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U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests

58 points by tokenadult 12y ago

Donzo 12y ago
The US educational system may be shitty, but I refuse to accept data like this until the standardized tests are actually standardized. ACT and SAT aside, in 3rd through 8th grade just about every state gives a different high stakes test. No national body approves these tests, and that's just in America. How the hell can you compare disparate American test data with disparate worldwide test data?
- cle 12y ago
  If you read the article, you will see that they used the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a nationwide standardized test. As for how they can compare the NAEP results with PISA results...well...that's also in the article (http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIV_4_peterson_method.jpg http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIV_4_peterson_method....).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  Because you didn't read the article. The US and international scores are from PISA tests. This is mentioned in the first sentence of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu... The state data in the article comes from NAEP... which is a national US test
- ylem 12y ago
  The article is a bit long, but it actually doesn't do what you claim. It uses one standardized test called PISA (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ http://www.oecd.org/pisa/) that is given to students around the world. In particular, it looks at math scores. If I were to challenge the results, I would ask 1) Is the test reasonable? 2) How aligned is US education with the test compared to the rest of the world? For example, perhaps in the US students are taught subjects by grade, so may be less familiar with algebra when tested than a student in a country that gradually teaches many subjects. 3) How seriously do the students in a given country take the test? For example, if there are no consequences or questions of national pride, maybe US students simply don't care as much about the test. But, if we assume that the answers to these questions are not enough to explain the differences, the US has a serious problem. There is usually a mythology in the US that if you look at our "best" schools, they are competitive with the rest of the world. What this study does is to look at the results of PISA broken down by the educational achievements of the students' parents (which may also serve as a proxy for wealth). Here, it finds interesting patterns within the US (for example, Texas is one of the best states in the US for students whose parents have a low level of educational attainment, whereas MA is where you want to be if your parents have a high degree of educational attainment)--it also finds that even in the top performing state (MA) that if you look at students whose parents have the highest level of education, they do not compare favorably with the best in the world.
digz 12y ago
While average education levels are of course important, they aren't as important as density of high achievers and the flexibility of the top group to remain challenged. It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers. Not to say that we shouldn't care about average competency, but these kinds of studies that explicitly or implicitly portend imminent doom for the US miss the mark.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers." I wonder what's better for the economy of a country as a whole - a high number of moderately well educated people or a good number of extremely well educated people but a high number of poorly educated people.
- firstOrder 12y ago
  You seem not to have not only read the article, but not read the title of the article. The entire point is that not only are US children of parents with low parental education behind countries like Portugal, Estonia etc., but US children of parents with high parental education are behind Portugal, Estonia etc. The analysis of this study dovetails with other analysis of PISA rankings, about how the top 10% of students in Japan and Korea have significantly better math proficiency than the top 10% of math students in the US, how their top 20% is better than the US's top 20%. This is what the data says and the analysis of the data. The typical reaction is of your type - you don't even read the article title, assume it is saying average rankings are below, and repeat the Panglossian idea that the US children of the well-educated who are ahead of most US students are on top of the world, or near it. The data shows otherwise. Even non-stringent observation shows otherwise, if you take a look around at who is getting doctorates in mathematics and the like at top American universities.
csentropy 12y ago
Simple solution to a complex problem. Just abolish public schools, let anyone and everyone compete to be able to become educators, open schools etc for profit, let the parents choose, select and vote with their money, let a million models be tested and a thousand flowers bloom. The best will rise to the top, (and probably be expensive), but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences. More importantly, many more kids will have a decent shot at a good if not a great life versus becoming drones captive to the world's worst performing school system, (by per capita dollars spent).
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  The thing is ... The best have already risen to the top. We already have a top 10 who seem to do relatively well. So why, on earth, are we not simply copying them ??? The Minnesotas, the New Jerseys, the Massachesettses, even the Wisconsins... why don't we just take one of these models and install it everywhere? Are kids in California, Washington and Nebraska really all that different from the kids in the old Union states ???
  - moheeb 12y ago
    I'd like to see a comparison of # of days of sunshine per year vs. test scores. Or perhaps average monthly temperature vs. test scores. I'm thinking not having anything better to do in the winter might have an effect on scores.
    - zarify 12y ago
      Not sure why the downvotes there. I teach in South-West Western Australia so our winters are cold and wet and the summers are quite dry and hot and it's quite interesting to see the effect the weather and climate has on students (it certainly has an effect on emotional and behavioural characteristics). It'd be interesting to see how comparative students do in different climates. Some quick looking about only found an article on worker productivity, which isn't really the same thing: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html
- 12y ago
happyscrappy 12y ago
>It is true that Massachusetts schools stand up to world competition, but it is important to keep in mind that the K–12 students living in Massachusetts are just 2 percent of the nation’s total. One cannot generalize to the country as a whole from this small state. They then go on, as always with these type articles, to compare the US to countries the size of Massachusetts.
- argv_empty 12y ago
  Of course. One can definitely cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a US-sized country, but it's rather hard to cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a Massachusetts-sized country.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    I don't think you can meaningfully compare a country of 330m to a country of 5m, especially if the 5m country is totally homogenous.
