10 ms·

Here’s why other countries beat the U.S. in reading and math

31 points by Libertatea 14y ago

eggoa 14y ago
Actually, I'm just surprised that the U.S. is ahead of Germany in both categories. Naiveté on my part?
- wolfgke 14y ago
  As far as I know (I was born and live in Germany, but please correct me if I'm wrong) the German education system is known for a great variance in performance of pupils. This means there are some pupils that perform very well, but also some that perform very poorly. These extremes are more pronounced than in comparable countries. Many people say that the education system is cementing the social hierarchy: if you are very well educated, your children will mostly become the same, but it is rather difficult for children to move up the social ladder if they have poorly educated parents. Because there are many top performers the German economy has enough skilled personnel to be competitive (what to do with the less well educated is a much-debated topic - because of the distinct German health and welfare system the status-quo leads to less social tensions than it would probably in the U.S.). TLDR: it is plausible that the U.S. is ahead on average. The German education system is probably better on the top performers and worse on the bottom performers.
taumeson 14y ago
Is this averaging the education system as a whole? If so, then that is a ridiculous way of studying how well the US education system is doing. It's already been pointed out that MA outperforms most of the world. How are you going to compare an education system for 100MM people to the education system of Singapore, Hong Kong, and "the Flemish region of Belgium"? The US is huge and disparate; the fact that the country that has HONEY BOO BOO is in the top 15 should point out that by and large the US has a decent educational system.
luu 14y ago
I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation. Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.). If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/ http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/ A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd... [2] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...
- adjwilli 14y ago
  How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.
  - pflats 14y ago
    Glibly, all of it. Immigrants make up 98.9% of the United States population as of the latest census.
    - pcl 14y ago
      If you continue to extend your time scale, immigrants make up 100% of the US population. (Assuming that "immigrant" != "first-generation immigrant, of course, which seems to be in line with your comment.)
TallGuyShort 14y ago
This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like kids are held back in the US primarily by the curriculum. I immigrated to the United States having grown up in a couple of commonwealth countries and I was shocked to go from a school where I had been learning basic trigonometry to a school where basic algebraic principles weren't even taught until the next year. So whenever I see a discussion about all the social issues that impact education, I have to roll my eyes and wander why people just aren't seeing the kids are capable of more. Thoughts?
- flatline 14y ago
  We have a subculture of anti-intellectualism and cottling our kids that is perhaps a little less prominent in the countries that out-perform us? Fitting in socially is also heavily emphasized in the US system, so early advancement for high performers is generally frowned upon.
  - tdfx 14y ago
    I think the biggest cultural problem we have is the constant search and glorification of the prodigy/wonderkid and the consequent obsession with "natural talent", as if everyone has some special innate skill that they're destined to discover and be the best at. If you don't understand calculus the first time around, it doesn't mean you're not a "math person", it means you need to sit down and RTFM for a few more hours. Likewise, if you're really uncoordinated and can't hit a baseball, go outside and practice for 2 hours every day. I guarantee you'll improve dramatically. There's not many things that humans do that can't be improved through practice and discipline. For some background, I say all this as someone who was told up and down during his childhood how smart and gifted he was, all of which came crashing and burning during high school and college when I realized there were actually things I needed to put in effort to learn. I'm still trying to repair my study habits and fill in knowledge gaps to this day, and I truly wish people had congratulated me more when I had put in a lot of effort into something than when I appeared to grasp a concept quickly with no effort.
    - jsdalton 14y ago
manishsharan 14y ago
This is just hyperbole to pry more tax dollars for education and I appreciate the sentiment behind it. However, US is the driving engine of innovation and creativity and will continue being so. Asian societies prize conformity over creative thinking ; they are good at Math/whatever-subject because they are forced to be good at those subjects because proficiency in those subjects is seen as the ticket into middle class. In America, every kid has a choice to do whatever with his/her life. The American society nurtures its rebel thinker and lone wolf ; it prizes creativity over conformity. This choice gives us Beyonce, Vint Cerf ,Steve Jobs / Bill Gates , etc. etc.
redcircle 14y ago
Silicon Valley has so many tiger moms. Yet I bet that the Americans who succeed here, on any measure of success including just plain fun, were raised in America's lax educational system. I'd be surprised if anyone showed a correlation between standardized test scores and life success; in fact, I'd be surprised if people actually tried to look for such a correlation, instead of worrying that it is an important indicator.
- pflats 14y ago
  How on earth can you define life success? SATs correlate positively with family income and negatively with incarceration rates. That seems like a start to me.
roasm 14y ago
Sheer size has to play a major factor here. Comparing the US to city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore or relatively tiny countries like Finland is really suspect because there is so much difficulty in the managing and improving an education system as large and diverse as the US has. Unfortunately, there isn't a great country to compare to: the countries with the closest populations are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. and comparisons there have other problems. I'm guessing the best possibly comparisons are probably Brazil or China.
- joshuahedlund 14y ago
  I would love to see a comparison of individual states with these European and Asian countries instead of just the "US". It's statistically difficult for a group of 50 country-sized states, with its high outliers and low outliers, to have an average that beats all of the high outliers of other countries.
TheCount 14y ago
I'd like to post a substantive comment on this story, but my comments seem to disappear when I logout of my account - as if HackerNews has decided to prevent anyone from reading me except, well, me. Any advice?
nathan_long 14y ago
TL;DR "because they test really heavily, or because they don't test much at all. Wait, what? There's got to be some causation here somewhere."
yummyfajitas 14y ago
In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) dragging the US average down. European Americans do very well when compared to European nations, and Asian Americans do well when compared to Asian nations (a bit worse in math, better in reading). http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-average-american.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-... Do we have any reason to believe that situation has changed? (I haven't read the latest report, so I don't know.)
- Mz 14y ago
  For me, that intuitively fits with other stats I have seen. IIRC, the U.S. was being reported as number six in the world for average income. But when broken down by ethnicity, white Americans placed number one. African Americans placed something like 49th. Hispanic Americans were a few notches lower than African Americans. (I hesitate to post this out of concern it sounds "racist". I am sure the reasons for this pattern are complex.)
  - guylhem 14y ago
    facts know no ethnicity
    - Mz 14y ago
      Maybe you should acquaint yourself with a book called "How to lie with statistics". In a biased environment, there are lots of ways to harm with innuendo (and similar) and then claim no such thing was intended while continuing to deepen the damage, often intentionally and maliciously, sometimes obliviously. (But have an upvote. I am pretty sure your intent was to be supportive.)
- nfg 14y ago
  > In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) There aren't many Hispanics in Europe...?
jere 14y ago
Here's what I learned from this article. In order to outperform the US in education, be a city-state with a higher per capita GDP than the US and only a few million citizens. Or be Finland.
jinushaun 14y ago
Singapore's system sounds like the most logical system. College doesn't work for everyone, and there has to be a way for these people to succeed in society instead of penalising them or pushing them to drop out of high school. Too bad it could never be implemented here in the US because it pretty much sets up discrete social classes.

