Here’s why other countries beat the U.S. in reading and math

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/11/heres-why-other-countries-beat-the-u-s-in-reading-and-math/?tid=socialss

by Libertatea • 14 years ago

31 52 14 years ago

washingtonpost.com

eggoa• 14 years ago

Actually, I'm just surprised that the U.S. is ahead of Germany in both categories. Naiveté on my part?

wolfgke• 14 years ago

As far as I know (I was born and live in Germany, but please correct me if I'm wrong) the German education system is known for a great variance in performance of pupils.

This means there are some pupils that perform very well, but also some that perform very poorly. These extremes are more pronounced than in comparable countries.

Many people say that the education system is cementing the social hierarchy: if you are very well educated, your children will mostly become the same, but it is rather difficult for children to move up the social ladder if they have poorly educated parents.

Because there are many top performers the German economy has enough skilled personnel to be competitive (what to do with the less well educated is a much-debated topic - because of the distinct German health and welfare system the status-quo leads to less social tensions than it would probably in the U.S.).

TLDR: it is plausible that the U.S. is ahead on average. The German education system is probably better on the top performers and worse on the bottom performers.

luu• 14 years ago

I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation.

Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.).

If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/

A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd...

[2] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...

adjwilli• 14 years ago

How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.

pflats5• 14 years ago

Glibly, all of it. Immigrants make up 98.9% of the United States population as of the latest census.

joshdick• 14 years ago

The U.S. looks bad compared to other countries because we have more poor children than they do. If you compare our middle-class and upper-class children to theirs, we look a lot better.

The U.S. does not have an education problem; it has a child poverty problem.

matrix2002• 14 years ago

This is exactly right. The US system has it's flaws, but other systems are just as bad or worse.

The problem is the divide between rich, middle class and poor. Poor kids just don't score nearly as high on tests than middle class and wealthy kids.

Of course, I don't have the stats or evidence, but I suspect if you took out our (USA) bottom 20% and the other countries bottom 20%, you would see a much more even comparison.

Just a theory.

newbie12• 14 years ago

In turn, the child poverty problem is related to whether a child has both parents in the household.

http://www.heritage.org/childpoverty

bitdestroyer• 14 years ago

The socioeconomic impact on students is definitely incredibly important.

While I know this is anecdotal, my wife is a reading/psychology teacher at a high school in Florida that is widely considered one of the worst, if not the worst, in the state. It's incredible the ways in which the students socioeconomic state plays into their ability and/or desire to learn. Everything from the students parents not being capable of or not willing to contribute to their educational growth to peer pressure from other students to not stand out (which includes appearing smarter than others, sadly).

My wife is lucky to be in a position where she can teach them in small groups of 1-3 students and get them away from that peer pressure. In these circumstances, and when someone is believing in their ability to do better, they really do excel and are incredibly bright. It's just like you said, their socioeconomic position has stacked the cards against them for a very long time and it becomes easy to fall into the same rut everyone else is in within those areas.

dspeyer3• 14 years ago

IMO and Putnum are comparing the best of each nation. This article is comparing the median of each nation. I wouldn't expect a strong correlation there. Both matter.

kenjackson• 14 years ago

Putnam is just a US competition.

IMO is international. And while the US does well, we haven't won since the mid-90s. In that same period of time China has won it like 15 times.

And the last time the US won the ACM Programming Contest is probably equally as long. And there we typically will only place one or two schools in the top 10 at best (although it's not a collection of our best programmers -- it is by school).

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like kids are held back in the US primarily by the curriculum. I immigrated to the United States having grown up in a couple of commonwealth countries and I was shocked to go from a school where I had been learning basic trigonometry to a school where basic algebraic principles weren't even taught until the next year. So whenever I see a discussion about all the social issues that impact education, I have to roll my eyes and wander why people just aren't seeing the kids are capable of more. Thoughts?

flatline• 14 years ago

We have a subculture of anti-intellectualism and cottling our kids that is perhaps a little less prominent in the countries that out-perform us? Fitting in socially is also heavily emphasized in the US system, so early advancement for high performers is generally frowned upon.

tdfx• 14 years ago

I think the biggest cultural problem we have is the constant search and glorification of the prodigy/wonderkid and the consequent obsession with "natural talent", as if everyone has some special innate skill that they're destined to discover and be the best at.

If you don't understand calculus the first time around, it doesn't mean you're not a "math person", it means you need to sit down and RTFM for a few more hours. Likewise, if you're really uncoordinated and can't hit a baseball, go outside and practice for 2 hours every day. I guarantee you'll improve dramatically. There's not many things that humans do that can't be improved through practice and discipline.

For some background, I say all this as someone who was told up and down during his childhood how smart and gifted he was, all of which came crashing and burning during high school and college when I realized there were actually things I needed to put in effort to learn. I'm still trying to repair my study habits and fill in knowledge gaps to this day, and I truly wish people had congratulated me more when I had put in a lot of effort into something than when I appeared to grasp a concept quickly with no effort.

pyre• 14 years ago

I seem to recall that, at least in the Chinese system, unless you meet a certain bar, you are kicked out of school at specified intervals. This would tend to lead to a school system only filled with top-performers.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

I would not call it anti-intellectualism, we have a culture which no longer celebrates success over one's peers. For some reason it is offensive to many that some students are better than others and any celebration of such is frowned upon. How do you breed success oriented children who consistently strive to be improve in a system like that?

