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An additional data point on this issue is from a few years ago, the discovery that students surveyed by the federal National Assessment of Education Progress (N

An additional data point on this issue is from a few years ago, the discovery that students surveyed by the federal National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known informally as "the Nation's Report Card," often self-report that their school lessons are so easy that school is mostly boring. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-schools-challenge-our-students/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201... On my part, having lived in another country (Taiwan), I have long suspected that most United States pupils could handle more challenging school lessons, if only those were on offer in United States schools. For example, in almost every other country in the world, it is routine for pupils to begin foreign language study while still in elementary school, and in many countries (including Taiwan and Singapore, a generation ago) the majority of school pupils are attending school with a language of instruction that is not the same as the language they speak at home with their parents. Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English. International comparisons suggest that there is still plenty of room at the top for achievable higher standards for United States students, and that students would enjoy school better if their lessons were more challenging.

jonlucc 10y ago
I don't have any data to back this up aside from personal anecdote, but it seems that while many students would benefit from more rigorous courses, the ones who don't keep up are very expensive. They'd need almost twice as many classes, and as someone who was on the TaG (Talented and Gifted), AP, and IB track at my school, I am always nervous about further separation from other classmates.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Classroom time doesn't need to be the primary social time for kids. A lot of the problems that people squawk about for mixed ages are only problems because they are tacitly tolerated. Discard social promotion and you don't need to worry about age group separation.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    You've identified yet another social dysfunction for which we can blame the automobile: Americans think children ought to be stuck in their homes when unsupervised. The kids simply must socialize in school, since there's no way we could allow them to ride bikes a few miles to visit friends after school. This may be less of an issue now, with social media. In third grade, I was in a mixed third/fourth grade classroom. It may have been the least boring year I spent in elementary school, although frankly that isn't a high bar to clear.
    - r00fus 10y ago
      Why would the helicopter-parent syndrome be less of an issue with social media?
      - emp_zealoth 10y ago
        At least the kids can talk to some other human beings instead being locked in solitary confinement
    - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      I'd blame that squarely on overprotective parents. If it was the cars fault "uphill both ways in the snow" stories would have died off about two generations ago. It's no longer socially acceptable for a parent to allow their kid(s) much freedom of movement ("no you can't ride your bike to your friend's house because crossing the street is too dangerous") and social media steps in to fill the void.
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        We're looking at different aspects of the same process. Americans are afraid of life for many reasons, but one of those is that so many of us tool around in our own private climate-controlled boxes rather than inhabiting the street as pedestrians, equestrians, or cyclists. The phrase "afraid of life" certainly includes "afraid of ridiculous innumerate peer opprobrium with respect to clearly superior parenting choices", and automobiles are as much to blame for that as anything else.
- bradleyjg 10y ago
  The larger the pool of people being drawn from the better tailoring that can be done. If you have 24 kids total in the district, then maybe you put them all in one classroom regardless of age and teach that way. If you have 300 kids in the school district now you can do separate classes for each age. If you have 900 kids, now each grade can have 3 classes and maybe one of them in each grade can be set aside for advanced students and one for slower students. If you have 25,000 kids in the district, now you can start doing things like an entire G&T school, and/or a school for the students interested in performing arts, and/or a specialized vocational high school. Unfortunately, the trend in the US is towards micro-catchment areas mostly as a legacy of racial segregation efforts and because of the continuing desire to have socio-economic segregation.
learc83 10y ago
There is a reason students in other countries learn additional languages at a young age--it's more beneficial for them. The ROI for learning English as a second language is incredibly high. The ROI for learning any second language as an American is comparatively much lower. The average American who learns a second language also lacks the ability/need to use that language day to day, so even if they do learn, they'll rapidly lose proficiency once they leave school.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. In some areas, they wouldnt get a chance to use it as much, but in many cases, they would be able to. If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.
  - learc83 10y ago
    >In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US. Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time. >If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from. Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish. To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual. [1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead. Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.
Retric 10y ago
If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years. Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?
- zhemao 10y ago
  Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam. I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards." Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not. The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.
