Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind 1528
3l1za writes "The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries. A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10. Further, only about 1/3 of US kids reported that they did not feel as though they were good at math, whereas about 2/3 of Koreans reported this--and the Koreans ranked in the top three. 'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
My elementary school (Score:5, Interesting)
Someday, maybe I'll tell you all about our phys. ed., art, and music programs. =)
And in contrast, in Korea... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Statistically invalid samples (Score:4, Interesting)
A Product of Liberalism (Score:2, Interesting)
Bang for the Buck (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very Telling Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
*** WARNING: Blog Pimping Ahead ***
Bingo! I live in DC and see this crap first hand. The students routinely score at the bottom of the national average, the drop out and truancy rates are staggering, and some of the schools, when not falling over from sever neglect, are borderline war zones (and I wish I was exaggerating about this).
Interestingly enough, though, DC public schools are well funded on a per student basis. Near the top nationwide. So if its not money, what's to blame? How about bloated, ineffectual at best / corrupt at worst managment (contract being awarded to the highest bidder, complete lack of any sort of capital works plan). How about criminally low expectations ("Want to be able to graduate without ever stepping into a math class? Go right ahead." "Don't feel like coming to school? Don't worry, we won't consider you truant until you miss fifteen days in a row ). How about a Teacher's Union that cares more about ripping off its members to the tune of $2+ million than the welfare of the children its supposed to teach.
The only good that has come out of DC's education mess is a vibrant private school system that caters to all socio-economic backgrounds. DCPS is proof positive that you can't solve problems by simply throwing money at them.
(You can read the sordid details at the DC Education Blog [blogspot.com])
Top Heavy (Score:3, Interesting)
I know the exact moment math became (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was taught that you can tell if a wall is straight with only a measuring tape.
3 foot out make mark
4 foot up. make mark.
mearsure the distance between the marks, should be 5 feet.
Re:US School System (Score:2, Interesting)
PREACH IT!!!!!!
My wife just recently transferred her passion for Biology/Anatomy/Physiology into a teaching career. It has been a nightmare. The kids are indeed little bastards. Not only the poor kids, not only the rich kids, but almost all of them. NO personal accountability and no parental support. When you have teachers being physically threatened by students and administration and parents doing nothing becasue "they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings" , then of course nothing is getting taught or learned.
What makes this story even worse is my wife teaches in the 4th richest county in the country, and supposedly the top educational county in our state. If this is the best, God help those below!
Re:So? (Score:2, Interesting)
Your reasoning is certainly correct. But it seems sad that as long finances are OK, its OK for a person (or a people) to not bother to improve their mental skills.
Money is certainly nice - but somehow just ending up as a comfartable potato with a fat bank account seems to be a waste of brain
Re:Yeah, but how fast does Linux boot? (Score:1, Interesting)
I could be wrong though.
(But I'm not.)
Canada ranked third (Score:4, Interesting)
And to improve the actual performance of Americans, it's not out of 40 but out of 41 countries. And in the news paper I read this morning, it said US ranked 24th not 28th, except I couldn't confirm with the OECD's site.
Re:Very Telling Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Try this math problem.
School 'A' spends $5 million dollars to put in a state of the art arena with an expected income of $1.2 million in ticket sales annually, side line advertising, and vending sales. School 'B' spends $5 million dollars on a state of the art Math department that will regain $100,000 a year in tuition. School 'A' gets larger attendance and educates far more people, School 'B' sees a 5% increase in Math scores but a decline in attendance. Which school made the better use of the money?
Re:Could you display results in a USA Today graph? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice try. Canada is right up there near the top of the rankings, and our society is as heterogeneous as the US, if not more.
Re:US School System (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, quite a bit of the problem rests on the parents. My mom teaches 3rd grade in an inner-city public school, just outside of NYC. There's a strong correlation between the problem kids and the parents.
This is most notable at the parent-teacher conferences. The kids that do well in the class usually have parents that come to these conferences, and listen to the teacher's descriptions and suggestions. The kids that don't do well typically have parents that never show up at these conferences or otherwise show absolutely no interest in their child's education. One time at such a conference my mother told a student's mother that the student was very poorly behaved. The student's mother's response was "Oh, just smack him upside the head when he acts up like that". A different teacher once saw a mother pull up to the school and unload the kids who were in the trunk (dept. of social services was called on this one). There's actually many more examples of things like this.
