U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests

http://educationnext.org/us-students-educated-families-lag-international-tests/

by tokenadult • 12 years ago

58 59 12 years ago

Donzo• 12 years ago

The US educational system may be shitty, but I refuse to accept data like this until the standardized tests are actually standardized.

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?

cle• 12 years ago

If you read the article, you will see that they used the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a nationwide standardized test.

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....).

rgbrenner• 12 years ago

Because you didn't read the article.

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

ylem• 12 years ago

The article is a bit long, but it actually doesn't do what you claim. It uses one standardized test called PISA (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/) that is given to students around the world. In particular, it looks at math scores.

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.

digz• 12 years ago

While average education levels are of course important, they aren't as important as density of high achievers and the flexibility of the top group to remain challenged. It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers.

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.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

> "It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers."

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.

firstOrder• 12 years ago

You seem not to have not only read the article, but not read the title of the article. The entire point is that not only are US children of parents with low parental education behind countries like Portugal, Estonia etc., but US children of parents with high parental education are behind Portugal, Estonia etc.

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.

csentropy2• 12 years ago

Simple solution to a complex problem. Just abolish public schools, let anyone and everyone compete to be able to become educators, open schools etc for profit, let the parents choose, select and vote with their money, let a million models be tested and a thousand flowers bloom. The best will rise to the top, (and probably be expensive), but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences. More importantly, many more kids will have a decent shot at a good if not a great life versus becoming drones captive to the world's worst performing school system, (by per capita dollars spent).

bilbo0s6• 12 years ago

The thing is ...

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 ???

moheeb• 12 years ago

I'd like to see a comparison of # of days of sunshine per year vs. test scores. Or perhaps average monthly temperature vs. test scores.

I'm thinking not having anything better to do in the winter might have an effect on scores.

lclarkmichalek• 12 years ago

Assuming a correlation between quality and price, what would be the advantage of choosing a cheaper school in such a system? A parent would simply choose to send their child to the most expensive school they could afford, leading to some not particularly desirable phenomenon (think, total lack of social mobility).

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

In theory, there should be ample room to innovate in low-cost high-quality instruction. Think of Khan Academy or Udacity: you get world-class instructors delivering clear lectures at scale. There are tons of just plain inefficiencies in the public school system, where it wouldn't be hard to improve both price and quality if it were a fair, competitive market.

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.

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

So like charter schools? I went to one for high school; it was a great experience for me, and gave me a lot more of what I needed than a normal public school would. But this solution already exists, and has since the 90s: if you'd like to see more school choice, lobby for alternatives like charter schools and homeschooling that already have some traction.

jude-• 12 years ago

The problem with this line of thinking is that low educational attainment is strongly correlated (and causally related) to low family income levels. Low family income levels mean that parents can't afford to send their kids to the "best" schools, even with voucher systems, since (1) schools can raise the price of admission higher than the voucher, (2) the "best" schools tend to be located closer to the affluent, not the poor (and commuting long distances is disproportionately expensive to the poor), and (3) in many states, non-public schools can expel students for not performing well academically. (3) especially is the reason a lot of non-public schools (particularly BASIS) appear to look high-performing (while not actually being high performing). Unless these concerns (and more) are addressed, abolishing public schools will screw over the children who need the best schools the most.

bilbo0s6• 12 years ago

"...The problem with this line of thinking is that low educational attainment is strongly correlated (and causally related) to low family income levels..."

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).

nmrm3• 12 years ago

Just abolish public schools

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...

csentropy2• 12 years ago

Can we define strong? What does well funded mean? How do achievements of students in public schools vs private schools in all the out performing nations compare? How do they compare between nations? And to the US? Were the students normalized before we compare per capita spending vs achievement by state? How? What factors were not considered? Without answering these and many other questions, most of this data is useless and pretty much exemplifies the pitfalls of aggregate statistics.

saraid216• 12 years ago

Simple solution to a complex problem.

