Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/why-american-teaching-so-bad/

by moab • 12 years ago

29 75 12 years ago

cies2• 12 years ago

i did not read the article, just quickly scanned through. but the answer to my best knowledge is:

1) it isn't always that bad, if you pay the premium for private education you can get some of the best education available in the world 2) the people who pay for private schools also pay a significantly larger share of the taxes 3) those taxes pay for the public schools

thus: public teaching is bad because the ones that proportionally pay more for it, don't make use of it.

i live in a country (NL) where public schools are the norm, we all pay for what we (almost) all consume.

nodata• 12 years ago

So "trickle down"?

gpvos• 12 years ago

It might be that trickle-down only works if the people from whom it trickles down are in some real way dependent on the trickling-down. Which seems not to be the case here, as cies said.

jeremysmyth3• 12 years ago

I'm not following the cause and effect of your logic. Are you missing a point or two? Perhaps "The ones who are paying for it are paying less than they need to"? or maybe "The ones who apportion those taxes have no financial incentive to apportion them wisely"?

Even in those cases, there should be enough distance between those paying the tax (in whatever portions) and those spending the tax to ensure that the government runs without interference and can provide the best service at that price point. If the service isn't good enough, then increase the price point. If you don't want to increase the price point, then reduce the quality of your service.

Either way, I think the argument falls into the category of "Wealth redistribution is a broken concept", and that's a whole 'nother ball game that any discussion on schools just isn't big enough for.

ddebernardy7• 12 years ago

As I understand what the parent post's author wrote, the ones who pay for the US school system aren't the ones who use it: their kids go to private schools.

Perhaps this point was missing or too implicit: contrary to what occurs in Europe, there is no "How is my money being spent?" effect as a result of this.

hpaavola• 12 years ago

Yes. Services used only or mainly by the poor, tend to be poor.

awinder3• 12 years ago

But public education is not a service used primarily by the poor unless you have an extremely broad definition of poor. I believe the figure is around 10% of children are in private education.

wernerb• 12 years ago

I also enjoyed an education from public schools in The Netherlands (NL) but I feel this article is more about the teacher than the system. Besides, the NL system is also district-based and we recently started "grading" schools according to standardized tests and then publishing the results. This will probably (and already has to a certain degree) result in parents wanting their children to go to the schools that score highest, in turn, those schools request more "bijdrage" (extra cost, for supposed 'school trips' and 'books'), in turn making those schools less diverse (i.e. more "white") and in turn making schools that used to perform nominally, worse.

The teacher is what makes the student, and unfortunately I have also witnessed PABO students barely able to pass basic spelling/math tests. Those students will probably only go on to teach toddlers/basic grades, but due to teacher shortages it is conceivable that they will eventually move on to teach higher grades as well.

In my opinion, there is no easy short-term solution to the problem of adequate teacher-levels due to regulation/unions etc. We parents should try our best to partially circumvent the entire issue by avoiding "permanent damage" is done by staying up to date with what the child learns and focus on rote-skills that are hard for teachers to supervise in large class-rooms but immensely important when those kids grow up: maths and writing.

Perhaps this will get easier as teaching/assignments are increasingly interactive, allowing the parent to gain a better view of the child's performance and problems. Here's me hoping this e-learning thing takes off as soon as possible, with teachers perhaps evolving to simply guiding their pupils with extra support (if necessary), social interaction (digital age might not be all thats cracked up to be with encouraging social skills), learning techniques, and job planning as kids these days have no idea what they realistically are going to do for work later.

EDIT: Added some perhaps off-topic personal vision of what a teacher should do in the future when MOOCS/e-learning takes off.

ch2• 12 years ago

The article didn't directly address private v. Public education, but rather that our teacher preparation methods are crap. You may be able to argue those who graduate from the best programs for creating educators may be skimmed off the top by the resources a private institution hasavailableto them in terms of provided salary and other issues, but the more direct issue is that teaching is hard.

One may be an expert in ones field, and not be a teacher. Saldly one may be a teacher, but over the years we've also gone and built a system which actively discourages teaching.

