Americans have always been concerned about the educational progress of our kids compared to kids in other nations. In the 1950s, the fear that we were falling behind in the race to the moon with the Soviet Union meant a new emphasis on math and science. In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration’s publication of The Nation at Risk said, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
When stacking up our kids with kids in Asian countries and even kids in a couple former Soviet republics, our kids fall short. Yesterday’s release of the international PISA test didn’t provide any relief from our national angst.
So, why don’t we do well? Is it the test? Is it our system of providing education? Are we fairly comparing the same types of kids in one country to another country? Can we even talk about education reform without dealing with massive economic inequality and childhood poverty rates?
Dana Goldstein at Slate has a good summary of the debate.
I’m sure that all those theories are right to a certain extent. There probably isn’t one fair and accurate way to measure educational progress across nations. Economic factors and the diversity of our country are in part to blame for our nation’s educational woes. We probably should have higher educational expectations for our kids. But I’m also certain that we could be doing a lot better as a nation at educating ALL of our children. I want to add one more point to Goldstein’s summary.
In some ways, the uniquely American way of letting localities control schools is a great thing. Each school operates as a laboratory of education, and some have cooked up really cool ways of educating kids. It enables schools to reflect the diversity of its inhabitants. It provides opportunities for citizens to become directly involved in their schools and can become a new avenue for political participation. All good things.
However, this tradition of local control of schools fosters an extreme individualism. The “MY tax money should go to MY kid” mentality means that schools have huge variations in the services. When the courts have attempted to equalize finances, localities have fought these measures. They have fought reforms in curriculum that might benefit poorer kids, when those reforms would disrupt their status quo. My kids’ suburban school bears little resemblance to schools just 20 minutes south from here in Newark.
And people don’t care. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. Let’s just say that suburban parents, aka the voters, have no idea what’s happening in poorer and more urban areas. They have no incentive to learn more. Maybe these PISA scores will make people pay attention a little more. Maybe we need our politicians to explain why it’s a really bad thing that kids in Newark aren’t reading at grade.
Some say that if we create a national system of education, it might improve the urban schools, but it will decrease the quality of suburban schools. Then the wealthier families will exit the system, and there will be even less investment in education. It will also mean losing out on the good aspects of local control of schools – laboratories of education, diversity, and participation. Maybe we need a half way measure, like greater state control of schools.
So, understanding our kids’ PISA performance is terribly complicated with lots of blame to spread – teacher quality, economic matters, an anti-intellectual culture, as well as educational individualism.
Apt. 11d 
I hadn’t realized the new PISA scores had come out but there was a lot of discussion on Canadian tv this morning. They were very upset that they were no longer in the top 10 of nations on their math scores. They are already looking at what they need to change. Their concern for having their children able to compete worldwide is so different from what I see here. I often hear parents find excuses for our scores rather than complaining about the lack of rigor in curriculum or expertise in instruction. Your blog post is both timely and hopefully a call for improved instruction in our schools. Not just for the rich or those fortuitously located but for all our children. For out nation to succeed ALL of our children need to be competent.
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“When stacking up our kids with kids in Asian countries and even kids in a couple former Soviet republics, our kids fall short.”
What is this “even kids in a couple former Soviet republics”? Russians and a lot of Eastern Europeans are VERY smart and under communism and beyond, the Russians prioritized math and science education, ran a space program that put the US to shame for years, and generated huge amounts of research in mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_mathematicians
I taught Russian high school students for two years, and a typical high school schedule for a kid would include algebra, geometry, biology, chemistry and physics, all at the same time during the same year, without even considering their history, Russian language, Russian literature, PE, home ec/shop, foreign language, etc. That was a normal schedule. They wouldn’t have every class every day and there was massive cheating to keep up with it all (remember, all those huge door-stopper Russian classics are REQUIRED reading for Russian school kids), but for those who actually do it, it’s an amazingly rich and demanding national curriculum.