- tokenadult 10y ago
  I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States. http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf (I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)
  - schoen 10y ago
    > I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system. I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!
schoen 10y ago
Americans are also often shocked to see how challenging lessons actually are in other places, and sometimes kind of frightened by it. I feel like there's a whole genre of Internet posts of what students are allegedly learning in other countries. ("Cheryl's birthday" from Singapore is a famous recent example, but there are plenty of others.) I had a physics teacher in high school who came from Russia and was always frustrated at the lower standards for science education here in the U.S. He would describe what people in Russia were supposed to know by a particular grade level and it was commonly years ahead of Americans -- and he claimed students were expected to take much more time studying overall (although that's not necessarily always useful, and there are presumably also many different kinds of schools in Russia, as there are in the U.S.). We can surely find some possible tradeoffs and disadvantages of particular educational methods and approaches used in other countries. (People often complain about the rote-memorization issue with the associated lack of conceptual understanding or creativity, and, when we see very difficult educational materials from earlier eras in the U.S., there's the observation that students then may have had to learn many fewer subjects at a time.) But it seems like there's a lot of indication that huge numbers of U.S. students could be learning at a more challenging pace than they are today.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  It's kind of hard to tell what's real anymore thanks to said genre of posts, after hearing the whole gamut up to things to the order of "Well Russian children are expected to know calculus by 8, group theory by 9, and complete their mastery of theoretical physics by 11"
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    I would post the quote from Vladimir Arnold where he said he taught sixth graders group theory but that would probably be depressing.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I only spent a semester in another country (in Madrid), but I felt that the lessons were not all that challenging, but they were thorough. Meaning, in my courses there we were expected to know a lot, but once we knew that material we weren't asked to manipulate it in any way that really pushed us. Confounding my interpretation is that one of my courses, as a computer engineering student, was a fluid mechanics course in the aerospace department. Then again, my US undergrad is probably pretty atypical. My school had very heavy core requirements (at least for engineering), so you had a lot of classes each semester. It tends to be a top-ranked US school, but the classes really weren't very challenging, and because of how many we took, they never seemed to go into much depth. On another note, it's not often that I reminisce longingly on my childhood, but that's exactly what happened while I was doing Cheryl's birthday. My favorite things growing up were math and logic puzzles in their pure forms, un-obscured by the tedium that accompanies them in real life. I remember Math 24 from Elementary school, Math Counts in middle school, and some brain teasers and logic puzzles sprinkled throughout both times. If you're needing some for late elementary children, I highly recommend "The Lady or The Tiger and Other Logic Puzzles"
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I only spoke English until a couple years ago, despite having taken a bit of French and German in high school. I could have never actually used it. Couple years ago, I moved to Norway. And the kids here are amazing with language. Not only do they understand dialects well and learn both official types of Norwegian, they are expected to understand Danish and Swedish. They start learning English their first year in school, and many wind up taking an additional language in high school. There is no homework in elementary school (and less at higher levels), no grades, and no holding kids back a grade. The school days are shorter. If a kid is needing help, there are programs to help them catch up. A smart kid will make good grades (and work for them): Average actually means average, and that is OK. Good marks mean a kid is learning over and above what is expected of them. If too many students are getting high marks (instead of average) on the national tests, they adjust the tests so they are harder. A few kids find school boring, but the system itself leaves room for kids to excel as well as makes provisions for those that aren't - which seems like one of the fallbacks of the American system. You are expected to make A's and B's and there simply isn't room for the high acheiver to work for anything.
- pc86 10y ago
  > [there are] no grades > A smart kid will make good grades
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    maybe that's the two types of Norwegian seeping through?
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I read that as "there are no grades (levels)", especially as the following point is "there's no holding back a grade (level)".
    - dalke 10y ago
      I think it's a switch from grades/marks for elementary school vs. grades/marks for secondary school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_school_.28Barneskole.2C_Grades_1.E2.80.937.2C_ages_6.E2.80.9313.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_sc... says, of primary school: > No official grades are given at this level. However, the teacher often writes a comment, analysis, and sometimes an unofficial grade on tests. Tests are to be taken home and shown to parents. There is also an introductory test to let the teacher know if the student is above average or is in need of some assistance at school. > ... When the students enter lower secondary school, at age 12 or 13, they begin getting grades for their work.
serge2k 10y ago
> Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English So? Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for only speaking English. How can I suffer such a life. /s But I agree with your point, the challenge offered by schools is too low.