So the issue isn't necessarily one of money, but of how we approach the problem of building teachers.

tom_scrace• 12 years ago

You don't matriculate from an institution. I think you mean 'graduate'.

cowsandmilk• 12 years ago

(1) Many poor school districts are urban (2) Many urban dwellers are not owners, they are renters (3) Schools are funded by property taxes payed by owners (4) Often, the owners are large corporations, that do not involve themselves in anything about how the schools are run.

Basically, poor, urban schools are largely funded by faceless corporations holding hundreds of apartments paying taxes, not random rich families with luxury condos in the city sending kids to private school.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

because politicians, nor school administrators, nor teachers, are required, to send their own children through the system.

It certainly isn't a lack of money. Some city school systems spend more than it cost to get an college education per student. We simply spend too much money on everything but having more teachers. It is not about paying teachers enough, its about hiring enough teachers. Instead it goes to administrators, counselors, and etc, heavy in nepotism and cronyism.

Then add in...

The Federal Government setting standards on punishment, effectively now requiring a quota system. So if one group is over represented in being disciplined the system cannot take action without threat of losing federal funds. The Federal government allowing select schools to ignore standards set by NCLB and subsequent programs provided they are politically well connected.

TL;DR

Spending too much money on hiring someone other than teachers. Having the Federal government dictate standards but excuse groups from them, dictating who you can discipline and how often, and finally the corrupt nature of hiring in many school systems.

seanmcdirmid5• 12 years ago

Spending on schooling is not equitable across school districts. So poor schools get less funding per student than rich schools, and predictably do much worse. On average there doesn't look there is a problem with funding, but that is deceptive.

TheBeardKing3• 12 years ago

This is exactly right. The Atlantic published an excellent article regarding school funding and its tie-ins to standardized testing: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/why-poor...

stoolpigeon• 12 years ago

I went through a period of time where I thought I wanted to teach. I took it as far as completing a 1 year education program that would allow me to be seek certification at the end.

The article has a paragraph that describes my experience perfectly:

"American education schools are often derided as overly theoretical, inscribing an arcane vocabulary about education and few real skills for delivering it. But these institutions actually teach a hollow and decidedly anti-intellectual brand of theory, as many critiques of education schools have concluded. Future teachers receive a warmed-over set of homilies about preparing “the whole child” and “student-centered learning” (with the requisite homage to philosopher and education theorist John Dewey) instead of a serious intellectual initiation into the subjects in which teachers will have to instruct students."

general_failure• 12 years ago

And yet they are the worlds leading economy and tech center of the word. Can some explain this paradox?

Dewie• 12 years ago

First world country with over 300 million people? As well as several other factors I'm sure.

You aren't doomed to failure just because one facet of your society is sub par (education in this case, allegedly).

mattivc• 12 years ago

I imagine it is because all the other countries close to the US in population size are even worse.

Granted, it is not based on very much, but i sort of feel that the US has gained the dominance it has today by being really big, and not horribly corrupt or impoverished.

dagw2• 12 years ago

Their (good) universities are very good and not all their schools are bad. A percentage of kids in the US do go to genuinely great schools, and then there is another group that due to various factors manage to get a decent basic education despite the school system. Due to the large US population, in absolute terms these two groups are quite large. Now feed these people through a genuinely world class higher education system and you end up with a quite large number (again in absolute terms) of genuinely smart and and well educated people.

Add to this the fact that the US has historically been very good at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to move there and you end up with probably the largest collection of 'leading' people in the world.

themartorana• 12 years ago

I think there's also an important bit of learning attached to independent thinking and problem solving. Some programs, like many Asian countries, overly-rely on rote learning. The schools that I went through - NJ public schools in the 80s and 90s - had many teachers that focused on teaching me/us how and why to learn in good balance with factual rote learning.

Now with all of the focus on standardized testing, I worry the focus on independent thinking and problem solving is all but destroyed. Teachers now have what I consider "mandatory sentencing" with no room to inspire - only time to teach the test and shuffle kids through.

You might see some of that US magic fade away this generation. I hope not.

rhino369• 12 years ago

1) The big issue is inequality. America is a terrible place to be poor. A fairly large majority get a fairly decent education by European standards. But a large minority get a terrible education. America's engineering and business schools aren't filled up with kids from impoverished backgrounds.