Years afterwards, I realized that the high school kids I taught in the 90s had, nutritionally speaking, come through some very rough times. Even in the early 90s, the older Peace Corps volunteers talked about the “white diet” that they had endured when they first came to the Russian Far East. And I was told a really epic story by parents of one of my students of what huge efforts they had to make to get cow’s milk for their oldest when she was a baby in the 80s. Kids who were small during those years of deprivation really had the deck stacked against them, and yet by and large, they did OK. Oh, yeah, and the teachers I worked with were always owed about six months of pay that had somehow gone missing.
In contrast, in the US educational system, we are always redoing stuff, buying new textbooks and widgets, thinking you can buy academic success, and chasing after panaceas.
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Does anyone know who is taking these tests? In France, for example, students have been tracked for what we used to call “college prep” by age 15; the other kids have been sent to vocational tech programs. Are the latter also taking the PISA? I can’t help but think that if you compare a random sample of US 15-year-old students with international 15-year-olds in college prep curricula, US performance looks worse.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/so-the-us-is-terrible-at-international-tests-who-cares/281999/
is worth a read, too.
I also read another article (I can’t now remember where) that argued that the Canadians and Finns might be mistaken to be so worried, and to see the Asian systems as being the ideal.
“The 2009 PISA results have already begun to shift the world’s attention away from Finland to Shanghai. I fear that the 2012 PISA will complete that shift and make Shanghai and other East Asian education systems THE model of education because the magic potion that East Asian success in international tests is very poisonous.”
http://zhaolearning.com/2013/12/02/reading-the-pisa-tea-leaves-who-is-responsible-for-finland%E2%80%99s-decline-and-the-asian-magic/
I’ve never considered these standardized tests to meaningful. What is meaningful to me is what the general knowledge of the adult population is. As an example, I believe that in China, it is a reasonable assumption that nearly every adult you meet can read. That is a tremendous achievement. Is it also true that in China, you can assume that every adult can calculate a 20% discount? Or what the price per unit of rice is? Or make change? Or calculate how much tile they will need to tile their bathroom? If so, that would be a tremendous achievement, too.
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Yes. One of the most surprising little things as an American living in China that generally flies under the radar when thinking about cultural differences is that everyone is numerically literate. In any little shop, convenience store, or fast food restaurant, the server can easily add up prices in their head, make change, and figure out percentages. It’s even more surprising when you realize that lots of these people have only a middle school, or even sometimes even just an elementary school, education. The only time I’ve seen anyone use a calculator is to confirm or show to a customer that their mental calculation is correct, and 100% of the time it is.
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Back in the 1990s in Russia, it was not uncommon to see an actual abacus at the checkout counter (and I think I hazily recall the clicking of the abacus beads). Now, a fair amount of the time, the cashier used a calculator instead, but the abacuses had obviously been in recent use.
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In any little shop, convenience store, or fast food restaurant, the server can easily add up prices in their head, make change, and figure out percentages.
I’m not sure that’s a reasonable comparison. At a c-store here, the clerk would not only need to add prices and make change, but at a 7% sales tax to some items and not others. And all of the prices have been set to avoid round-number transactions that might no require opening the register to prevent employee theft.
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MH makes some good points about prices and taxes–a lot of the prices seem to have been purposely chosen to short-circuit our number sense.
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Sales tax is tricky, but I doubt it would be a problem. If people can add up ten differently priced items in calculate a 35% discount on an item that’s not priced at a round number, I’m not sure that calculating 7% of the total and adding it to the purchase price would be all that difficult. The point about avoiding round numbers might be valid, but I stand by the fact that everyone here pretty much across the board has far better arithmetic skills than do Americans.
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Literacy is also an amazing achievement, especially considering how recent of a phenomenon it is and how difficult the writing system is. Where I live, a quite poor part of China, 100% of people under 55 I meet of both genders are literate. Over 55 or 60, it starts to be a bit more of a crapshoot, especially among women, and over 75, most people are illiterate. In comparison, the literacy rate in India in 2011 is 82% for men and 65% for women. According to the same article, China’s adult literacy rate (in 2009) is about 96% for all adults and over 99% for youth. (India’s youth literacy rate, not broken down by gender, is 82%)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India
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Yes, a remarkable achievement. I remember noting it when someone said that you could generally rely on written notes produced by your hotel to navigate the city (I presume within bounds of the places where tourists usually travel). Such is not the case in India.
