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In the broader context, when it comes to math, reading and science, teens in the U.S. rank 36th in the world. Students in Shanghai are rated the best. What are

In the broader context, when it comes to math, reading and science, teens in the U.S. rank 36th in the world. Students in Shanghai are rated the best. What are they doing right that we could be doing better here in the US? http://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-survey-ranks-us-students-36th-in-the-world---how-do-we-improve?id=978874 http://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-survey-ranks-us-student...

dmm 11y ago
Scores in the US are strong affected by outliers. We won't significantly improve our ranking without addressing those outliers.
oldmanjay 11y ago
the real question is does that ranking matter? chasing potentially useless numbers to feel better isn't an unvarnished good in my book
acdha 11y ago
Those comparisons are misleading because they don't control for the demographics of students coming in. The United States does a decent job for affluent students but we have a relatively percentage of lower class students taking the same tests, which means that the effect is significantly smaller once you compare demographically matched students from different countries. The elephant in the room is poverty: that's well known to have massive educational drawbacks and most of the countries which outperform the United States have much higher social safety nets. It's hard to study when you have untreated medical problems, are hungry or perhaps not sleeping in the same place every night or even having a safe place to sleep at all. That's a familiar litany to many U.S. public school teachers and it's something which, unlike standardized testing, has been the subject of ongoing cuts for decades. I think that this is something we should address for many reasons but I do want to note that poverty doesn't directly explain the entire gap, although I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by the social instability caused by multi-generational poverty which is harder to directly account for: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/2014/03/poverty_PISA_scores.html http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/201... “Even the OECD authors of the PISA test acknowledge that PISA results are due to a combination of variables, including but not limited to schooling, life experiences/home environment, poverty, access to early childhood programs, and health. In 2013, the OECD wrote in one of their reports that poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA mathematics score in OECD countries. At no time did OECD claim, as Duncan stated, schools' performance on the test can be blamed on low expectations and complacency.” http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/ http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin... “If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”

dmm 11y ago

Scores in the US are strong affected by outliers. We won't significantly improve our ranking without addressing those outliers.

oldmanjay 11y ago

the real question is does that ranking matter? chasing potentially useless numbers to feel better isn't an unvarnished good in my book

acdha 11y ago

Those comparisons are misleading because they don't control for the demographics of students coming in. The United States does a decent job for affluent students but we have a relatively percentage of lower class students taking the same tests, which means that the effect is significantly smaller once you compare demographically matched students from different countries. The elephant in the room is poverty: that's well known to have massive educational drawbacks and most of the countries which outperform the United States have much higher social safety nets. It's hard to study when you have untreated medical problems, are hungry or perhaps not sleeping in the same place every night or even having a safe place to sleep at all. That's a familiar litany to many U.S. public school teachers and it's something which, unlike standardized testing, has been the subject of ongoing cuts for decades. I think that this is something we should address for many reasons but I do want to note that poverty doesn't directly explain the entire gap, although I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by the social instability caused by multi-generational poverty which is harder to directly account for: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/2014/03/poverty_PISA_scores.html http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/201... “Even the OECD authors of the PISA test acknowledge that PISA results are due to a combination of variables, including but not limited to schooling, life experiences/home environment, poverty, access to early childhood programs, and health. In 2013, the OECD wrote in one of their reports that poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA mathematics score in OECD countries. At no time did OECD claim, as Duncan stated, schools' performance on the test can be blamed on low expectations and complacency.” http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/ http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin... “If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”