    - bilbo0s 12y ago
      Do you believe you can meaningfully compare Massachusetts to the rest of the US ? Because even compared to Massachusetts, which is anything but homogeneous, the US at large does miserably.
      - shadowfox 12y ago
        Also people here tend to overestimate the homogeneity of other countries.
        Dewie 12y ago
        From what people tend to elaborate on what they mean by homogeneity, it seems that it tends to boil down to "has a very large percentage of white people"...
      - 12y ago
vasilipupkin 12y ago
The problem of using PISA results for analyzing upper tail of U.S. student performance is that it's not clear how representative they are. How many high achieving US students bother taking the test, when it has no impact on their college acceptance, etc. ? Did Zuckerberg take it? What percentage of Ivy League incoming freshman class take it ?
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Based on the U.S. Department of Education's description of the sampling process[1], it seems like the representativeness is dependent on how the school framing is done. It's not clear from that description what happens with individual students at the selected schools. You could still get distortions if groups of students within the selected schools are over or under represented. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp#4 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp#4
chrisBob 12y ago
Tests are a measure of how well someone takes a test. My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China. In the US there are better opportunities, and education (or maybe test performance) is valued less. This results in students putting much less effort into standardized tests.
- vorg 12y ago
  > My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China I've been told that students at a 3-year high school in China will learn all the new content in the first 2 years, and the only thing they do during that 3rd year is review and practise tests.
  - avmich 12y ago
    In many areas the content is learned in layers - first you get some simple picture, then refined details, then some real depth. So it doesn't say much is something is learned in 2 years, the question is - how deep?
jff 12y ago
Look at those contemptible Republican idiots in the shitty flyover states, with their "kids who can do math" and such.
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  ??? You lost me on that one. This really isn't about politics... since both Democrat and Republican states seem pretty much bad. I think this may be more indicative of a reticence, on a societal level, to value education.
  - jff 12y ago
    Oh, I was just talking about how much contempt drips from the voice of a coastal city resident when they talk about those backward states in the midwest, but then we see Montana, North & South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all in the top 10. Wyoming and Kansas doing pretty good, etc. It wasn't supposed to be really truly about Democrats or Republicans, I mean shit look at the South, I was mostly mocking the kind of attitudes you'll find out here in CA regarding those who live in say North Dakota.
- sremani 12y ago
  Texas - 40.3 California - 25.3 That does not fit into any political narrative.
  - jff 12y ago
    Well, it fits my personal narrative that I should move out of California... :)
  - bzbarsky 12y ago
    Indeed. Texas does better than California on average and _way_ better for less-advantaged students, while spending less money per student on its schools (though it's entirely possible that in COLA-adjusted terms Texas is spending more; it's hard to tell).
    - 12y ago
tokenadult 12y ago
Several of the comments here have asked how we compare the United States "top" students to students from other countries. The TIMSS tests (a different data set, also based on international sample surveys with consistent methodologies among countries) suggest that there is a lot more "top" in some countries than in others. Take a look at the very well constructed data chart "Distribution of Mathematics Achievement" for eighth graders in Exhibit 1.2 of Chapter 1 of the TIMSS report from the 2011 testing round.[1] This issue is familiar to Americans like me who have lived overseas and have learned the local language of another country and have read the math textbooks available there. Better instruction can produce better educational results--and for less money besides. The top student issue is illustrated also by results from the International Mathematical Olympiad[2] and other international academic competitions. The United States has a huge population base, and it has many families in which the children are brought up by parents who are first-generation immigrants who received their own primary and secondary educations in other countries. (Such children do conspicuously well in academic competitions in the United States.) And the United States is wealthy, a heritage from the good governance structure set up by the United States federal Constitution. But even at that, the United States national team can be beat at the International Mathematical Olympiad by countries that have many fewer people and much poorer economies. Some countries have a very impressive group of top students. Is America rich enough that many young people here feel they can be complacent about their futures? Sure it is. But isn't it an especially good use of wealth to gain more knowledge and more ability to make the world better for everyone? Why can't the young people of the United States grow up with a sense of purpose about improving themselves and the world around them, as earlier generations of Americans apparently did? As to the public policy point, Minnesota (where I live) was the first state in the United States to have public school open enrollment, the first to have any charter schools (and it still has more charter school places per capita than most states), and the first state to have a comprehensive, state-funded program to allow dual enrollment in colleges or universities by students completing the last two years of high school.[3] (We also have a flexible homeschooling statute, which I take advantage of as a parent.) Even at that, we here in Minnesota have a long way to go to reach the level of the top-performing countries. But any state that doesn't have as much flexibility in schooling choices for families needs to follow Minnesota's example right away. More choice and flexibility in the state education system is definitely a good idea and worth imitating in the other states in the United States. [1] http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Chapter1.pdf http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Cha... (You can also download the full report for more context, but that download is slower.) [2] http://www.imo-official.org/ http://www.imo-official.org/ [3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/ http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/
chris_mahan 12y ago
I bet they don't fail at Minecraft.
- ausjke 12y ago
  can't agree with you more here
javert 12y ago
Socialized education and socialized medicine cannot work well in any country with a huge underclass. This group of countries is the U.S. plus the "third-world countries," the US+3 group (as I call it).
rdl 12y ago
Why do Israel and Sweden do so badly?

