U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science

Sounds familiar, right? Seems like we're always sucking at math. We hear these international test scores stories over and over. But not so fast. I think there's a long-running and highly unwarranted tendency for the US to beat itself over being bad at math/science.

I'm always really skeptical of these stories for a couple of reasons. One is that these tests are almost never given to a fair cross-section of students. NPR to its credit actually addresses this, although it's buried in an update at the end of the article:

In other words, it's not a fair representative sample, since you're leaving out the Chinese students living in poorer, rural areas. The same effect happens when you look at SAT scores. Adjusted SATs in the US have dropped dramatically since the 50s. Are we dumber? Not really. In the 50's only the very best (and well off) students went on to college and took the SAT.

There's are also issues of whether the test questions match the country's curriculum goals -- this is a bit like the "teaching to the test" issue. Suppose Country A teaches graphing trig functions in 7th grade and solving quadratic functions in 8th grade, while Country B teaches graphing trig functions in 8th grade and solving quadratic functions in 7th grade. If we give the students a test that's heavy on solving quadratic equations to 7th graders, B will crush A. But that's not an indication that B sucks at math education. And what about country C that teaches probability theory instead of solving quadratic functions, because, hey, we have fancy calculators for all that boring busywork?


Let's go down memory lane. Sputnik gets launched in 1957, and the US collectively loses its ****. Suddenly, Americans imagined themselves falling behind a technology race against the USSR. In 1983, the famous Nation at Risk study came out, describing in apocalyptic terms the decline of American education (which turned out to be a product of a statistical error that's known as Simpson's paradox). Anyone who grew up in the 80s will remember how the Japanese were going to rule the world with their strict cram schools. Well, that didn't quite pan out. Now the Chinese are supposedly going to take over the world.




Frankly, I think we need a long-overdue reality check. Of course we have serious problems with our system. But the fact is, despite 60 years of reports about the failing American educational system, we're still wafflecrushing the world in science and technology in every field. Asian and Indian universities are notorious for academic fraud and crappy scientific journals. The very best Chinese students go to American universities. We're working on sending yet another probe to Mars while the Chinese are still working on a manned moon landing.

So like, everybody chill the **** out with the test scores and ****. We got this.



For further reading:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...97oct/fail.htm

Yeah but in math, physics, and engineering more than half of those "American" papers are actually published by foreign-born people. This is also true to a lesser degree of fields like chemistry and biology.

Regardless of whether or not its hysteria, the "we got this bro" attitude is probably unwise as there is important dialogue to be had about failures and flaws within the education system as it exists today.

Very good post. This is something I had kind of suspected but hadn't really looked at too deeply and your analysis makes a lot of sense. This panic mongering probably does a lot of harm by pushing people to support NCLB and other teach-to-the-test education curriculums.

We can have the best higher education system in the world and still have a pretty ****ty primary education system.

It's basically because the US lacks a culture of education, except for certain demographic groups (Jews, Asians, especially first generation, etc.) You can't instill a culture of learning or knowledge in the US by having kids take a couple of more tests or hovering over teachers.

I bet south korea would smoke the US in math even if they had 60 student classes. It's like Sparta vs Athens in hand to hand combat.

Foreign born people who are now american.

BOOM. GOT EM!

lol remember when you called me racist?

yeah. bout that...

This.

4 or 5 years ago, the PISA scores (eyeballing stds and means, then merging data with test scores by zip codes in US) for US suggested our top 80% compared VERY well with the top 80% of other countries.

That's not the case anymore. The lag in the poorest 20% is starting to percolate into rich suburban areas by lowering expectations state wide and nationally.

We need to fundamentally alter the system. The demographic segregation of our school systems has effectively segregated students by socio-economic status and by race. This is not ****ing cool.

So asians and jews don't prioritize education? Are they just inherently superior in intelligence? Who's the racist now?

He said something positive about Asians and Jews, that's not racist.

One thing I want to add is that it's really hard to quantify national science output. Never trust figures that just show #s of Ph.Ds or publications because quality >>>> quantity in science --and I've seen loads of hysterical news reports showing China outproducing the US in Ph.Ds. A Ph.D. from a good Chinese university is usually the equivalent of a master's from a middle-tier US university. Publications are even worse, because there are loads of junk journals that will publish nearly anything.

It's been my experience working in the field that the US still dominates the field and I think it's also encouraging that organizations like NASA, NIH, NIST, the American Chemical/Physical Society are basically regarded as the nuts by scientists.

This is true, but still the grad students and profs aren't all from outside the US. Somehow we're getting kids ready for srsbusiness engineering classes.

This is a fair point. I'm not arguing that we should stop worrying about making our educational system as good as we can.

Does it really matter? Its not like average or worse people are ever going to have jobs that require more math ability than simple addition and subtraction. And they are definitely never going to be jerb creators.

Limiting the ability of legitimate geniuses from abroad to enter the USA #1, however, is the stupidest thing ever, and it matters.

Algebra skills matter for virtually everyone. Even cynically, multiplication, division, and exponentials (interest rates) are essential for everyone. I would also argue that basic science literacy, including not only knowledge of fundamentals of science but also knowing how to apply the scientific method, is extremely valuable for everyone. Most people don't have to be able to do particle physics, sure, but if more people had the ability to develop hypotheses and design controlled experiments to test those hypotheses, even about something rudimentary like, "Does this hand cream work for me?" they'd be a lot better off.

Algebra skills are completely irrelevant to the jobs of probably 30-50% of American workers. Although this claim is better than what you often hear people say, that calculus is beneficial to everyone. Sorry, hairdressers don't ever use algebra let alone calculus.

You're just wrong about this. Even hairdressers need algebra for simple every day tasks like budgeting.

Without algebra skills, they'd be massive dogs to run a successful business of their own too.

It's still a great way to learn abstract thinking, problem solving, and logic. And BTW, some of those kids are going to find that they're good at math and might want to pursue that.

Anyway, you could make the same argument for 95% of the stuff you learn in school. Ever needed to know anything about Shakespeare for your job? Is that education still useless?

Seems like budgeting can be done with just arithmetic.

Should Shakespeare be taught in high school? Absolutely not, doing so is completely absurd and the archaic language alienates even the good readers. I loved to read in high school and despised Shakespeare because I had to pore over every single page. Because it is basically written in a different goddamn language.

Budgeting is inherently an algebra problem. It's a simple algebra problem, but it's algebra.

lol commoners.

You realize I could make the exact same argument with any other author, right?

Make that argument for JK Rowling then.

http://harrypotter.scholastic.com/glossary/

I once had an employee bitch about how much he hated math and had no need for it after I tried to explain some very basic geometry to him.

I work in construction. These are the people building your homes and highrises. America is doomed.