On the other hand, the degree of English knowledge is high in India.
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I’m bemused by the links proposed by so many between better testing outcomes and national standards. How will standards and mandates, by themselves, effect change that really counts on a local and individual level? We can prescribe and punish all that we want in glorious, sweeping documents that lay out high expectations but that still won’t improve student outcomes without serious examination of how education is really working both at the level of the classroom and the individual learner. I’d be more supportive of all this frooforaw if it was aimed at providing useful material to improve teaching and learning. I don’t see that. what I see is a national standard used to justify an expensive and rather hollow testing regime. That, in turn, will soon be further monetized by all sorts of remedial programs that your school and family can shell out to “crack the code” of the Common Core.
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I agree with most of backlash against frequent standardized testing and the common core, except in one big way. I do think we need assessments, yes, even standardized ones, to see how we are doing (and, we in that case, refers to everyone, teachers, parents, children, society in general).
I also believe those assessments are a reality check when kids aren’t learning. There’s discussion circulating on around this article: “Daily Online Testing in Large Classes: Boosting College Performance while Reducing Achievement Gaps ”
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079774
As with all research articles, there are a lot of caveats, but the bottom line is that frequent testing in a beginning class improved performance, especially for those students who were not as well prepared (a study in at UT Austin, where some students enter by being at the top of the class in poorly performing high schools). The authors suggest that the frequent testing provided a reality check for those students who were used to skating through with no work, to keep up with the reading on a regular basis, and to review/practice what they didn’t understand.
I think we need testing for that purpose, and that worries in the US about how that testing will be used to rank students (in asia, people just accept that they will be ranked that way) sometimes prevents us from getting useful feedback on learning.
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I was just looking at the PISA scores and made a discovery I was expecting to make, namely that when Laura said “former Soviet republics” I was pretty sure that Estonia was going to be one of the top ones. And lo and behold, Estonia was right there at the top, right above Finland (they’re about 2 pts. apart, which is presumably almost indistinguishable). The reason that is interesting is that while Estonia and Finland have vastly different economic situations ($21k vs. $37k per capita GDP) and Estonia has had a much harder modern history than Finland (namely mass deportments to Siberia during WWII plus half a century of occupation), they are linguistically very close (or way closer to each other than they are to their neighbors). It’s almost a sort of national twin study–despite very different environmental conditions, their academic results are almost identical.
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So, obviously, we should institute new language programs in US schools. A choice! Estonian or Finnish.
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In an analysis of international testing, Jay Greene and Josh McGee pointed out that the wealthiest suburbs produce mediocre results: http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/.
Stand-outs are found in small, rural districts and charters. In other words, excellence is found in small pockets. Local control really is the key. The larger a system becomes, the more removed the decision makers become from day-to-day operations. In my opinion, a large part of the difficulties public schools face stems from the ever-changing directives raining down on their heads from the state and the federal government. The schools employ administrators just to keep up with the reporting requirements.
A national school system would decrease student achievement, by stamping out the places which do education well. There are no economies of scale in education, other than perhaps ordering toilet paper. If that were possible, the largest districts would lead the way.
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Over and over again, large scale differences in quantitative performance among similarly prepared populations have been explained by development of metrics that unintentionally exploit the problems of regression to the mean. That would be the first explanation I would look for whenever a small n populations outperform high n populations, as in the Greene/McGee analysis (not based on PISA, but on their own index) (though they should be aware of the problem and may address it).