58 points by tokenadult 12y ago

Donzo 12y ago

The US educational system may be shitty, but I refuse to accept data like this until the standardized tests are actually standardized. ACT and SAT aside, in 3rd through 8th grade just about every state gives a different high stakes test. No national body approves these tests, and that's just in America. How the hell can you compare disparate American test data with disparate worldwide test data?

cle 12y ago
If you read the article, you will see that they used the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a nationwide standardized test. As for how they can compare the NAEP results with PISA results...well...that's also in the article (http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIV_4_peterson_method.jpg http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIV_4_peterson_method....).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rgbrenner 12y ago
Because you didn't read the article. The US and international scores are from PISA tests. This is mentioned in the first sentence of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu... The state data in the article comes from NAEP... which is a national US test
ylem 12y ago
The article is a bit long, but it actually doesn't do what you claim. It uses one standardized test called PISA (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ http://www.oecd.org/pisa/) that is given to students around the world. In particular, it looks at math scores. If I were to challenge the results, I would ask 1) Is the test reasonable? 2) How aligned is US education with the test compared to the rest of the world? For example, perhaps in the US students are taught subjects by grade, so may be less familiar with algebra when tested than a student in a country that gradually teaches many subjects. 3) How seriously do the students in a given country take the test? For example, if there are no consequences or questions of national pride, maybe US students simply don't care as much about the test. But, if we assume that the answers to these questions are not enough to explain the differences, the US has a serious problem. There is usually a mythology in the US that if you look at our "best" schools, they are competitive with the rest of the world. What this study does is to look at the results of PISA broken down by the educational achievements of the students' parents (which may also serve as a proxy for wealth). Here, it finds interesting patterns within the US (for example, Texas is one of the best states in the US for students whose parents have a low level of educational attainment, whereas MA is where you want to be if your parents have a high degree of educational attainment)--it also finds that even in the top performing state (MA) that if you look at students whose parents have the highest level of education, they do not compare favorably with the best in the world.

