's class. Our point is that these differences, which appear so large within our culture, are dwarfed by the gap in general methods of teaching that exist across cultures. We are not talking about gaps in teachers' competence but about a gap in teaching methods." p. x

"When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by how different they were from the other country's lesson. When we watched a Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features of U.S. lessons--that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of cross-cultural comparisons. They allow us to detect the underlying commonalities that define particular systems of teaching, commonalities that otherwise hide in the background." p. 77

A great video on the differences in teaching approaches can be found at "What if Khan Academy was made in Japan?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHoXRvGTtAQ

with actual video clips from the TIMSS study of classroom practices in various countries.

We would reasonably expect a wealthy country, like the United States, to get return on its investment in education

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

but the United States somewhat disappoints that expectation compared to other countries, on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Noteworthy about the United States is that it lags compared to several other countries in how well the school system meets the needs of the most disadvantaged learners in the country.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

What jumped out at me from the report released today, as summarized in the official Department of Education webinar, is what a large gain in results on international testing is found among students in Iran. Iran is still poorer than many other countries, despite its inherent wealth from petroleum exports, but despite all that is dubious about current governance in Iran, it appears that educational provision there is improving, as gauged by the international testing programs. (I note too that Iran is becoming a consistent contender in the International Mathematical Olympiad,

http://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx

at a much higher level of mathematical performance.)

As usual, my home state, Minnesota, which is one of several states that participates in TIMSS as a separate statistical unit as well as in the aggregate national ranking of the United States, is outperforming the United States median score. Even at that, there is a growing market here in Minnesota for the services I provide, supplemental mathematics education at a more advanced level than the school curriculum of suburban school districts, which parents who are aware of international standards are happy to pay for out-of-pocket even after paying their taxes to the local school system. (More information about that appears in my user profile.)

I would sum up today's news by saying that the United States is by no means doing as badly as it possibly could, but policy makers in the United States would be well advised to develop curiosity about how to do better in education. Living overseas a decade ago opened up my eyes to what is possible. For the amount of resources invested in public education in the United States

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

(more than what is invested by India and China COMBINED, even though each has a larger school-age population than the United States), education policy makers should continue to look around the world for the best path to good results. 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."

The full reports just released today on TIMSS and PIRLS testing are linked at the United States Department of Education website.

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls/

Do you think that recent changes to schooling (e.g. NCLB) are stymieing strong learners from having better results than they may have had, say, ten years ago?

It seems like the data in the "Teaching math to the Talented," article refutes that assumption.

"In short, the incapacity of American schools to bring students up to the highest level of accomplishment in mathematics is much more deepseated than anything induced by recent federal legislation."

According to the article, the biggest gap is at the high performing level, not the average.

"Although the average scores among American students were not significantly lower than the top performers, several nations far outstripped the United States in the proportion of students who scored at the highest levels on the math and science tests."

This may suggest that America's elite students are either 1) unable to get the kind of education that leads to high math and science scores, or 2) uninterested in putting in the amount of effort it takes to get past a certain level of competence.

Here's the forbes list of highest paid careers...

http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/04/jobs-careers-compensation-l...

8 of the top 10 are medical specialties. The other two are orthodontists and CEOs.

Here's a link to the amount of math and physics typically required for a med school application.

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/medical-school-admissi...

(posted again here)

• two semesters of biology with laboratory (up to four semesters at some schools)

• two semesters of inorganic chemistry with laboratory

• two semesters of organic chemistry with laboratory

• two semesters of math, at least one in calculus

• two semesters of physics with laboratory

• two semesters of English and/or writing

So, "at least one semester of calculus". UCSD (my alma mater) had an easier track of physics that required an easier track of calculus that was acceptable for many of the med-school bound bio majors (while not one of the most elite undergraduate universities, UCSD does have a very high rate of admission to med school).

You do need to take a few tough courses (ochem and so forth), but all in all, I think the highest paid fields tend to reward moderate skill in the sciences, but not exceptional mathematically ability.

In short, it doesn't appear that access to the highest paid professions in the US requires a tremendous amount of math. You can't ignore it, but a single semester of calc seems to do the trick.

I've heard OChem is tough... I haven't taken it. But perhaps US students are behaving rationally by rationing the amount of effort they put into math and physics?

