U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests
educationnext.org
educationnext.org
This suggestion is highly inconsistent with the data from the article.
Every nation out-performing the United States has a strong and well-funded public school system. Although some have a hybrid model, the hybrid models favor public schools over private schools. And hybrid models hardly constitute "abolishing".
There is also a strong correlation between states (in the US) with high per-pupil spending and states which out-perform the US average [1].
> but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences.
"Same quality, lower price"? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
[1] I am comparing Fig. 1 of the article with the table titled "Current Spending per Pupil" on this page: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...
The other correlation I pointed out does deserve scrutiny, but data-driven decision making is not impossible and this data isn't nearly as bad as you claim. The correlation between high per pupil spending and educational outcomes is not a ground truth and does not hold universally. However, it does hold with surprising consistency throughout time and space).
As an aside: you initially claimed that abolishing public schools will solve our performance problems. You provided zero empirical evidence. It's not even possible to compare the evidence for and against your claim, because you literally provided no evidence.
You're holding other people's opinions to a ridiculously high standard of rigor while selling your own as self-evident.
If the state of affairs is really this bad, if it is impossible to obtain good data and make reasonable predictions based on that data, then your initial post could be nothing except blind faith.
To be fair...
The point of the article is that, in a lot of places across the US, low educational attainment is correlated with ALL family income levels. And the problem is how do you handle a situation like that?
Put another way... even if the poor could get their kids into the top schools via vouchers or what have you... chances are, they would still not get as good an education as their international counterparts. Now there are some states, mostly in the North East and Midwest that buck that trend. But for everyone else... the test results aren't all that stellar regardless of income (or rather, familial level of educational attainment).
The best have already risen to the top. We already have a top 10 who seem to do relatively well. So why, on earth, are we not simply copying them ???
The Minnesotas, the New Jerseys, the Massachesettses, even the Wisconsins... why don't we just take one of these models and install it everywhere? Are kids in California, Washington and Nebraska really all that different from the kids in the old Union states ???
I'm thinking not having anything better to do in the winter might have an effect on scores.
I teach in South-West Western Australia so our winters are cold and wet and the summers are quite dry and hot and it's quite interesting to see the effect the weather and climate has on students (it certainly has an effect on emotional and behavioural characteristics). It'd be interesting to see how comparative students do in different climates.
Some quick looking about only found an article on worker productivity, which isn't really the same thing: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html
Anytime you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you probably don't understand the problem.
In practice, the main problem is that it's very difficult to judge the quality of an education until decades after you pay for it, and so there's a large signalling effect. In the absence of hard quality signals, people (both consumers and those who would judge the consumers, like colleges or jobs) rely on price as a proxy, assuming that the effect you mention holds.
For me, the most interesting market in the economy today is credentialing. That's what people actually pay for in higher ed, and that's the one keystone you need to topple for a revolution in education to happen. Unfortunately, it seems to take decades for a credential to gain legitimacy, because most of its value lies in the unconscious beliefs of the public.
Lots of other countries and US states seem to be doing very well without MOOCs, which indicates there are probably more fundamental changes the US can make.
That aside...
MOOCs seem like a panacea. Individual experiences with MOOCs help reinforce this perception for many reasons:
* Most people take MOOCs in areas where they have previous experience or are intrinsically motivated.
* MOOCs tend to cover technical material, which is far easier to teach than sophisticated reading or writing.
* MOOCs tend to cover introductory or intermediate university material, and assume a certain level of intellectual maturity that many teenagers do not yet possess.
* Many high school courses are far more difficult (for high schoolers) than university-level courses (for high school graduates). In particular, most CS 101 courses probably rank somewhere between high school Algebra I and Algebra II courses in terms of time and intelligence required to master the concepts (for relevant age groups).
Effective instruction at the secondary level requires knowing your students and reacting to their individual strengths and weaknesses.
Most often, and especially at the secondary school level, it's impossible to teach effectively without actually spending lots of time in front of your students. "Delivering the content" is not enough -- you have to determine (in real time) whether students understand and help fill in gaps.