jonlucc 10y ago

I don't have any data to back this up aside from personal anecdote, but it seems that while many students would benefit from more rigorous courses, the ones who don't keep up are very expensive. They'd need almost twice as many classes, and as someone who was on the TaG (Talented and Gifted), AP, and IB track at my school, I am always nervous about further separation from other classmates.

maxerickson 10y ago
Classroom time doesn't need to be the primary social time for kids. A lot of the problems that people squawk about for mixed ages are only problems because they are tacitly tolerated. Discard social promotion and you don't need to worry about age group separation.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  You've identified yet another social dysfunction for which we can blame the automobile: Americans think children ought to be stuck in their homes when unsupervised. The kids simply must socialize in school, since there's no way we could allow them to ride bikes a few miles to visit friends after school. This may be less of an issue now, with social media. In third grade, I was in a mixed third/fourth grade classroom. It may have been the least boring year I spent in elementary school, although frankly that isn't a high bar to clear.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Why would the helicopter-parent syndrome be less of an issue with social media?
    - emp_zealoth 10y ago
      At least the kids can talk to some other human beings instead being locked in solitary confinement
  - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    I'd blame that squarely on overprotective parents. If it was the cars fault "uphill both ways in the snow" stories would have died off about two generations ago. It's no longer socially acceptable for a parent to allow their kid(s) much freedom of movement ("no you can't ride your bike to your friend's house because crossing the street is too dangerous") and social media steps in to fill the void.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      We're looking at different aspects of the same process. Americans are afraid of life for many reasons, but one of those is that so many of us tool around in our own private climate-controlled boxes rather than inhabiting the street as pedestrians, equestrians, or cyclists. The phrase "afraid of life" certainly includes "afraid of ridiculous innumerate peer opprobrium with respect to clearly superior parenting choices", and automobiles are as much to blame for that as anything else.
bradleyjg 10y ago
The larger the pool of people being drawn from the better tailoring that can be done. If you have 24 kids total in the district, then maybe you put them all in one classroom regardless of age and teach that way. If you have 300 kids in the school district now you can do separate classes for each age. If you have 900 kids, now each grade can have 3 classes and maybe one of them in each grade can be set aside for advanced students and one for slower students. If you have 25,000 kids in the district, now you can start doing things like an entire G&T school, and/or a school for the students interested in performing arts, and/or a specialized vocational high school. Unfortunately, the trend in the US is towards micro-catchment areas mostly as a legacy of racial segregation efforts and because of the continuing desire to have socio-economic segregation.

learc83 10y ago

There is a reason students in other countries learn additional languages at a young age--it's more beneficial for them. The ROI for learning English as a second language is incredibly high. The ROI for learning any second language as an American is comparatively much lower. The average American who learns a second language also lacks the ability/need to use that language day to day, so even if they do learn, they'll rapidly lose proficiency once they leave school.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. In some areas, they wouldnt get a chance to use it as much, but in many cases, they would be able to. If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.
- learc83 10y ago
  >In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US. Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time. >If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from. Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish. To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual. [1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead. Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.