digz 12y ago

While average education levels are of course important, they aren't as important as density of high achievers and the flexibility of the top group to remain challenged. It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers. Not to say that we shouldn't care about average competency, but these kinds of studies that explicitly or implicitly portend imminent doom for the US miss the mark.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers." I wonder what's better for the economy of a country as a whole - a high number of moderately well educated people or a good number of extremely well educated people but a high number of poorly educated people.
firstOrder 12y ago
You seem not to have not only read the article, but not read the title of the article. The entire point is that not only are US children of parents with low parental education behind countries like Portugal, Estonia etc., but US children of parents with high parental education are behind Portugal, Estonia etc. The analysis of this study dovetails with other analysis of PISA rankings, about how the top 10% of students in Japan and Korea have significantly better math proficiency than the top 10% of math students in the US, how their top 20% is better than the US's top 20%. This is what the data says and the analysis of the data. The typical reaction is of your type - you don't even read the article title, assume it is saying average rankings are below, and repeat the Panglossian idea that the US children of the well-educated who are ahead of most US students are on top of the world, or near it. The data shows otherwise. Even non-stringent observation shows otherwise, if you take a look around at who is getting doctorates in mathematics and the like at top American universities.

csentropy 12y ago

Simple solution to a complex problem. Just abolish public schools, let anyone and everyone compete to be able to become educators, open schools etc for profit, let the parents choose, select and vote with their money, let a million models be tested and a thousand flowers bloom. The best will rise to the top, (and probably be expensive), but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences. More importantly, many more kids will have a decent shot at a good if not a great life versus becoming drones captive to the world's worst performing school system, (by per capita dollars spent).

bilbo0s 12y ago
The thing is ... The best have already risen to the top. We already have a top 10 who seem to do relatively well. So why, on earth, are we not simply copying them ??? The Minnesotas, the New Jerseys, the Massachesettses, even the Wisconsins... why don't we just take one of these models and install it everywhere? Are kids in California, Washington and Nebraska really all that different from the kids in the old Union states ???
- moheeb 12y ago
  I'd like to see a comparison of # of days of sunshine per year vs. test scores. Or perhaps average monthly temperature vs. test scores. I'm thinking not having anything better to do in the winter might have an effect on scores.
  - zarify 12y ago
    Not sure why the downvotes there. I teach in South-West Western Australia so our winters are cold and wet and the summers are quite dry and hot and it's quite interesting to see the effect the weather and climate has on students (it certainly has an effect on emotional and behavioural characteristics). It'd be interesting to see how comparative students do in different climates. Some quick looking about only found an article on worker productivity, which isn't really the same thing: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html
12y ago

happyscrappy 12y ago

>It is true that Massachusetts schools stand up to world competition, but it is important to keep in mind that the K–12 students living in Massachusetts are just 2 percent of the nation’s total. One cannot generalize to the country as a whole from this small state. They then go on, as always with these type articles, to compare the US to countries the size of Massachusetts.

argv_empty 12y ago
Of course. One can definitely cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a US-sized country, but it's rather hard to cherry-pick a Massachusetts-sized sample from a Massachusetts-sized country.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  I don't think you can meaningfully compare a country of 330m to a country of 5m, especially if the 5m country is totally homogenous.
  - bilbo0s 12y ago
    Do you believe you can meaningfully compare Massachusetts to the rest of the US ? Because even compared to Massachusetts, which is anything but homogeneous, the US at large does miserably.
    - shadowfox 12y ago
      Also people here tend to overestimate the homogeneity of other countries.
      - Dewie 12y ago
        From what people tend to elaborate on what they mean by homogeneity, it seems that it tends to boil down to "has a very large percentage of white people"...
    - 12y ago

vasilipupkin 12y ago

The problem of using PISA results for analyzing upper tail of U.S. student performance is that it's not clear how representative they are. How many high achieving US students bother taking the test, when it has no impact on their college acceptance, etc. ? Did Zuckerberg take it? What percentage of Ivy League incoming freshman class take it ?

vonmoltke 12y ago
Based on the U.S. Department of Education's description of the sampling process[1], it seems like the representativeness is dependent on how the school framing is done. It's not clear from that description what happens with individual students at the selected schools. You could still get distortions if groups of students within the selected schools are over or under represented. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp#4 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp#4

chrisBob 12y ago

Tests are a measure of how well someone takes a test. My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China. In the US there are better opportunities, and education (or maybe test performance) is valued less. This results in students putting much less effort into standardized tests.