2) Our post-secondary education is the best in the world.

3) Even counting poor schools, the American education system isn't even that bad. America is better than Italy, Spain, Austria, and even Sweden. It's about as good as the UK.

American's just think we have to have the best system.

bostonvaulter2• 12 years ago

Not to mention that even with all the H1B nonsense the US is still able to attract many of the worlds best-and-brightest (or nearly so) from other countries. There are definitely large network effects in play as well.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

Coasting on 40 years of doing things right after WWII.

ddebernardy7• 12 years ago

Easy access to capital helps a lot. In Europe, we've plenty of good schools and universities, but capital is so much more readily available across the pond that entrepreneurs who need it readily flock to the SV or NYC in order to get it.

It also helps a great deal to have a consumer society that is on a constant lookout for the latest or greatest gadget, product or service. This helps to quickly identify the better options amongst the gazillions that see the day and die each year.

throwaway781• 12 years ago

Currently in my first year teaching in an urban school. It's hard to describe how physically/mentally/emotionally draining it is. I went through an alternate certification program and was put in front of a class after a six week summer program. I am amazed that this is acceptable.

jostylr2• 12 years ago

You've been given the task of controlling lots of kids, squishing their natural learning desires and ways. This should be draining as it is against the ways of how we evolved.

See for example http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag...

Despite your best intentions, coercive schooling is not a good thing. There are better ways, such as Sudbury schooling, that are both respectful of children and actually prepare them for the world that we live in.

TheBeardKing3• 12 years ago

Arguments like this make me wonder whether we should pursue homeschooling. My kids are 2 and 4, and we've been going back and forth on the decision. We couldn't afford private school, and my wife is already staying home. Our county's educational system is one of the best in the state, but it still suffers from the bad practices that plague our national education system.

threatofrain• 12 years ago

I have had some past association with an education franchise, and I'd say that the biggest thing stopping an American teacher from doing better in specifically math and science is probably classroom logistics.

When you are paired 1:1 with a young person of peer-ish intelligence, the speed at which you can teach them specific math skills and principles can be exciting for both involved. But most people cannot afford 1:1.

ddorian43• 12 years ago

Which country affords 1:1 ?

Haul4ss2• 12 years ago

I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S.

The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes.

I agree with taking the profession of teaching more seriously (as if anybody is opposed to such a thing). How best to do that is what we'll probably never agree on.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Ntrails• 12 years ago

As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing:

"Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."

Rather than pretending it could ever be the case, I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where it happens :)

tartuffe78• 12 years ago

"... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course

Haul4ss2• 12 years ago

As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster.

- You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand.

- You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs.

- You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English.

- In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine.

- You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way.

And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats.

I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).

acdha3• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'm married to a teacher and wince almost every time I read something about what's wrong with education because most of the problems I hear about are caused by social problems (usually symptoms of poverty). The public education system gets blamed for the effects but has very little funding or ability to fix the causes.

There are two main drivers: the most obvious one is that teachers are one of the largest unionized groups so there's going to be a certain level of attack just from that particular culture war.

The less appreciated one, however, is the number of companies and investors who benefit from changes. A major policy change means billions of dollars in new textbooks, curriculum materials, etc. — and almost inevitably follows this cycle where test scores drop (boosters: "see how bad it was"; teachers: "these kids have had the new approach for one year"), improve as everyone has time to get used to the new system and then plateau at roughly where they'd been under the previous system. Each time you repeat, textbooks companies make billions.

The rise of charter schools gives an even greater benefit to attacks. Each student who switches is $10+K/year and there's a lot less oversight on where that money is spent so you have room for modern CEO salaries, dividends to investors, etc. so there are plenty of people trying to jump in.

Attacking public schools also turns out to be a good strategy for a charter school to show results: the marketing appeals to the more motivated, generally higher-income parents, whose children were already likely to perform above average anyway. That helps the charter school and, if this happens enough like it does here in DC where this is about 40% of the students, lowers the public school ratings at the same time.