Retric 10y ago

If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years. Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?

zhemao 10y ago
Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam. I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards." Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not. The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.
tokenadult 10y ago
I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States. http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf (I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)
- schoen 10y ago
  > I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system. I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!

schoen 10y ago

Americans are also often shocked to see how challenging lessons actually are in other places, and sometimes kind of frightened by it. I feel like there's a whole genre of Internet posts of what students are allegedly learning in other countries. ("Cheryl's birthday" from Singapore is a famous recent example, but there are plenty of others.) I had a physics teacher in high school who came from Russia and was always frustrated at the lower standards for science education here in the U.S. He would describe what people in Russia were supposed to know by a particular grade level and it was commonly years ahead of Americans -- and he claimed students were expected to take much more time studying overall (although that's not necessarily always useful, and there are presumably also many different kinds of schools in Russia, as there are in the U.S.). We can surely find some possible tradeoffs and disadvantages of particular educational methods and approaches used in other countries. (People often complain about the rote-memorization issue with the associated lack of conceptual understanding or creativity, and, when we see very difficult educational materials from earlier eras in the U.S., there's the observation that students then may have had to learn many fewer subjects at a time.) But it seems like there's a lot of indication that huge numbers of U.S. students could be learning at a more challenging pace than they are today.

sliverstorm 10y ago
It's kind of hard to tell what's real anymore thanks to said genre of posts, after hearing the whole gamut up to things to the order of "Well Russian children are expected to know calculus by 8, group theory by 9, and complete their mastery of theoretical physics by 11"
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  I would post the quote from Vladimir Arnold where he said he taught sixth graders group theory but that would probably be depressing.
tbihl 10y ago
I only spent a semester in another country (in Madrid), but I felt that the lessons were not all that challenging, but they were thorough. Meaning, in my courses there we were expected to know a lot, but once we knew that material we weren't asked to manipulate it in any way that really pushed us. Confounding my interpretation is that one of my courses, as a computer engineering student, was a fluid mechanics course in the aerospace department. Then again, my US undergrad is probably pretty atypical. My school had very heavy core requirements (at least for engineering), so you had a lot of classes each semester. It tends to be a top-ranked US school, but the classes really weren't very challenging, and because of how many we took, they never seemed to go into much depth. On another note, it's not often that I reminisce longingly on my childhood, but that's exactly what happened while I was doing Cheryl's birthday. My favorite things growing up were math and logic puzzles in their pure forms, un-obscured by the tedium that accompanies them in real life. I remember Math 24 from Elementary school, Math Counts in middle school, and some brain teasers and logic puzzles sprinkled throughout both times. If you're needing some for late elementary children, I highly recommend "The Lady or The Tiger and Other Logic Puzzles"

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

I only spoke English until a couple years ago, despite having taken a bit of French and German in high school. I could have never actually used it. Couple years ago, I moved to Norway. And the kids here are amazing with language. Not only do they understand dialects well and learn both official types of Norwegian, they are expected to understand Danish and Swedish. They start learning English their first year in school, and many wind up taking an additional language in high school. There is no homework in elementary school (and less at higher levels), no grades, and no holding kids back a grade. The school days are shorter. If a kid is needing help, there are programs to help them catch up. A smart kid will make good grades (and work for them): Average actually means average, and that is OK. Good marks mean a kid is learning over and above what is expected of them. If too many students are getting high marks (instead of average) on the national tests, they adjust the tests so they are harder. A few kids find school boring, but the system itself leaves room for kids to excel as well as makes provisions for those that aren't - which seems like one of the fallbacks of the American system. You are expected to make A's and B's and there simply isn't room for the high acheiver to work for anything.

pc86 10y ago
> [there are] no grades > A smart kid will make good grades
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  maybe that's the two types of Norwegian seeping through?
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I read that as "there are no grades (levels)", especially as the following point is "there's no holding back a grade (level)".
  - dalke 10y ago
    I think it's a switch from grades/marks for elementary school vs. grades/marks for secondary school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_school_.28Barneskole.2C_Grades_1.E2.80.937.2C_ages_6.E2.80.9313.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_sc... says, of primary school: > No official grades are given at this level. However, the teacher often writes a comment, analysis, and sometimes an unofficial grade on tests. Tests are to be taken home and shown to parents. There is also an introductory test to let the teacher know if the student is above average or is in need of some assistance at school. > ... When the students enter lower secondary school, at age 12 or 13, they begin getting grades for their work.

serge2k 10y ago

> Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English So? Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for only speaking English. How can I suffer such a life. /s But I agree with your point, the challenge offered by schools is too low.