Another correlation is that many of the problem students rarely or never miss a day of school. In other words, even if they're sick, their parents still force them to go to school. This is because some of the parents think of school as a free day-care system to get the kids out of the house. While some of these families certainly have both parents work in the day, other families have mothers that don't work but still send the kid to school to keep them out of the house in the day.
It's pretty sad because these factors indicate that many of these children are not getting the proper parental support and nurturing they need, which in turn will lead them to develop a similarly neglectful lifestyle. Some of the parents hated school when they were little and pass on the same hatred of school to the kids. Some parents outright tell their kids not to worry too much about homework or studying.
It's really a sad state of affairs. Part of the problem, that another poster said elsewhere, is that in the USA school is really uncool. And being smart in some area, except gym class, is really uncool. Much of these perceptions are easily fed by the media, eg in commercials, tv shows, and movies. But if we could change these perceptions, IMHO it would really make a difference.
Re:Laziness (Score:3, Interesting)
See, in a case like that, the teacher could assign a project to create a CFD program that implements the reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (with the turbulence model of your choice optional). It'd be even better if people were assigned to create an optimal shape for some given purpose using the program, and then everyone's shapes would be fabricated and put in a real-world test.
Now, you may decide that simulators or part design aren't your thing. That's fine.
In general (not always, but usually), things aren't taught unless they have a significant real-world application. A goal should be to make the real world application abundantly clear.
Re:Completely unsurprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Even worse in minority communities (Score:5, Interesting)
As another nerdy black kid, I have had plenty of time coming to terms with that phenomena. The problem is race perception.
Many very well-meaning people unknowingly sterotype the intelligence and preferences of others. They reserve their limited use the latest "street slang" for you, even if you usually converse with them in near perfect english. They comment that the music at the party sucks and they'd much rather rap hoping to strike a cord. They are nice people, but that attitude is very dangerous when that person needs to interview you for a job or somehow otherwise assess your capabilities.
The sad thing is that after a while people begin to lean towards what is expected of them.
I highly, highly recommend Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004 [amazon.com] . The essays in this book cover race and other socio-economic factors affecting pop culture and race perception, amongst over things. Coves all the new trends, eg. What does the Bohemian movement and modern rap have in common? This was a mind-opening book, the best I've read all year.
Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
And it is stupid to just have students memorize answers (espcially for fundamentals that other subjects build upon)...it's not the right way to teach and that is what the teachers complain about...they aren't being allowed to teach and it makes school boring for both the student(s) and the teacher(s). Please elaborate on how those teachers are wrong...or so you work for a school administration in such a program?
C'mon, just say it. American Kids Are Dumber (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't require enough of your kids in school, and even the little that's required, you don't enforce. Your parental skills are zilch. It's not the teacher's fault that your kid doesn't know crap, it's yours as a parent. If a teacher fails half the class, don't blame the teacher as long as he/she stated the requirements for passing the class clearly at the beginning. And do not curve when you grade. Either you pass or not. Don't do that "Everybody in the class is dumb, so I won't fail them all, I'll geave the least dumb one an A, and curve everyone else." Everyone below 60% (or whatever) fails. Period. Even if it means failing everyone.
Kick your kid in the butt, throw out that Nintendo, chat rooms, demented TV shows, or better yet, sit down with him/her and teach them something. Make sure your kids study for at least 3-4 hours a day (plus or minus depending on how smart they are) and you'll see the results. What? They don't want to? Well, that's where you come in as a parent to make sure you make them. It's either that or let your kids be educated not by books, but by Hollywood and the rest.
The society's (parents' and schools') obligation is to make sure everyone comes out of high school well-educated (even if it means repeating a coupls of years). As for the higher education, well guys, don't dumb it down so everyone gets a chance. What's up with this everybody goes to college, nobody fails crap. Pretty much if you stick around and keep paying, you'll get some kind of a degree. Not everyone is smart enough for college.
Re:Egalitarian? Who are you kidding? (Score:3, Interesting)
The "no child left behind" program is idiotic. I have several nieces and nephews in public schools. Their teachers have set curriculums they must cover each year. If they don't cover everything and their kids do poorly in testing, they get in trouble. So they try to cover everything, teaching just enough of each topic to hopefully get everyone to answer the questions that will be on standardized testing. Hence all the rote learning as mentioned in the article.
And of course there is a price to pay for all this too. There is a significant tax burden to everyone to pay for schools. I am lucky enough to make enough money so that I can send my children to a private school and pay this tax burden. Many parents are not so lucky and have to send their children to public schools. And there's your socioeconomic stratification for you.
