Ugh. I meant to write about this paper and then forgot. Glad that Derek did it.
Derek Thompson in the Atlantic wrote about a new study by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein that found that when student data is broken down by class, our comparisons with other nations improve dramatically.
When you break down student performance by social class, a more complicated, yet more hopeful, picture emerges, highlighted by two pieces of good news. First, our most disadvantaged students have improved their math scores faster than most comparable countries. Second, our most advantaged students are world-class readers.
Apt. 11d 
My high school student daughter is doing work way beyond what I did at an equivalent rich suburb high school. She’s in ninth grade and taking AP world history and what she’s doing in that class…well, two day exams every month or so and dozens of document evaluations (I can’t remember what she called them), which I’d never heard of.
I took AP European history (in my junior year) in 1983 and we didn’t do anything remotely like that.
I would also argue that most young college faculty are better teachers than those who taught back in the day. I went to a top-ranked liberal art school in the 1980s and I didn’t even get syllabi from all my profs. No rubrics from anyone, ever. Profs regularly assumed you knew how to write college papers and spent zero time instructing on that. There may be fewer stellar lecturers, I don’t know; but there are more and better teachers, which I think is more important.
The one thing I haven’t seen my daughter do–yet, she’s got time–are longer papers. Now that we may be falling down on. I wrote a 20-page papers in AP European History and AP English. And my college students–admittedly, from mediocre city schools–don’t seem to have written even 6 page papers in high school.
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That’s got to be the lamest alibi for underachievement I’ve ever heard.
“The only adjustment for social class used in this study is the student estimate of the number of books in his or her home. In 2009 a higher percentage of U. S. students (than those in the other six countries) told PISA, the international testing agency, that they came from a family with few books in the home.”
http://educationnext.org/carnoy-and-rothstein-disgrace-the-honest-marxian-tradition/
It should go without saying, but the student’s personal judgment of whether their home has “few,” “some,” or “many” books is not exactly rock solid empirical data.
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Also, bear in mind that the student’s judgment of how many books the home has is going to reflect very different quantities from country to country and subculture to subculture. It would make very little sense, for instance to compare home size from country to country based on students’ opinion of their homes being “small,” “average,” or “large.”
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I’ve been staring at this info-graphic for 45 minutes. Thinking about writing about it. http://www.visualizing.org/full-screen/44104
Is it interesting or confusing?
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Both.
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