This isn't to say that there aren't real problems in public education but rather that there are both no simple fixes and many people who stand to profit from ignoring the root causes.

jimktrains24• 12 years ago

Teaching isn't bad, society is. I have a friend who teaches in an intercity school:

* One or more of her students will be shot to death each year

* Many of her kids get pulled out of class and beaten by rival gangs each year

* Many of her kids will go to jail for a portion of the school year for drug charges each year

* Many of her girls will be out due to pregnancy each year

How is any of that the fault of the teachers? We need to fix our society before kids will have any chance of learning.

ddebernardy7• 12 years ago

Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice, teachers and educators ought to get their fair share of the blame for not being good role models and keeping kids protected from that mess?

mkohlmyr• 12 years ago

You're asking a whole lot of teachers.

And frankly, no. It is a classic case of treating the symptom rather than the disease. When what you need is stronger parenting and better social structure and safety nets, substituting that with additional responsibilities and workloads for teachers who are arguably often already burdened outside of what could reasonably be expected of them is not going to be a recipe for success.

lbotos• 12 years ago

How do you propose a teacher protect a student who they just met Day 1 of the school year who is heavily indoctrinated in gang culture? You can blame the teacher the year before but that teacher never saw the student much because he wasn't in class. It's not about role models it's about survival.

I grew up in a rural area. Farmland. I now live in NYC. This place breeds a hardened tougher person and in the impoverished areas education and schooling are often second fiddle to money that is here, now, that will keep food on the table.

TwiztidK• 12 years ago

No. Not even remotely. Teachers do provide a good example for their students, but it's not their responsibility to watch children 24hrs a day to ensure good behavior, to inspect their home to make sure it's suitable, to watch their parents and ensure that they're not abusive or setting a bad example. If we give them a "fair share of the blame," then their share would be exactly 0%, because they are not responsible for the problems they and their students have to deal with.

jimktrains24• 12 years ago

Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice,

No, I would not agree that children are parented by teachers. A child has multiple teachers each year and many, if not all of them, change year-to-year. What more could we ask for such a transient figure to do beyond being a good role model?

not being good role models

Where has anyone every said educators shouldn't (or aren't) be role models?

keeping kids protected from that mess?

Yes, my petite, 110# dripping wet friend will protect her kids from gang violence. By the time school security responds, the damage is done.

Additionally, how does a teach protect their kids when they're not in school? How do they protect them from gang violence in their neighborhoods?

These are big issues. Seriously, huge issues that cities and our society face. Expecting teachers to be able to build a bubble is ludicrous when children are selling drugs or worse on the streets to stay fed, when they're being shot and beat in and out of school over gang affiliations.

awinder3• 12 years ago

Even stepping back from this teaching aspect and into the abstract, making essentially mid-level staff employees responsible for factors that are well out of their control and above their pay grade is the sign of an unhealthy business. As a developer, is it my responsibility when product drops the ball or the business mis-invests its money and goes under? Teachers play a very important role in a child's development, and there are rockstar teachers that will truly turn a child's life around and put it on a different trajectory than where it would have been otherwise. But it's not in their job description to be able to do that for every child, regardless of how seriously they take THEIR job of being a student, or a parent's job of raising a child that is prepared for the real world.

geebee• 12 years ago

Hmmm - you certainly make a strong case for social problems. But both halves of the equation could be true, right? Teaching and society could both be bad.

My understanding, from this article and other reports, is that the percentage of teachers drawn from the top tier of graduates is dropping (top tier measured by GRE scores, grades, and rigor of the undergraduate program). The top 10% of math majors, for instance, rarely become teachers.

I think the US is putting so much emphasis on a plan. My take on it is if you draw your math teachers from the top echelons of math students, and provide support for learning to teach in a classroom, you really won't need to micromanage the curriculum. Sure, a general plan is a good thing, but at that point you can give the teachers pretty broad autonomy in the classroom.

Still, the problems you've described are extremely serious and could completely derail an education and life regardless of the talent and devotion of the teacher. Strong teachers and a stable social environment are both pretty critical for a kid trying to excel in school.

spindritf• 12 years ago

It's not. It's on par with the rest of the western world[1], maybe except Finland which is an outlier whether you include the US or not. At least as of 2009, I doubt it somehow collapsed since.

Not to mention higher education, where Americans lead. Although judging by tuitions perhaps a little too far in the diminishing returns region.