However, it's the attitude that "there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE" that is the root of these problems. There are actually a lot of good reasons for students to lag behind. If you have a child whose parents don't care about education, the child will not do well in school. There's nothing the government can do about this. It is up to parents to educate their children, not the government. That means there will be lots of children who don't go to school, but so what? If you round those kids up and force them to school, they won't do well anyways.
Testing is fine, but it should be up to parents to react to the results. If their child is doing poorly, they have options. Chances are there are things that they can do, but if they really think it's the school's fault, they should change schools. If the school is not publically financed, then it will do its best to make sure this does not happen so that it can continue to operate. However, if the parent has no reason to take personal responsibility for their children's education and, just as bad, has no way of taking action about it, then they will just blame the school and will have to rely on the government to do something about it. That is the current situation for the majority of parents/children in this country, and you can see where it's landed us -- in the bottom third.
Re:Laziness (Score:3, Interesting)
Putting it in a personal context (Score:4, Interesting)
Last year, he took a Quantum Mechanics class. At the course's beginning, the prof said the pace would be harsh but he figured most students would cope. Mid-terms showed otherwise. My son earned a 75% on the mid-term. He was depressed until he found out the class average was in the 40's. That made him feel better until he found out that his house mates aced the test. His house mates are from Singapore and Taiwan.
When he asked them how they had managed to ace the mid term, they all shrugged their shoulders and said they'd seen the material in high school. They had seen the material in high school for multiple reasons. [greenes.com] The typical Taiwanese goes to school 220 days out of a year instead of 180 here in California. The school days are longer, typically 8-5 instead of 8:30 to 2:30 here. The elementary teachers have strong math skills as opposed to our elemetary teachers. Parents in Asia expect more from their children than American parents do and the end results are Asian children have been trouncing American children academically for the past 20 years.
In case you're wondering about the source of all the facts cited above, here are the citations. [greenes.com]
The story isn't completely grim however. The United States is nothing if not adaptable. The alternative school movement in the U.S. has made an opening for schools like this one [whitneyhs.net], this one [pacificcollegiate.com] and KIPP schools [kipp.org] to function. As the existence and efficacy of these kinds of options becomes more commonly recognized, American education will shift.
Germany (Score:2, Interesting)
Talk about hurt pride.
Re:And in contrast, in Korea... (Score:2, Interesting)
Finland (Score:1, Interesting)
Finland already led in the PISA 2000 reading assessment, and in PISA 2003 it maintained its high level of reading literacy while further improving its performance in mathematics and science.
It seems like Finnish teenagers are the best both in reading and math skills, but how come the biggest fear in Finnish minds is that Finland does not produce good enough engineers and some day Nokia will move its HQ out of Finland?!?
It's true. In the media this is (and has been) considered as the biggest threat to Finnish economy. No matter what you read, we think we suck. Maybe we do.
Re:And in contrast, in Korea... (Score:1, Interesting)
Nobody is saying that these Asian kids are wunderkind necessarily by their own merits. But the society in which they grow up is conducive to higher academic achievement, as has been proven time and time again.
With that in mind, and assuming you are talking about a North American university, do you not see why the data you've encountered is completely irrelevant? The tendency for young people of all cultures is to "get away with" whatever they can. If laziness is the norm for students at your academic institution, that is will become the new norm for these Asian kids as well.
Re:Could you display results in a USA Today graph? (Score:2, Interesting)
I had to search a while but I found this OECD raport [oecd.org] which among other things has a table of immigration per 1000 inhabitants. You can see right there that the US is in the low end compared to other countries, including many European ones. So this disproves (1) (assuming the data is somewhat correct, it is off course a bit off).
Secondly, most immigrants to European countries come from Third World countries (I'm thinking Arab and African nations here). And I don't know what anybody meant by 3.