The Gates Foundation went on a failed wild goose chase in favor of “small” schools based on mistaken analysis ignoring the problem of small n. With small n, a population mean is more likely to deviate from the mean performance, in either direction (i.e. be better than average or worse than average). As the n increases, the sampled mean regresses to the population mean. So, small schools are likely to pop up both on the high and low end of distributions purely by statistical chance. The Gates Foundation made the mistake of assuming that the artifact is a result of choices made by the “good” and “bad” schools and tried to replicate the “small school” effect by creating expensive schools within schools, only to find that there was no positive effect.
(and this is before the potential selective exclusion of particular poor test takers and students, an effect that is exacerbated in small n samples).
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But small n populations don’t happen randomly in schools. Anyone living in Pelham has chosen to live there. Small, good rural schools don’t fluctuate randomly in test scores from year to year, either.
I think school culture can be very stable, once established. This can be very good, or very bad. A good principal (head of school) can set up great patterns. She can hire good teachers, set up good procedures, and tinker as warranted. There are probably lots of bad small, rural schools, too.
Off the top of my head, some of the standout schools are charters or exam schools which are freed from things which limit other schools: BASIS schools, KIPP schools, the Boston MATCH public charter school, Boston Latin, Stuyvesant, etc. They all have distinctive approaches which can’t be scaled. While they all have more applicants than spots, I think many parents would go nuts if their local school adopted the culture of the BASIS or KIPP schools.
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I think most of the ideas about economies of scale in education don’t pan out (just like the kibbutz experiment on scaling parenting didn’t) because I think that hard learning, especially for young children, occurs when personal, meaningful relationships develop between student and teacher.
But, the reform movement is based on the idea that there are economies of scale in education, MOOCs, textbooks, common curricula, scripted lessons, evidence based teaching methods. I think those things won’t address all of the problems, but that some of them can contribute to better practices in education, if we stuck with them long enough and didn’t expect miracle cures for all the ills of society.
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I am pretty convinced by the evidence that the significantly successful charters (i.e. the ones that test significantly different from the mean) are selecting their populations and counseling out individuals who are difficult to educate or non-compliant. And, yes, selection doesn’t scale up at all. It might work the particular individuals who fit the mold (as, does the testing-heavy compliance demanding teaching methods in Asian schools).
I do agree that an individual school can be good because of an individual collection of teachers & administrators (and parents and students). Again, not features that scale up.
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I don’t think that national standards are the answer. More like a national commitment to educating all kids. I want a change in mentality first.
The KIPP and similar charter schools are doing well, because they only admit a certain type of student with a certain type of parent. And those KIPP kids are having a hard time in college.
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The KIPP kids having a hard time in college actually points to the school environment making a difference. If it were just selection, the kids would be doing better at college. The fact that they are struggling in college suggests that they had been getting extra structure at school that wasn’t available at college.
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I do think there shoud be national standards and that folks should know how their stacking up to those standards. I just don’t think that we shouldn’t combine that with teaching narrowly to methods of assessing those standards, I realize that this fantasy might be like wishing fir unicorns and world peace.
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Forbes just published an article about the “challenge of being poor at America’s Richest Colleges.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2013/11/27/the-challenge-of-being-poor-at-americas-richest-colleges/
The Posse Foundation seems to have been able to boost success rates by convincing colleges to accept “posses” of ten or more. College is a cultural experience, not only an academic experience. There are lots of traps for the unwary.
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I was just over looking at Steve Sailer’s take on the PISA, and he’s asking some good questions.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-which-countries-not-to-trust.html
That very question occurred to me, too–some of these countries are fudging or have bad samples. Sailer says that participating countries were supposed to use 95% of students and only exclude 5% for disability or language. However, back in real life:
“…Costa Rica only managed to test half the people they were supposed to, and Albania only tested 55%. Vietnam, which made a splashy PISA debut with high scores, somehow couldn’t find 44% of their 15-year-olds. At the other end, the dutiful Dutch managed to test slightly more students than were thought to be around.”
For the curious, the US excluded 11%, which doesn’t sound that bad. Among the richer countries, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Korea, New Zealand, Greece, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, the U.A.E., Shanghai (21%!!!) and Liechtenstein (25%!!!) excluded more than the US.
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