vorg 12y ago
> My Chinese coworker said he spent more than 12 hours a day at his public high school the year before the college entrance exam in China I've been told that students at a 3-year high school in China will learn all the new content in the first 2 years, and the only thing they do during that 3rd year is review and practise tests.
- avmich 12y ago
  In many areas the content is learned in layers - first you get some simple picture, then refined details, then some real depth. So it doesn't say much is something is learned in 2 years, the question is - how deep?

jff 12y ago

Look at those contemptible Republican idiots in the shitty flyover states, with their "kids who can do math" and such.

bilbo0s 12y ago
??? You lost me on that one. This really isn't about politics... since both Democrat and Republican states seem pretty much bad. I think this may be more indicative of a reticence, on a societal level, to value education.
- jff 12y ago
  Oh, I was just talking about how much contempt drips from the voice of a coastal city resident when they talk about those backward states in the midwest, but then we see Montana, North & South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all in the top 10. Wyoming and Kansas doing pretty good, etc. It wasn't supposed to be really truly about Democrats or Republicans, I mean shit look at the South, I was mostly mocking the kind of attitudes you'll find out here in CA regarding those who live in say North Dakota.
sremani 12y ago
Texas - 40.3 California - 25.3 That does not fit into any political narrative.
- jff 12y ago
  Well, it fits my personal narrative that I should move out of California... :)
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  Indeed. Texas does better than California on average and _way_ better for less-advantaged students, while spending less money per student on its schools (though it's entirely possible that in COLA-adjusted terms Texas is spending more; it's hard to tell).
  - 12y ago

tokenadult 12y ago

Several of the comments here have asked how we compare the United States "top" students to students from other countries. The TIMSS tests (a different data set, also based on international sample surveys with consistent methodologies among countries) suggest that there is a lot more "top" in some countries than in others. Take a look at the very well constructed data chart "Distribution of Mathematics Achievement" for eighth graders in Exhibit 1.2 of Chapter 1 of the TIMSS report from the 2011 testing round.[1] This issue is familiar to Americans like me who have lived overseas and have learned the local language of another country and have read the math textbooks available there. Better instruction can produce better educational results--and for less money besides. The top student issue is illustrated also by results from the International Mathematical Olympiad[2] and other international academic competitions. The United States has a huge population base, and it has many families in which the children are brought up by parents who are first-generation immigrants who received their own primary and secondary educations in other countries. (Such children do conspicuously well in academic competitions in the United States.) And the United States is wealthy, a heritage from the good governance structure set up by the United States federal Constitution. But even at that, the United States national team can be beat at the International Mathematical Olympiad by countries that have many fewer people and much poorer economies. Some countries have a very impressive group of top students. Is America rich enough that many young people here feel they can be complacent about their futures? Sure it is. But isn't it an especially good use of wealth to gain more knowledge and more ability to make the world better for everyone? Why can't the young people of the United States grow up with a sense of purpose about improving themselves and the world around them, as earlier generations of Americans apparently did? As to the public policy point, Minnesota (where I live) was the first state in the United States to have public school open enrollment, the first to have any charter schools (and it still has more charter school places per capita than most states), and the first state to have a comprehensive, state-funded program to allow dual enrollment in colleges or universities by students completing the last two years of high school.[3] (We also have a flexible homeschooling statute, which I take advantage of as a parent.) Even at that, we here in Minnesota have a long way to go to reach the level of the top-performing countries. But any state that doesn't have as much flexibility in schooling choices for families needs to follow Minnesota's example right away. More choice and flexibility in the state education system is definitely a good idea and worth imitating in the other states in the United States. [1] http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Chapter1.pdf http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/T11_IR_M_Cha... (You can also download the full report for more context, but that download is slower.) [2] http://www.imo-official.org/ http://www.imo-official.org/ [3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/ http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/

chris_mahan 12y ago

I bet they don't fail at Minecraft.

ausjke 12y ago
can't agree with you more here

javert 12y ago

Socialized education and socialized medicine cannot work well in any country with a huge underclass. This group of countries is the U.S. plus the "third-world countries," the US+3 group (as I call it).

rdl 12y ago

Why do Israel and Sweden do so badly?