US adults score below average on worldwide test
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
"America's school kids have historically scored low on international assessment tests compared to other countries, which is often blamed on the diversity of the population and the high number of immigrants."
America's diversity is a creation myth. Outside of New York, it isn't very diverse at all, and compared to Western Europe it doesn't have a very high number of immigrants.
Or does the American definition of 'diversity' only refer to the number of black people? In that case, blaming their numbers for lower test scores is kind of ... racist, isn't it?
This is true. America has an immigrant population of about the same size as Germany or Sweden (at about 12-13% of the population).
> Or does the American definition of 'diversity' only refer to the number of black people? In that case, blaming their numbers for lower test scores is kind of ... racist, isn't it?
I believe that is the main demographic difference between western Europe and America. We do not have a large population of former salves who historically have suffered heavy discrimination. Pointing out the results of historical (and current) racism is not racist.
I suppose if you mean "people who've immigrated within the past two generations". Because, um, historically the US is where Western Europeans immigrated to.
I'm not sure what they are getting at here. High unemployment, being hard hit by the recession and debt crisis, and recently cutting education would not affect adult reading, math, and problem solving skills, so I don't think they are offering those as an explanation for those countries doing poorly on these tests.
Are they implying that because Spanish and Italian results are not as good as their neighbors they were not as capable as handling the recession and debt crisis, and so were hit harder?
Unless you live in big cities, there are also not that many libraries to go to, or the possibility to connect to the Internet in a workable manner.
Sure, when one wants to learn, even with limited resources, they might try to. However, the majority just won't bother.
Oh man, I am from Spain. I believe you need to get out of your country for a while.
There are few places in which I had seen more misery than in the US of America, India comes to mind. There some people live very well, the rest very bad.
Spain is somewhat a socialist country, you are paid for not working, with lots of subsidies, like PER or paro, education and healthcare for the poor are free. Also lots of taxes.
Spain exports food, there is plenty of it. If you are poor there are lots of rural places where you are given land free if you want to work it(as small villages get empty when population gets older).
In Spain(and Italy) family is much more important than in the US, so it has a wide social net.
Not everyone has a family to fall on or gets the expected help from the social institutions.
I travel regularly in Spain and am aware of such situations.
I'll add that a less acculturated population doesn't just offer a worse workforce, but is also likely to choose a worse political class. This is very visible here in Italy.
That's not a twist. It's the exact same statement just 10 years later.
Often it's just access to natural resources or the ability to get access by force. (otherwise I would have to assume that neolithic societies like those we find in Saudi Arabia or Qatar would have one of the best educated populations out there)
As long as the US is able to sustain its military apparatus and educate the top 1% well enough so they can innovate on technology they'll do fine.
It's not as if no one knew that US education for the masses is average at best, but it didn't matter in the last decades, and it probably wont matter in the future.
Edit: And yes, you'll have more innovation if you can attract the brightest students, no matter in which country they happen to be born in.
Sadly the rather smart folk who evidently inhabit these columns (and are meticulous when instructing their computers) sometimes don't set good examples for you. They really should, should they not?
As long as the prosperity is based on top 10% performers (whether educated workforce or economy sector) the system is inherently unstable.The price of natural resources can drop, highly educated people can easily migrate. Consider how much time it took for Detroit to degrade once auto industry shrunk and it became 'uncool' place to live.
First of all, you won't just need a well-educated top 1% (I presume you mean top 1% in terms of innovation ability, not income). You also generally need a skilled workforce in order to implement what you've invented.
Second, it is arguable that the rising inequality in the US is incompatible with long-term economic growth. The economic growth in past decades has been powered not just by innovation: A lot has been due to families going from single to dual income households, working two jobs, and more recently, Americans using their homes as ATM machines.
America, at least for now, has a consumption-driven economy and for that you need consumers to be able to buy things. In order for that, they need sufficient income, and for that income, they have to be able to compete on the labor market. 99% of the labor force doing minimum wage jobs cannot drive an economy.