[1] http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

tokenadult• 12 years ago

This thread seems already to have aged off the front page, but it is dismaying to see that lazy blog post from 2010 still cited here on Hacker News years after other participants have pointed to better sources on international educational comparisons. The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."

But this is factually incorrect.

1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...

and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.

Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...

shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.

2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...

which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.

3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...

The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.

4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf

consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.

This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."

The Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.

Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf

Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,

Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

pastProlog• 12 years ago

A recurring theme here seems to be the bottom 10%, or bottom 20%, or what have you, scores in the US are dragging down the other scores. If those were ignored, the US would presumably be way up top.

But that is not the case. If you compare the top 10% of PISA scores in Japan, Singapore, South Korea etc. - or Finland, Switzerland, Holland - to the top 10% in the US, the US top 10% is below their top 10% as well.

http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/top-us-students-far...

acdha3• 12 years ago

That kind of study is really hard for non-experts to draw conclusions from because the process is full of confounds. Even before you look at the test content you'd want to compare across demographic profiles (i.e. parental education levels or income) to see whether that trend holds up. In the case of the PISA scores, there's 2013 paper claiming that some percentage of the differences are explained by a sampling bias over-representing low-income students: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin... That could have an effect on the top-end scores as well if it reduced the percentage of top students in the pool.

The other big problem you get is that this is a very narrow test of a single subject and Goodhart's law reigns supreme in this kind of comparison. The total difference being discussed is a 2% delta between the top US decile and Shanghai, which was the world leader. Even if that's not just random fluctuation, it could be explained entirely by something as simple as Singapore making that test a priority whereas it's largely off the radar in the US. That's not an accusation of cheating – it could be as simple as whether kids have drilled as heavily on a specific skill which is used more in one national curriculum than the other.

EDIT: To clarify: this shouldn't be read as criticism of PISA – I'm sure they've made considerable effort to address this challenges – but simply that this kind of comparison is a HARD challenge.

lordnacho2• 12 years ago

I was surprised teacher salaries did not come into it. From my relatively uninformed viewpoint, I would think offering more money would give you a better choice of candidates. Look at investment banks. They offer lots of money, and they get the pick of a large proportion of the top graduates.

Here's a conversation I had with a young man in Switzerland:

Me: You seem like a smart, well educated guy (Kid speaks 4 languages, and can talk about interesting stuff at age 20). So, what do you do when you're not helping out at your dad's shop?

Him: I've got an apprenticeship at Credit Suisse. So I work there a few days and study some other days.

Me: Cool. My banker is at CS, and he started at 16, just like you. He's a smart guy, been sent to NYC as well. Probably doing quite well out of it. I guess that's your path then?

Him: Nah. I like it and the pay is good. The work is interesting, but I want to get into teaching.

Me: So, no rat race I guess?

Him: Well, I know you can make good money in banking, but I figure I can help out young people make the most of themselves.

Me: Sounds like quite a paycut. I remember going into finance thinking how on earth I could ever change back out.

Him: Well, you do get paid 120K CHF a year after a few years. (That's 125K USD.)

Me: [Jaw Drops]

I don't know a whole lot about the system here, but I do feel more comfortable knowing that it's actually competitive to become a teacher.

dagw2• 12 years ago

Getting better candidates is not the only problem. Keeping them is the real trick. I have several friends who've ventured into teaching out of various more or less idealistic reasons. Most of them quit for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with the terrible working conditions. Constant micromanagement, zero control over lessons or lesson plans, endless stream of tests they had to teach to, reams of pointless paperwork that sucked up all their supposed lesson planning time. That is what drives many young, smart, talented people away from teaching in my experience.

lordnacho2• 12 years ago

This sounds right. The guy I was talking to seemed to think conditions were good. A lot of debate in certain countries carries an undertone that teachers are lazy, which can't be useful for retention.

usermac• 12 years ago

My wife is a teacher in China. She taught me that the difference is 2 things: One is the single child is pushed into competing by the parents who fear the other parents are pushing their child. Second is she says the Chinese children can "see" the future is bad without something to change it and that is getting an education. She says we just don't see that here in America - the child that is.

Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

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