There are of course other issue, where many students are categorized based on race and/or upbringing and this effectively curtails their educational opportunities.

bjhoops1• 14 years ago

The anti-intellectualism in this country is infuriating!

And it reaches to the highest levels, with creationist congressman and even anti-vaccination nuts like Dan Brown.

Only in America do people scoff at the work of science and academicians and put air quotes around the word "expert".

pflats5• 14 years ago

Curriculum shouldn't be an issue for much longer. The vast majority of the states (http://www.corestandards.org/in-the-states) have adopted the Common Core. The holdout is publishers: currently, textbook companies have nominal "core standards" texts, but the vast majority of them are old textbooks with minor changes to get out the door quickly. Once actual alternative surface, we can expect a bigger change.

dspeyer3• 14 years ago

The curriculum didn't occur in a vacuum, though. It's based on what the leaders thought the students could handle. No one wants a curriculum where a lot of students fail.

Part of that is heterogeneous grouping. The curriculum is based on what the bottom 10% can handle, and everyone else must go at their pace lest there be elitism.

There's probably other factors too, though. All students could probably move faster if culture as a whole were encouraging it.

manishsharan• 14 years ago

This is just hyperbole to pry more tax dollars for education and I appreciate the sentiment behind it.

However, US is the driving engine of innovation and creativity and will continue being so. Asian societies prize conformity over creative thinking ; they are good at Math/whatever-subject because they are forced to be good at those subjects because proficiency in those subjects is seen as the ticket into middle class. In America, every kid has a choice to do whatever with his/her life. The American society nurtures its rebel thinker and lone wolf ; it prizes creativity over conformity. This choice gives us Beyonce, Vint Cerf ,Steve Jobs / Bill Gates , etc. etc.

redcircle• 14 years ago

Silicon Valley has so many tiger moms. Yet I bet that the Americans who succeed here, on any measure of success including just plain fun, were raised in America's lax educational system. I'd be surprised if anyone showed a correlation between standardized test scores and life success; in fact, I'd be surprised if people actually tried to look for such a correlation, instead of worrying that it is an important indicator.

pflats5• 14 years ago

How on earth can you define life success?

SATs correlate positively with family income and negatively with incarceration rates. That seems like a start to me.

roasm• 14 years ago

Sheer size has to play a major factor here. Comparing the US to city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore or relatively tiny countries like Finland is really suspect because there is so much difficulty in the managing and improving an education system as large and diverse as the US has.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great country to compare to: the countries with the closest populations are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. and comparisons there have other problems. I'm guessing the best possibly comparisons are probably Brazil or China.

joshuahedlund• 14 years ago

I would love to see a comparison of individual states with these European and Asian countries instead of just the "US". It's statistically difficult for a group of 50 country-sized states, with its high outliers and low outliers, to have an average that beats all of the high outliers of other countries.

taumeson• 14 years ago

Is this averaging the education system as a whole? If so, then that is a ridiculous way of studying how well the US education system is doing. It's already been pointed out that MA outperforms most of the world. How are you going to compare an education system for 100MM people to the education system of Singapore, Hong Kong, and "the Flemish region of Belgium"?

The US is huge and disparate; the fact that the country that has HONEY BOO BOO is in the top 15 should point out that by and large the US has a decent educational system.

nathan_long• 14 years ago

TL;DR "because they test really heavily, or because they don't test much at all. Wait, what? There's got to be some causation here somewhere."

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) dragging the US average down. European Americans do very well when compared to European nations, and Asian Americans do well when compared to Asian nations (a bit worse in math, better in reading).

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

Do we have any reason to believe that situation has changed? (I haven't read the latest report, so I don't know.)

Mz2• 14 years ago

For me, that intuitively fits with other stats I have seen. IIRC, the U.S. was being reported as number six in the world for average income. But when broken down by ethnicity, white Americans placed number one. African Americans placed something like 49th. Hispanic Americans were a few notches lower than African Americans.

(I hesitate to post this out of concern it sounds "racist". I am sure the reasons for this pattern are complex.)

guylhem• 14 years ago

facts know no ethnicity

nfg• 14 years ago

> In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia)

There aren't many Hispanics in Europe...?

Nursie• 14 years ago

Errr.... no?

I've never heard it used to refer to someone from actually from Spain.

raleec6• 14 years ago

Oddly enough, there aren't that many (statistically significant) African Americans anywhere outside of America either... :)

theorique• 14 years ago

Spanish speaking whites in Spain aren't "Hispanic" in the American sense (ethnically indian or mestizo from Central and South American regions that were colonized by Spain).

raleec6• 14 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what is the relevance of this observation?

Are you saying that nations are irrelevant, and ethnicity is what really matters? Is this a subtle entreaty to focus the brunt of America's educational efforts on specific ethnic subgroups so that the entire nation can have better results?

Instead of blindly downvoting, I really am interested in the point of this statement.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

The point is that whatever trait drags the US average performance down probably lives in the student body rather than the school system.

If so, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

jere• 14 years ago

Here's what I learned from this article. In order to outperform the US in education, be a city-state with a higher per capita GDP than the US and only a few million citizens.

Or be Finland.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

Singapore's system sounds like the most logical system. College doesn't work for everyone, and there has to be a way for these people to succeed in society instead of penalising them or pushing them to drop out of high school. Too bad it could never be implemented here in the US because it pretty much sets up discrete social classes.

Here’s why other countries beat the U.S. in reading and math

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