31 points by Libertatea 14y ago

eggoa 14y ago

Actually, I'm just surprised that the U.S. is ahead of Germany in both categories. Naiveté on my part?

wolfgke 14y ago
As far as I know (I was born and live in Germany, but please correct me if I'm wrong) the German education system is known for a great variance in performance of pupils. This means there are some pupils that perform very well, but also some that perform very poorly. These extremes are more pronounced than in comparable countries. Many people say that the education system is cementing the social hierarchy: if you are very well educated, your children will mostly become the same, but it is rather difficult for children to move up the social ladder if they have poorly educated parents. Because there are many top performers the German economy has enough skilled personnel to be competitive (what to do with the less well educated is a much-debated topic - because of the distinct German health and welfare system the status-quo leads to less social tensions than it would probably in the U.S.). TLDR: it is plausible that the U.S. is ahead on average. The German education system is probably better on the top performers and worse on the bottom performers.

taumeson 14y ago

Is this averaging the education system as a whole? If so, then that is a ridiculous way of studying how well the US education system is doing. It's already been pointed out that MA outperforms most of the world. How are you going to compare an education system for 100MM people to the education system of Singapore, Hong Kong, and "the Flemish region of Belgium"? The US is huge and disparate; the fact that the country that has HONEY BOO BOO is in the top 15 should point out that by and large the US has a decent educational system.

luu 14y ago

I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation. Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.). If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/ http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/ A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd... [2] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...

adjwilli 14y ago
How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.
- pflats 14y ago
  Glibly, all of it. Immigrants make up 98.9% of the United States population as of the latest census.
  - pcl 14y ago
    If you continue to extend your time scale, immigrants make up 100% of the US population. (Assuming that "immigrant" != "first-generation immigrant, of course, which seems to be in line with your comment.)