Worse, increasing technological innovation has eliminated low skill, minimum wage job, and driven a lot of them overseas. Technological innovation needs to be paired with skilled labor if you don't want to face a collapsing labor market down the road.
I specifically disagree, on the basis of trans-national comparisons. The newly independent former colonies that became independent during my childhood and the formerly backward surviving countries after World War II that became developed countries during my lifetime followed various development paths. All over the world, in a lot of pairings of countries with different cultural backgrounds and differing supplies of natural resources, by far the most successful national development strategy was broad education for the masses. Countries that invested education spending in well designed K-12 education for the whole national population had much higher sustained levels of economic growth (and much more success in democratization) than countries that invested equal spending per capita in subsidized national university education for a tiny elite minority. This contrast in national policies is one of the biggest differences between Africa (which had several countries as rich as any east Asian country other than Japan at the time of independence) and east Asia (which has left most parts of Africa far behind in economic growth and democratization since the early 1960s). You really should look up more facts about the rest of the world before giving general policy advice. A good source of information on this subject, even though it is now somewhat old, is the book How the Other Half Dies,
http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-dies-0
a free download of a book published in the 1970s, when these trends were becoming apparent.
"Japanese and Dutch adults who were ages 25 to 34 and only completed high school easily outperformed Italian or Spanish university graduates of the same age."
This observation from the article is not a surprise.
The point is to measure how government policy affects education.
I glanced at the 466 page report for this and couldn't grep a US state... Someone should sell the OECD on an OLAP system so they can easily find this stuff out and publish it. (Or even let journalists and/or the public have direct access...)
I spend a lot of time both in the EU and the US, and find the US remarkably culturally homogeneous compared to Europe. In a country the size of a continent, from coast to coast, you find the same dominant language, traditions, politics, religion, holidays, sports, restaurant chains and stores.
What is the case I imagine, is that one is trained from birth to differentiate the tiny differences within one's own culture and values those so highly, that they look like remarkable diversity, while one doesn't recognize the differences between strangers, and automatically doesn't value them very highly. Can you tell a significant difference between a Slovene and a Hungarian, for example?
This is how 'latin americans' seem like one uniform group, or even 'sub saharan africans' or 'asians', while objectively Amhara from Ethiopia, Hausa from Nigeria and San from South Africa differ far more from each other than say Americans, Italians and Danes differ from each other.
You can keep zooming in, to the most highly developed desk in the most highly developed building in the most highly developed street, in the most highly developed town, etc, and then be content with the absolutely stellar performance if it wasn't for the periphery dragging us down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Europe
From Brussels to the nearest Scandinavian country, Denmark, is a 10 hour drive.
Here’s the paragraph I’m referring to: “But in the northern European countries that have fared better, the picture was brighter — and the study credits continuing education. In Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, more than 60 percent of adults took part in either job training or continuing education.”
(I’ll refrain from making the obvious jokes about Americans being bad at general geography.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_subregion_map_UN_ge...
Also, ‘the Mediterranean’ is not the same as Southern Europe. For instance, France, Monaco, and Corsica are not part of Southern Europe, even though they are in the Mediterranean. Portugal is in Southern Europe, but it isn’t in the Mediterranean.
What about, creativity, critical thinking and arts? Harder to quantify, but just as important.
George Carlin's thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQT7_rVxAE
1. Other countries score better on subject tests than the US on average.
2. This has traditionally been blamed on the USA's high diversity and immigrant population.
3. Cue policy expert giving us a dire warning about how there are no politically tenable solutions to the US education crisis.
4. Cue 2nd policy expert talking about how devastating the skills gap will be on the economy.
Can someone give us a different angle?
The problem is real and will likely manifest itself dramatically over the next century.
Flanders and Australia are every bit as 'incomparable' as Finland and the US, so let's just compare anyway. It turns out there are major consequences for income inequality, and most of the countries listed in the top categories have worked aggressively to reduce it and to alleviate it's consequences through social programs.
Income inequality is a major goal of American politics. The poverty oligarchs farm the poor for votes. This will continue for as long as Americans practice the perversion known as democracy.