But it proves a point that you should be careful about saying "we have x immigrants more", while usually when you break down the numbers it just isn't correct. (in this case the US does have more immigrants in absolute numbers, but this is logical with it being the biggest nation)
Re:It all comes down to the parents. (Score:5, Interesting)
you should, but that's not really the issue. as another poster mentioned, many americans today see the school system as a free baby sitter program. by sending their kids off to school, they feel they are absolved of any responsibility for their kids' educations. unfortunately, things don't work that way. kids learn from their parents, whether the parents like it or admit it. they learn by emulation and observation. if the parents just see school as a way to not have to worry about their kids while the state educates them, then the kids won't care about doing well in school either. and sending your kid to a private school (in and of itself) won't help your kids either. one of the biggest reasons private schools tend to perform better than public schools is that the parents who are willing to send their kids to private schools are more likely actually care about the education their child is receiving, and impress that upon their children.
my parents are both teachers, and i know a lot of teachers both among friends my age and people who are old enough to have been one of my teachers. in general, students who do well in school are more likely to have parents who take an interest in what is going on in school, and poor students tend to have parents that could care less about what happens to their child from the time they leave for work in the morning until they get home.
Re:US School System (Score:1, Interesting)
In my county, students cost the school system around $7000 each. Assuming an average class size of 30, that's $210,000 per class. Where is all the money going?
Re:Putting it in a personal context (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why a lot of us are encouraged to do our undergraduate back home and come here for gradschool. Big labs aren't all that important for your undergraduate studies, however the moment you start doing serious research you need good resources.
Developing countries cannot provide this - and the US benefits because they go to school in their homeland and end up studying/working here. If India wants its brightest and best to stay in India, the focus on research should increase.
This is a very big advantage that the US has - resources do matter a lot.
Here's another possible issue (Score:3, Interesting)
Hauptschule: This is basically vocational school, the idea being that you probably don't get any further schooling after this. In the US it would be to say your intention is to get a highschool diploma, nothing more, with an emphasis on practical clases.
Realschule: This is something like a trade school, idea being maybe some secondary training. In the US, it would be for those that wanted to go on to get an AA degree or the like.
Gymnasium: This is for the university bound kids.
(Note that they do have a couple of alternitives to this kind of schooling as well)
Ok, well if the kids you are testing are the ones int the Gymnasium and maybe in the Realschule but not the Hauptschule, your averages will be much higher. This is often how the testing is done for academic tests, given that the kids in teh lower schools aren't on a track for an academic life anyhow.
I don't have the time to read the whole survey, but I could not find any data on this. They claim that countries sought to include as wide a cross section as possible, but made no specifics to level of education of the students. That a student is in a given grade says nothing. In grade 12 at my high school a student could be in anything from calculus to remedial algerbra. The same is not true of a student in a Gymnasium.
I additonally question these studies because of my personal experience with people educated under a foriegn system. I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department which, as one might expect, has a high percentage of foriegn students, primarly Indian and Asian.
What I continually find is that the Chinese students in particular are very good with memorization and forumlas, but very bad at analysis and application. They can crunch numbers like nothing, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to simple real-world scenarios, they are sunk. For them, being smart is knowing a lot of facts and forulams and being able to mash them together, not being able to synthesize and apply data to the real world.
As you note with your "don't give a fuck" stastic, I'd need to see a lot more controls before I'd consider this meaningful. I'd want to know things like how intelligence correlated to score, and what level of education the kids recieving the scores recieved (at the very least).
Counterexample (Score:3, Interesting)
"Probably not."
The American Attitude Towards Education... (Score:1, Interesting)
Parents don't apply pressure on their kids to do better in school, they feel it's not important. It's common belief among bureaucrats and administrators today that education spending is always positively correlated with educational return -- which is usually true, -- but we have to consider how this money is spent.
Take my school district for example. Last year, several million dollars were spent on bathroom renovations and a NEW gym. So our school has new bathrooms (which have already been wrecked) and a new gym (whose size is comparable to our old one, which is still what we're using for PE). Our teachers, however, are currently going on strike over wages. Several popular courses, including an excellent creative writing class, were cut.
Let's face it, we Americans are too convinced of our superiority. We consider our lax educational policies to be an evolution and laugh upon those who are forced into school 6 days a week. But who can blame us, being painfully wealthy tends to make you stupid.
Re:Laziness (Score:3, Interesting)
What it means to be cool (Score:4, Interesting)
An interesting tangent on this -- my wife grew up in Malaysia, and when she was a kid the smartest kids *were* the most popular. No one wanted to hang out with the kids who were doing poorly in their classes, because they weren't cool. Appearance mattered somewhat, too, but was less of a factor. And all the kids she knew *liked* vegetables -- she was totally baffled when she learned about how everyone in the US "knows" that kids just automatically don't like vegetables, need special kids menus with chicken fingers, etc.. None of her friends were like that. Here favorite food growing up was spinach (still is, actually). Yes, I'm totally serious.