So although MOOCs can probably play some role in improving secondary education, they will never replace the classroom teacher.
I've been told that students at a 3-year high school in China will learn all the new content in the first 2 years, and the only thing they do during that 3rd year is review and practise tests.
Not to say that we shouldn't care about average competency, but these kinds of studies that explicitly or implicitly portend imminent doom for the US miss the mark.
I wonder what's better for the economy of a country as a whole - a high number of moderately well educated people or a good number of extremely well educated people but a high number of poorly educated people.
The analysis of this study dovetails with other analysis of PISA rankings, about how the top 10% of students in Japan and Korea have significantly better math proficiency than the top 10% of math students in the US, how their top 20% is better than the US's top 20%.
This is what the data says and the analysis of the data. The typical reaction is of your type - you don't even read the article title, assume it is saying average rankings are below, and repeat the Panglossian idea that the US children of the well-educated who are ahead of most US students are on top of the world, or near it. The data shows otherwise. Even non-stringent observation shows otherwise, if you take a look around at who is getting doctorates in mathematics and the like at top American universities.
This issue is familiar to Americans like me who have lived overseas and have learned the local language of another country and have read the math textbooks available there. Better instruction can produce better educational results--and for less money besides. The top student issue is illustrated also by results from the International Mathematical Olympiad[2] and other international academic competitions. The United States has a huge population base, and it has many families in which the children are brought up by parents who are first-generation immigrants who received their own primary and secondary educations in other countries. (Such children do conspicuously well in academic competitions in the United States.) And the United States is wealthy, a heritage from the good governance structure set up by the United States federal Constitution. But even at that, the United States national team can be beat at the International Mathematical Olympiad by countries that have many fewer people and much poorer economies. Some countries have a very impressive group of top students.
Is America rich enough that many young people here feel they can be complacent about their futures? Sure it is. But isn't it an especially good use of wealth to gain more knowledge and more ability to make the world better for everyone? Why can't the young people of the United States grow up with a sense of purpose about improving themselves and the world around them, as earlier generations of Americans apparently did?
As to the public policy point, Minnesota (where I live) was the first state in the United States to have public school open enrollment, the first to have any charter schools (and it still has more charter school places per capita than most states), and the first state to have a comprehensive, state-funded program to allow dual enrollment in colleges or universities by students completing the last two years of high school.[3] (We also have a flexible homeschooling statute, which I take advantage of as a parent.) Even at that, we here in Minnesota have a long way to go to reach the level of the top-performing countries. But any state that doesn't have as much flexibility in schooling choices for families needs to follow Minnesota's example right away. More choice and flexibility in the state education system is definitely a good idea and worth imitating in the other states in the United States.
[1] http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Cha...
(You can also download the full report for more context, but that download is slower.)
The problem with American youth is not that they work only 4 hours a day, but they want results equivalent to that of someone who is working 14 hours a day. Their expectation is that government somehow should come up with policies to create jobs.
Reflecting on American history it appears that the country was built by men and women with their own ambitions and strength. Instead of appreciating that the youth is getting into a some kind of entitlement thinking.
"as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding"
Students don't have to do that anywhere. And they don't do that anywhere. I have lived in east Asia (and my three older children all have) and I challenge your assumption that pupils there study for fourteen hours a day (they most certainly do not) or that everything about schools there is a "pressure cooker environment." There are trade-offs involved in living anywhere, rather than living somewhere else, but you really owe it to yourself to find out more about how effective primary teaching is done before concluding that it shouldn't be tried in the United States. As they say in Chinese-speaking countries, "百聞不如一見" (hearing about something a hundred times isn't worth seeing it once). I offer for your reading pleasure a reading suggestion, full of food for thought, namely Liping Ma's book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States.[1] Reviews of this book appear below the book link.
Anyway, we can get other reality checks on this issue by seeing what people who have studied the United States school curriculum say about secondary schools here, for example "What’s Holding Back American Teenagers? Our high schools are a disaster."[2] The last federal sample survey on the issue resulted in news reports such as, "School is too easy, students report,"[3] suggesting that a lot of learners here don't appreciate dumbed-down school lessons that waste their time without providing a return in new knowledge and skills.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf
http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2695436?uid=2&uid=4&si...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/high_sc...