TallGuyShort 14y ago

This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like kids are held back in the US primarily by the curriculum. I immigrated to the United States having grown up in a couple of commonwealth countries and I was shocked to go from a school where I had been learning basic trigonometry to a school where basic algebraic principles weren't even taught until the next year. So whenever I see a discussion about all the social issues that impact education, I have to roll my eyes and wander why people just aren't seeing the kids are capable of more. Thoughts?

flatline 14y ago
We have a subculture of anti-intellectualism and cottling our kids that is perhaps a little less prominent in the countries that out-perform us? Fitting in socially is also heavily emphasized in the US system, so early advancement for high performers is generally frowned upon.
- tdfx 14y ago
  I think the biggest cultural problem we have is the constant search and glorification of the prodigy/wonderkid and the consequent obsession with "natural talent", as if everyone has some special innate skill that they're destined to discover and be the best at. If you don't understand calculus the first time around, it doesn't mean you're not a "math person", it means you need to sit down and RTFM for a few more hours. Likewise, if you're really uncoordinated and can't hit a baseball, go outside and practice for 2 hours every day. I guarantee you'll improve dramatically. There's not many things that humans do that can't be improved through practice and discipline. For some background, I say all this as someone who was told up and down during his childhood how smart and gifted he was, all of which came crashing and burning during high school and college when I realized there were actually things I needed to put in effort to learn. I'm still trying to repair my study habits and fill in knowledge gaps to this day, and I truly wish people had congratulated me more when I had put in a lot of effort into something than when I appeared to grasp a concept quickly with no effort.
  - jsdalton 14y ago

manishsharan 14y ago

This is just hyperbole to pry more tax dollars for education and I appreciate the sentiment behind it. However, US is the driving engine of innovation and creativity and will continue being so. Asian societies prize conformity over creative thinking ; they are good at Math/whatever-subject because they are forced to be good at those subjects because proficiency in those subjects is seen as the ticket into middle class. In America, every kid has a choice to do whatever with his/her life. The American society nurtures its rebel thinker and lone wolf ; it prizes creativity over conformity. This choice gives us Beyonce, Vint Cerf ,Steve Jobs / Bill Gates , etc. etc.

redcircle 14y ago

Silicon Valley has so many tiger moms. Yet I bet that the Americans who succeed here, on any measure of success including just plain fun, were raised in America's lax educational system. I'd be surprised if anyone showed a correlation between standardized test scores and life success; in fact, I'd be surprised if people actually tried to look for such a correlation, instead of worrying that it is an important indicator.

pflats 14y ago
How on earth can you define life success? SATs correlate positively with family income and negatively with incarceration rates. That seems like a start to me.

roasm 14y ago

Sheer size has to play a major factor here. Comparing the US to city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore or relatively tiny countries like Finland is really suspect because there is so much difficulty in the managing and improving an education system as large and diverse as the US has. Unfortunately, there isn't a great country to compare to: the countries with the closest populations are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. and comparisons there have other problems. I'm guessing the best possibly comparisons are probably Brazil or China.

joshuahedlund 14y ago
I would love to see a comparison of individual states with these European and Asian countries instead of just the "US". It's statistically difficult for a group of 50 country-sized states, with its high outliers and low outliers, to have an average that beats all of the high outliers of other countries.

TheCount 14y ago

I'd like to post a substantive comment on this story, but my comments seem to disappear when I logout of my account - as if HackerNews has decided to prevent anyone from reading me except, well, me. Any advice?

nathan_long 14y ago

TL;DR "because they test really heavily, or because they don't test much at all. Wait, what? There's got to be some causation here somewhere."

yummyfajitas 14y ago

In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) dragging the US average down. European Americans do very well when compared to European nations, and Asian Americans do well when compared to Asian nations (a bit worse in math, better in reading). http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-average-american.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-... Do we have any reason to believe that situation has changed? (I haven't read the latest report, so I don't know.)

Mz 14y ago
For me, that intuitively fits with other stats I have seen. IIRC, the U.S. was being reported as number six in the world for average income. But when broken down by ethnicity, white Americans placed number one. African Americans placed something like 49th. Hispanic Americans were a few notches lower than African Americans. (I hesitate to post this out of concern it sounds "racist". I am sure the reasons for this pattern are complex.)
- guylhem 14y ago
  facts know no ethnicity
  - Mz 14y ago
    Maybe you should acquaint yourself with a book called "How to lie with statistics". In a biased environment, there are lots of ways to harm with innuendo (and similar) and then claim no such thing was intended while continuing to deepen the damage, often intentionally and maliciously, sometimes obliviously. (But have an upvote. I am pretty sure your intent was to be supportive.)
nfg 14y ago
> In previous years these results have been driven primarily by African Americans and Hispanics (groups which don't exist to any significant degree in Europe or Asia) There aren't many Hispanics in Europe...?

jere 14y ago

Here's what I learned from this article. In order to outperform the US in education, be a city-state with a higher per capita GDP than the US and only a few million citizens. Or be Finland.

jinushaun 14y ago

Singapore's system sounds like the most logical system. College doesn't work for everyone, and there has to be a way for these people to succeed in society instead of penalising them or pushing them to drop out of high school. Too bad it could never be implemented here in the US because it pretty much sets up discrete social classes.