The reason why pay is so high in the medical field is because it is highly government regulated, and is an anomaly in that regard. Not only is the number of medical students admitted each year tightly regulated (reducing the supply), the costs of medical treatment are paid indirectly (via insurance companies), obscuring costs and making it easier to raise rates.

If regulations were loosened, you'd end up with a similar situation to what you see with lawyers now - a lot of students graduating from law school and finding out that most lawyers these days don't actually make that much (or can't even find a job).

I agree, and the "cartel" that you've described carefully limits the number of foreign physicians who can compete with Americans. I agree with you about law at the middle to low end, but clearly the very elite schools still often lead to lucrative careers - and this is another field that clearly has established barriers to entry that make it more difficult for foreign firms or lawyers to compete.

Elite science and engineering programs, on the other hand, seem to be going in the opposite direction from the AMA and ABA - the graduate schools in these fields are willing to enroll a majority of international students, and the US senate is talking about "stapling a green card" to every graduate degree in a STEM field (but not to every JD, MD, or DDS). And even if they did include the professional degrees, the respective professional organizations are empowered by the US government to severely limit how and where they can practice.

All that said, I think this simply lends more support to my original point, which is that US citizens have discovered that the fields that require heavy science and math often put them in the path of competing with very talented immigrants and international students, whereas fields that require less math are more lucrative and offer a safe haven from international competition.

It may not be a free market at work, but it clearly is a rational and expected response to market conditions created by government policy.

In short, if you're a very talented US citizen who wants to maximize the return on the effort you put into education, it is rational to get a little bit good at math, but there isn't much of a premium on getting really good at math relative to what the professions offer. If you're an international student who aspires to immigrate to the US, on the other hand, getting really good at intensive math and science fields is a high probability way to gain access to the US market.

Medicine is profitable because it is potentially ~extortive, even correcting for government regulation.

ie, "your money, or your life"? is the negotiating dynamic.

Note this is also historically why Lawyers ("your money, or your life"?) and investment bankers ("your money, or your life/company"?) are also highly remunerative careers, at least traditionally.[1,2]

_______

[1] It helps also that in addition to negotiations under proximate duress, there is a highly exclusionary hiring process (a/k/a guilds or qualifications to be admitted into "the professions" etc).

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=hold+up+problem

I don't think that's a valid argument. You could say the same thing about the food industry - if you don't eat, you die. The food industry (notwithstanding the FDA) is relatively free from government regulation and is quite competitive. Strong competition in any industry inevitably drives prices down.

There can certainly be situations where time is of the essence, but that doesn't explain why an MRI costs thousands of dollars or why a visit to a specialist can cost hundreds for a 15 minute visit.

I don't think that's a valid argument.

-- It's not an 'argument' as much as it is a negotiating strategy/dynamic.

The food case is trivial. Its not the case that you negotiate from a position of massive information assymetry. There are 1XXX variations of healthy diet, for example. Medical, legal, and Banking services are akin to the food case if you were in an alien planet where 90/100 items in the food store or to be foraged were poisonous/deadly to humans, yet indeterminately so. So, you must pay for the 'information' element to not kill yourself (ie, like a local alien guide).

If the issue is information asymmetry, you could say the same thing about car repairs. Most people don't know a thing about fixing their car, and if it's not fixed correctly, they could die. I don't see this pricing issue happening with car repairs though.

I think that with sufficient competition and a system that doesn't require/encourage people to go to the specialists recommended by their primary care physicians, you could significantly drive prices down. There is in fact probably a place for technology in all this, insofar as curating and maintaining accurate statistics on the record of individual doctors in a manner that is easily accessible to all patients. Then you wouldn't have primary care physicians giving referrals to friends from medical school or residency (a change that could actually improve specialist quality).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-up_problem

The stakes are much higher in medicine/law/and finance. But similar "hold-up" dynamics are pretty frequent as low levels in car repairs (classically, taking advantage of women). A more intermediary example is is Home Building (the so-called change-orders, also at play in public works). Its really a combination of information assymetry, high-stakes, and some form of sunk cost or switching/searching costs that are prohibitive. You can't change your builder with a hole in the ground, you can't change your car-repair guy with your car-motor in pieces, etc.

