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It's not that the existence of poor schools makes the students at good schools dumber. It's the horrible quality drop between the good and bad schools makes th

It's not that the existence of poor schools makes the students at good schools dumber. It's the horrible quality drop between the good and bad schools makes the statistics misleading. The report could be titled in a completely different way: "American 8th graders significantly better at science than European 8th graders." I went to the actual data set ( http://nces.ed.gov/timss/idetimss/dataset.aspx http://nces.ed.gov/timss/idetimss/dataset.aspx ), selected the 8th grade science tests, and asked for the average score from the European nations. The result was 501 +- 0.9. The American score was 520 +- 2.9. Now, I'm a bit concerned about their averaging methodology, since I don't think that it's accounting for population density (adding the scores for each country and dividing by the number of countries gives the average returned by the dataset). Still, if we assume that the results are correct, then the United States is doing significantly better than Europe in science education. Of course, the English and the Hungarians, with scores of 542 and 539, respectively, have nothing to fear for the average American, while Turkey, at 454, should be pretty concerned. Which brings us back to the diversity of educational quality in the US. While the average might be 520, I wouldn't be surprised, as a Hoosier, to find Indiana down near Turkey's 454. On the other hand, I'd expect Massachusetts to compare favorably with England's 542.

droithomme 14y ago
You make a very good point that comparing american total aggregate scores to the best of the individual european states is misleading. We could compare total american average results against total european and show that the US does better, as you have, or even better is to present histograms showing american state by state results and comparing to european state by state results. This makes sense and is a fair way to compare since in both europe and the US, educational policy is mostly determined at the individual state level rather than at the union of states level.

droithomme 14y ago

You make a very good point that comparing american total aggregate scores to the best of the individual european states is misleading. We could compare total american average results against total european and show that the US does better, as you have, or even better is to present histograms showing american state by state results and comparing to european state by state results. This makes sense and is a fair way to compare since in both europe and the US, educational policy is mostly determined at the individual state level rather than at the union of states level.