Anytime you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you probably don't understand the problem.

happyscrappy4• 12 years ago

It is true that Massachusetts schools stand up to world competition, but it is important to keep in mind that the K–12 students living in Massachusetts are just 2 percent of the nation’s total. One cannot generalize to the country as a whole from this small state.

They then go on, as always with these type articles, to compare the US to countries the size of Massachusetts.

argv_empty• 12 years ago

Of course. One can definitely cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a US-sized country, but it's rather hard to cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a Massachusetts-sized country.

happyscrappy4• 12 years ago

I don't think you can meaningfully compare a country of 330m to a country of 5m, especially if the 5m country is totally homogenous.

vasilipupkin• 12 years ago

The problem of using PISA results for analyzing upper tail of U.S. student performance is that it's not clear how representative they are. How many high achieving US students bother taking the test, when it has no impact on their college acceptance, etc. ? Did Zuckerberg take it? What percentage of Ivy League incoming freshman class take it ?

vonmoltke• 12 years ago

Based on the U.S. Department of Education's description of the sampling process[1], it seems like the representativeness is dependent on how the school framing is done. It's not clear from that description what happens with individual students at the selected schools. You could still get distortions if groups of students within the selected schools are over or under represented.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp#4

chrisBob• 12 years ago

Tests are a measure of how well someone takes a test. My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China. In the US there are better opportunities, and education (or maybe test performance) is valued less. This results in students putting much less effort into standardized tests.

vorg• 12 years ago

My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China

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.

avmich2• 12 years ago

In many areas the content is learned in layers - first you get some simple picture, then refined details, then some real depth. So it doesn't say much is something is learned in 2 years, the question is - how deep?

jff3• 12 years ago

Look at those contemptible Republican idiots in the shitty flyover states, with their "kids who can do math" and such.

bilbo0s6• 12 years ago

???

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.

jff3• 12 years ago

Oh, I was just talking about how much contempt drips from the voice of a coastal city resident when they talk about those backward states in the midwest, but then we see Montana, North & South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all in the top 10. Wyoming and Kansas doing pretty good, etc.

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.

sremani• 12 years ago

Texas - 40.3 California - 25.3

That does not fit into any political narrative.

jff3• 12 years ago

Well, it fits my personal narrative that I should move out of California... :)

bzbarsky3• 12 years ago

Indeed. Texas does better than California on average and _way_ better for less-advantaged students, while spending less money per student on its schools (though it's entirely possible that in COLA-adjusted terms Texas is spending more; it's hard to tell).

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

Several of the comments here have asked how we compare the United States "top" students to students from other countries. The TIMSS tests (a different data set, also based on international sample surveys with consistent methodologies among countries) suggest that there is a lot more "top" in some countries than in others. Take a look at the very well constructed data chart "Distribution of Mathematics Achievement" for eighth graders in Exhibit 1.2 of Chapter 1 of the TIMSS report from the 2011 testing round.[1]

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.)

[2] http://www.imo-official.org/

[3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

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?

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.

avmich2• 12 years ago

That doesn't explain the difference between US and the rest.

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?

WorksOnRobots• 12 years ago

Shouldn't we celebrate that the U.S. is rich enough and stable enough that their students do not have to study for 14 hours a day in their prime of their youth to acquire a stable career? Why should we want to emulate East Asia's pressure cooker environment?

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

students do not have to study for 14 hours a day in their prime of their youth to acquire a stable career

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-...

tn13• 12 years ago

People who work 14 hours a day irrespective of the purpose would do better than those who work 4 hours a day.

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.

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

I bet they don't fail at Minecraft.

ausjke2• 12 years ago

can't agree with you more here

javert• 12 years ago

Socialized education and socialized medicine cannot work well in any country with a huge underclass.

This group of countries is the U.S. plus the "third-world countries," the US+3 group (as I call it).

rdl• 12 years ago

Why do Israel and Sweden do so badly?

U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests

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