Alas, I don't want to beat the explanation to death. Its not meant to be the sole explanatory variable. I just thought it was useful to be aware of. In the case of healthcare, in particular, I don't dis=agree with the structural market issues (lack of direct pricing, non-transparency, etc.). But if you look at drug pricing, see what they charge for cancer drugs. And look at places like the NHS in britain who won't pay $100k for a course of drugs out of principle.

There is more to the story for those interested in the subject is all.

Completely pointless to perform these comparisons without adjusting for demographics. Finland is so homogenous they don't even keep demographic statistics about ethnicity. In the US, 12.6% of the population is black (and deals with the continuing effects of slavery and systematic discrimination/segregation that ended only 50 years ago), and 16.4% of Hispanic (many of them relatively recent immigrants, as well as being disproportionately in the lower socioeconomic calsses). I don't imagine Helsinki's public schools are filled with 90% minority students of whom 87% are low income, like Chicago's.

The problem in the US is not education. The problem is the education of poor urban and rural childern who are parts of ethnic minorities. In the US, we segregate all of these kids together in schools that spend most of their time suppressing the resulting gang activity. We don't need more teachers, except in the inner cities, or better curricula, or more or less standardized testing, what we need is to tackle inner city and rural poverty and mitigate the effects of segregation that linger from the 1950's.

> The problem is the education of poor urban and rural childern who are parts of ethnic minorities.

Exactly: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

If you break down American students by their ethnicities and compare them to students in the parts of the world their ancestors migrated from, American students always do better or the same. That is, European Americans do better than Europeans, Asian Americans are about as good as Asians, Latino Americans do better than Central/South Americans, and African Americans do better than Africans.

The problem is that there's such a large gap between different countries that despite a performance improvement among Latino and African Americans relative to Central/South Americans and Africans, they drag down the overall American average, bringing America below many countries in Europe and Asia.

I've posted this here a number of times, but it looks like it is still needed. Here are some stats on US performance, broken down by ethnicity:

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

tl;dr White Americans do very well when compared to White Europeans. Asian Americans do roughly as well as east asian nations (a bit worse on math, a bit better on reading/writing).

The bulk of the gap between the US and other nations is caused by Blacks and Hispanics (groups which are uncommon in Europe and Asia) dragging the US average down. I.e., the problem doesn't live in the education system.

Assuming these figures are accurate, how do we address this question in a way that doesn't confront awkward questions of race, ethnicity, and class?

Here's my theory on why so few US children score as advanced level in math:

I have a fifth grader in public school now, and as far as I can tell, schools are nearly incapable of identifying advanced learners, and most teachers don't have the training to teach differentiated math/science. So we settle on curriculums that target the "bottom average." The bright kids get bored and drift away, the slower kids get help, but almost never enough, and the middle group never get properly challenged.

It took two years to get my son math instruction appropriate to his level, and now the school system doesn't seem to know what to do with a 10 year-old who is finishing up Algebra 1. The answer seems to be Kahn Academy, which is not enough. I can't imagine what the battle is like for a single parent with two jobs, or parents who are not native speakers.

  > schools are nearly incapable of identifying advanced
  > learners

I know very little about US schools, but was it not the case that more attention was given to those lagging rather to advanced? The "no child left behind" thing? As I understand it the goal of the program was different, but in reality it turned out differently. Or am I completely off the rails there?

You're correct. But it doesn't work very well for the moderate to very advanced learners, and this leads to fewer kids reaching their capabilities. I don't even call these children "gifted" any more, because school administrators seem to whip out the pitchforks and actively work against "gifted" kids. I wish I were kidding. Massachusetts has ZERO budget for gifted K-12 education. I suppose the private schools will handle that (for those who can afford it), or we'll just ship them in from elsewhere after messing up our own brightest and talented.

Teachers/administrators/schools do not have their funding tied to the improvement of their high-performing students.

This is a natural by-product of the Texas model of educational reform (NCLB/Race to the Top/etc.): teachers cannot be trusted to teach and assess their students where those students might be (with regards to content mastery) so we implement standardized tests which focus attention on the lowest performing students (often overwhelmingly teaching them test-taking skills irrelevant to real life) and thereby reducing the time allotted to core curriculum for everyone. It's a system that only improves academics on a superficial level (raising scores without raising academic mastery) and diverts billions of dollars out of already constrained school budgets to private testing/content material providers (NCLB requires tests and other measures without providing resources to implement them - hence resources must be stripped from other programs or services at the schools).