Malaysia has problems of their own that seriously hinder education, like blatantly racist policies controlling access to higher education, but the totally different path to "cool" is worth noting. It's NOT automatic that the "nerds" are unpopular (and then never learn proper social skills...), or even that there is some derogatory name for them.
I wish I could follow this up with some good suggestions for fixing this problem... but I'm kind of lost for answers on that one. The first step is at least pointing it out -- then maybe we can work on building better ways for kids to actually use what they learn to do cool stuff; that should help.
Re:And in contrast, in Korea... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think part of the issue is that "play and fun" usually just means sitting in front of the teevee, playing GTA, or shopping at the mall.
Re:Laziness (Score:2, Interesting)
Electricians don't need a college education, and a union electrician makes $26 an hour out here. With overtime, they make more in a year than I do with a Ph.D. Plumbers and carpenters, and masons all make good money. College is not necessary for a good living. More education or training or apprenticeship after high-school is needed. Sending everyone to college is pointless.
I started college at age 27 after 8 years in the Navy. There were a lot of lost teenage souls on campus who had no idea why they were there. (And this was a land grant school, not a liberal arts joint.) And they did badly, and I suspect many of them are either working outside their majors, or depressed about the job they hate, but are now stuck with. Stay out of college until you know what you want from it. It's too expensive in time and money to screw up.
(P.S. For those who don't know, a land grant university typically has a charter ordering it to pursue subjects of practical use for the original settlement of the area. Thus they focus on agriculture, engineering, teacher education, and hard sciences. Four to six classes of "liberal arts" is all that's required, and at least two of them are English, which you need anyway to write the reports in the other majors. The point is that land grant schools are very goal oriented, and attract practical, goal-oriented people, not the dreamy-eyed mystic types, or the "anguished wailer" class.)
Don't - Know - Shit. (Score:2, Interesting)
First... if you're judging public education by your experience back in the 80's, you don't know shit. Education has changed since then. Some changes for the better, some not, but it's different. So shut up.
Second... if you are judging american schools based on your own experience in one or two schools, you don't know shit. That's a sample that is too small to be statistically significant.
Third... don't compare the US to countries where they get to kick all the dumb kids out by age 12. Some countries do that, you know. And only the bright ones get to go to prep (for college) school. Not all countries do that, but some.
Fourth... don't assume that throwing more money at the problem will not help. It will. Let me explain. We can't get teachers because no one wants the shit pay and lack of respect. Steve Jobs said it best. Pay teachers $100,000 per year. What would happen? We'd have extreme competition and some of the brightest and best people would pursue teaching, instead of a field that actually pays their fucking bills. The more competition, the higher the quality of the candidates. Teaching would be a respected profession. Kids would want to grow up to be teachers. The process of learning would take on a greater meaning because it would be tied to what we americans worship most - the almighty fucking dollar.
Fifth... don't think you can throw the blame at one or two groups. Our entire economy and way of life is based on us continually buying a bunch of shit we don't really need (capitalism.) There are larger factors at play here than just "bad parents." Everyone, including parents and teachers and students themselves, needs to do their part to help.
By the way, I work at a high school. I am doing my part.
Re:keep an eye on your local mathematics curriculu (Score:2, Interesting)
a) -34
b) 576
c) 3.14
d) sheep
The fact that you can answer b) by applying that 12*48 ~ 10*50 puts you a point ahead of an amoebe regarding maths. And will not help you if the answers were 572, 576, 574 (and if you answered 575 you have to check how pair*pair gives an odd).
But I was tutoring EE, and was amazed at the fact that people cannot use the same reasoning when they are not given multiple choices. They would tote their calculators, and drag the constant through the equation (even if it cancels out later, and even if, for all engineering purposes it can be approximated like g=10m/s^2), and in the end arrive at the conclusion that the voltage between two points in a simple schema is 12.11V. Completely failing to understand the point that if the batery is 12V NO voltage in the schema can be grater than that. Simple approximated calculation would give them a ballpark estimate of 12V, which would be more correct. Or, what I hate even more, when they don't understand that EE deals with physical elements, with their own abberations and limitations (yes, your TI-89 shows that the voltage on that diode is 3000V, but it is long gone in the puff of blue smoke before it reaches that level).
Well, that's my pet peeve - people not using common sense.
(And for nit pickers - yes, voltage can be greater than Vcc if there is an active element, or an element with stored energy like capacitor; but that was not the case with simple Kirchhoff law problems I was trying to explain)