[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-...
Because there are no jobs in that. Cynicism and snark aside, nowadays the purpose of education in America is to get you a job: for a lower-class student, to get a job at all, for a higher-class student, to get a cushy job.
Actually, doubling back, the purpose of education in most of the world is to get you a job. The number of people who learn just to improve themselves and the world is, well, really tiny, actually.
Either the rest of the world has other, more noble purposes, which helps their children to learn better. In this case, should we think about purpose? Or the rest of the world has the same goals and just reaches them better than in US. In this case - should we learn how to pursue them properly?
This all is in case US still believes the real education is important. May be it isn't? May be better education doesn't lead to a better life?
They then go on, as always with these type articles, to compare the US to countries the size of Massachusetts.
Because even compared to Massachusetts, which is anything but homogeneous, the US at large does miserably.
But actually ... fairly representative of most other states. If anything... Massachusetts should have MORE education problems than places like Nebraska, Washington and Missouri.
If you look at the section titled "Breakdown by State", the numbers for Massachusetts and New Jersey are far and away larger than the numbers for ... say ... Nebraska and Washington State. Yet Massachusetts and New Jersey are top 5 performers on international tests.
This group of countries is the U.S. plus the "third-world countries," the US+3 group (as I call it).
You lost me on that one.
This really isn't about politics... since both Democrat and Republican states seem pretty much bad. I think this may be more indicative of a reticence, on a societal level, to value education.
It wasn't supposed to be really truly about Democrats or Republicans, I mean shit look at the South, I was mostly mocking the kind of attitudes you'll find out here in CA regarding those who live in say North Dakota.
That does not fit into any political narrative.
1. CA is a more of socialized state 2. CA has more diverse population, to get it straight, more Hispanic and blacks?
or something else?
Similarly, if you look at the scores for students eligible for free or reduced price lunches, California is at 264 and Texas is at 279.
Overall, the demographics of the two states are not that different; see http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2013/#/comparison-... near the bottom. The big difference is that California has a lot more Asians and Texas has a lot more blacks. But even the fact that Asians on average score higher than blacks on these tests is not enough to overcome the fact that on an race group by race basis Texas scores so much better than California.
Theories as to why abound; everyone has their favorite theory that matches their politics, which makes me slightly doubt all of them. I'd really like to know what's going on there, though, because it seems like Texas schools are consistently doing something less wrong than California ones...
ACT and SAT aside, in 3rd through 8th grade just about every state gives a different high stakes test.
No national body approves these tests, and that's just in America.
How the hell can you compare disparate American test data with disparate worldwide test data?
As for how they can compare the NAEP results with PISA results...well...that's also in the article (http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIV_4_peterson_method....).
The US and international scores are from PISA tests. This is mentioned in the first sentence of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu...
The state data in the article comes from NAEP... which is a national US test
If I were to challenge the results, I would ask 1) Is the test reasonable? 2) How aligned is US education with the test compared to the rest of the world? For example, perhaps in the US students are taught subjects by grade, so may be less familiar with algebra when tested than a student in a country that gradually teaches many subjects. 3) How seriously do the students in a given country take the test? For example, if there are no consequences or questions of national pride, maybe US students simply don't care as much about the test.
But, if we assume that the answers to these questions are not enough to explain the differences, the US has a serious problem. There is usually a mythology in the US that if you look at our "best" schools, they are competitive with the rest of the world. What this study does is to look at the results of PISA broken down by the educational achievements of the students' parents (which may also serve as a proxy for wealth). Here, it finds interesting patterns within the US (for example, Texas is one of the best states in the US for students whose parents have a low level of educational attainment, whereas MA is where you want to be if your parents have a high degree of educational attainment)--it also finds that even in the top performing state (MA) that if you look at students whose parents have the highest level of education, they do not compare favorably with the best in the world.