Standardized testing is orthogonal to focusing on the lowest performing students.

You could use standardized tests and focus on top students just as easily - we just focus on the underperformers because that's what our political culture demands.

I was identified in 1st grade as being an advanced learner (or whatever you want to call it) and my parents were brought in and were told that I had a lot of potential and if they wanted me to succeed and reach my potential they should take me out of the public school system as soon as possible. Very grateful towards my parents that they took the advice.

This article does nothing to convince me that singing or playing math games with my young kids has a causal link to better math, science, or reading performance. Those both seem like signs of parents who are generally involved and likely correlate with lots of other constructive activities throughout the child's life (like caring about how they're doing in school) that could be the real reason for why the kids do better at a later age.

The U.S. has no past of consistently placing among the 'best' in the world as measured by standardized tests. We are not 'losing competitiveness' due to these countries because they are smarter. The United States' emphasis on allowing mistakes in the business world more than make up for the fact that our students don't win at math test scores. The United States has never placed among the top 5 in math scores, but that didn't slow down progressive movements in the last 60 years. Being consistently good on math tests is frequently a tautology, as you win the award of "best on math tests", but there is little strong evidence of increased innovation and economic growth based on math test scores alone.

I could have told you that without testing. There leaders are running on anti-science platforms and getting lots of press and support for doing so. (Creationism, global warming deniers, forced conception denial.) What about our culture promotes science and math?

Yes, there are pockets that deviate from the mean (like HN for instance) but as a society, the US is pretty anti-intellectual. For me, that's the scariest thing about this country (that I love).

The bright side is that in my opinion it's improved, the status of science and math. Again just the status, the education system pre college is still a mess.

I am going to go out on a limb and say controversially, that it's because education falls under state rights. You just have too many different philosophy of education across all the states. For something so important it should be at a national level.

> For something so important it should be at a national level.

Could you elaborate on this? To me, the conclusion would seem entirely opposite: a single, homogeneous educational policy would prevent meaningful variation, and thereby make the status quo all but immutable.

There are entire states that deviate from the mean.

The reality is that there's a large percentage of the US that is quite dumb, and it drags states with good education systems down.

> and it drags states with good education systems down.

How does poor-quality education in one state adversely affect better-quality education in another?

Ignoring your question, I was speaking more about the whole "US kids are stupid." thing. The average is abysmal, but that doesn't mean that education is bad across the board. Often times, the media makes it out to be so.

I think the author of the parent post to yours meant that if an average or aggregate grade of some kind is calculated for the whole of the USA, then the resulting figure may not reflect the performance of much of the country because of a large variation between the states.

Of course, many of the countries in the study have populations smaller than some states within the USA. Perhaps the comparisons should be conducted at state level?

Which makes one wonder as to what the justification was for aggregating the data in the way it was aggregated, or aggregating it at all in the first place, other than to contrive a statistic to argue for whatever policy position the authors already support.

If the honest purpose of the study is to compare the results of various educational methodologies, I don't see that there'd be a useful unit of analysis any larger than an individual school, and even that might be too coarse. It's true that American states have de jure authority over public schools, and that there isn't any singular "American educational system" to speak of, but even within the individual states, there's still a great deal of variation from district to district and from school to school. Plus, there are plenty of schools outside the conventional public education systems, whose methodologies aren't determined by policy from any government.

It's not that the existence of poor schools makes the students at good schools dumber. It's the horrible quality drop between the good and bad schools makes the statistics misleading. The report could be titled in a completely different way:

"American 8th graders significantly better at science than European 8th graders."

I went to the actual data set ( http://nces.ed.gov/timss/idetimss/dataset.aspx ), selected the 8th grade science tests, and asked for the average score from the European nations. The result was 501 +- 0.9. The American score was 520 +- 2.9.

Now, I'm a bit concerned about their averaging methodology, since I don't think that it's accounting for population density (adding the scores for each country and dividing by the number of countries gives the average returned by the dataset). Still, if we assume that the results are correct, then the United States is doing significantly better than Europe in science education.

Of course, the English and the Hungarians, with scores of 542 and 539, respectively, have nothing to fear for the average American, while Turkey, at 454, should be pretty concerned.

Which brings us back to the diversity of educational quality in the US. While the average might be 520, I wouldn't be surprised, as a Hoosier, to find Indiana down near Turkey's 454. On the other hand, I'd expect Massachusetts to compare favorably with England's 542.

You make a very good point that comparing american total aggregate scores to the best of the individual european states is misleading. We could compare total american average results against total european and show that the US does better, as you have, or even better is to present histograms showing american state by state results and comparing to european state by state results. This makes sense and is a fair way to compare since in both europe and the US, educational policy is mostly determined at the individual state level rather than at the union of states level.

This needs to be emphasized.

US primary education is governed state-by-state. If you compare Massachusetts to the world leaders, you'll discover we have an excellent educational system. If you compare Alabama to the world leaders, you'll see that we are a third-world nation.

States fund education differently. They establish different standards for what children are going to learn, subject by subject. In almost all cases, the basis for these standards is more political (and frequently religiously inspired) than scientific.

Useful reading: http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/the-state-of-state-...

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

Exactly, I suspect many U.S. states (e.g. Massachusetts, Minnesota) perform quite well against their international counterparts, but most news stories never make that point clear (or even at all).

Stories in local media in those states do: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/12/11/mass-8th-graders-among...

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_22168278/states-8th-g...

I would argue that two of the nations listed at the top (Singapore and South Korea) have many similar problems. Both are fairly religious societies and have pretty strong anti-intellectual politicians.

As someone who's attended high school in both the United States and South Korea, I'm also not seeing how the Korean society is any less anti-intellectual - we have moronic interest groups, we believed in fan death for generations, our public schools are absolutely horrid, and we enjoy censoring large swaths of the internet (although admittedly a lot of that is pornography).

The only "leg up" I can think South Korea has is their focus on Hakwons (basically after school tutors).

I could have told you that without testing.

It's hilarious to start a post this way and then complain about anti-scientific attitudes.

I suppose I could have written, "I could have told you that." There are also typos in my post about education. Grrrr...

People constantly complain about schools supposedly teaching creationism, and yet it's impossible to find public schools teaching that, and the private schools that teach it get much higher achievement, disproving the hypothesis that teaching it is leading to worse results.

I wonder how long American exceptionalism can keep taking this battering until the nitwits in the state and national assembly agree that education is important. Pre-K and Headstart is important. Afterschool and tutoring is important And school lunch is important.

I have too many friends that are absolutely struggling to get their kids into Pre-K or headstart only to find out it's been cancelled or enrollment reduced due to budget cuts. Then the only option is private care where at one end of the school it's TV for 6-8 hours and the "good" schools cost almost your entire paycheck.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, "it's goddamn expensive to be poor!"

These stories pop up at least once a month, and it always leads me back to this one: "Why It's Never Mattered That America's Schools Lag Behind Other Countries'"

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/16/why-its-never-mattered-that...

In short: Kids aren't computers -- you can't just feed them facts and formulas then expect them to go apply those in meaningful ways. And economies are led by the top students who usually go to top schools, both of which we have more than our fair share of.

It would be interesting to see the difference in, say, the 20th percentile between countries (those who care, in other words).

Most people are not interested in math, and frankly have little use for it.

I find the use of "still" rather humorous. Still? Like there was a grand expectation of the quality of education to all of a sudden get better. What have we done to improve this? Nothing.

Although this is an important topic, I have some structural concerns with this particular article.

"...Fretting about how American schools compare with those in other countries has become a regular pastime in education circles..."

Gee, patronize much? Talk about disqualifying your own story. Ouch.

"...What’s remarkable is that in all the countries, this concept of an early start is there over and over again..."

I feel as both the problem, how I should feel about the problem, and the answer are all presented to me in this one article. I remember back in the day, reporters used to just report on things. I liked it back then.

I also note that according to some statistics, some native English speakers in inner cities don't read, write, and understand English at the same level as the same-aged kids in foreign cities growing up speaking a different language. We could easily end up in a spot where non-native speakers are used to teach English to kids growing up in the language. Amazing.

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