America’s education system is “vastly superior to the stunted, impoverished school systems of China and India,” writes Jay Mathews in response to Two Million Minutes, which features American slackers and Asian scholars. Our best students can compete with the world. The real problem is “separate and unequal” schools that waste the time and talent of too many children.
Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A-plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. . . . The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children. . . . Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our back.
China and India still send their best students to U.S. universities, Mathews writes. And, the U.S. produces more engineers with a bachelor’s degree per capita than China or India.
In the late 1980s, when Japan still seemed on its way to becoming the world’s economic superpower, U.S. newspapers published glowing stories about the lofty test scores achieved by Japanese students and suggested that failures of American public education had helped bring on bad times in the United States. By 1998, despite the lack of any significant change in math and reading scores, the U.S. economy was back on top. The Japanese still had good schools, but the bottom had dropped out of their economy (which still hasn’t fully recovered). No story.
Flypaper commends Mathews for restoring sanity to the discussion.
The fools who decided that discipline was an infringement on minority rights are totally to blame for the miserable showing of ghetto schools.
> the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations.
Being weighed down by large impoverished populations would be a burden on any country. It also has a direct impact on educational outcomes.
One would reason, then, that policies designed to alleviate the impact of this poverty and to promote economic equity would benefit both the economy and education outcomes.
But this is a key area in which the U.S. differs from both India and China, and also from countries like Finland and Holland, which are indisputably exceeding American educational results.
These nations all make it a national priority to reduce poverty and promote equity of opportunity. Only the U.S. consistently elects governments that promote the interests of the wealthy, with the result that the number of poor, and the depth of their poverty, continues to increase.
The people who are saying American education is ‘good enough’ are the very people who are satisfied with the production of a generation of barely literate and impoverished rural population.
After all - they are elected by them. The ‘blue’ on the electoral map.
[Large impoverished populations] also has a direct impact on educational outcomes.
The word “has” implies causation, yet there is no evidence of a causal link between poverty and educational outcomes. For all you know, the causation could be backwards with bad education outcomes causing poverty [one generation removed] or some third factor causing both bad education outcomes and poverty, such as student IQ, parent IQ, poor teaching practices, and the like. All you have is a correlation, which I know you know. And there are millions of counterexamples in which a person in poverty achieved superior educational outcomes, such as, for example, many of the millions of the immigrants coming to the U.S. And why would you ignore all the other factors that also correlate witheducation outcomes: student IQ, parent IQ, student race/ethnicity, teacher effectiveness, curricular effectivess, and the like, and pretend as if student poverty is the primary factor determining educational outcomes?
I understand that your entire worldview depends upon this correlation also being a causation, but you should temper your comments and/or warn your readers until the data comes in because without the causation you so desperately wish for, your argument and favored remedies are a logical fallacy.
I don’t buy it. First, the proliferation of AP and IB programs says nothing about how these schools are serving their non-elite students. Second, as a product of one of those on-paper decent public schools with a schedule full of AP courses, I can’t say I got a good education. I was never asked to write a research paper. I was seldom asked to do a substantial quantity of homework. I never learned any post-1900 American history (and later learned that was more or less by design, given my curricular options). I avoided taking physics because it was well known they never did more than a third of the book and the teacher had failed calculus. I had a few really excellent classes and teachers, but overall, my high school education does not stand up well to the education I’ve seen seventh graders get in the private school where I now teach.
This is wrong. The best US high schools do not supply a good education by international standards.
http://www.ed.gov/inits/Math/tmpres2.html
US colleges may be world-class. US high schools, as a whole, aren’t. Definitely not the top 70%.
There are some world-class universities in the United States. But half of all foreign students choose to study in Europe, and only a quarter go to the US (Europe and the US being comparably sized markets).
My kids were extensively involved in extra-curricular activities, sports and otherwise, all the way through high school.
I also knew and have since watched their friends.
I don’t know if there is an academic advantage. There is a major advantage in learning how to work. How to show up, how to complete an assignment when you are accountable to your peers for success in a project you chose yourself, not to a teacher for something imposed.
How to work together. How to function in a formal and an informal hierarchy. How to do various items with minimal–because sponsors generally try to get the kids to think and do for themselves–adult input. How to learn from success and failure.
The exchange students we’ve had were pretty explicit about how such things don’t happen at home. I think it’s an advantage.
In addition, many nations have systems which select for the college-bound at some point, and the higher end of their K-12 systems are not the same as ours which includes both National Merit Scholars and kids too lazy to lose the truant officer. Once we correct for that, I’ll be interested in comparing scores.
“Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A-plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for”…how much of this “production” should be attributed to the schools vs how much to the parents and general environment in which the kids live?
The International Baccalaureate program represents a world-class college preparatory high school education. In the United States, IB is a program for elite students only. The vast majority of American students are so far behind by their Junior year that IB is impossible for them - if they had the ambition to do the work and access to a program of this quality.
There is a single school system in my area that has a handful of students taking Algebra I in the 7th grade. This is the global standard for college preparatory programs.
American high schools are poor, primarily because our culture puts a low value on education. What could be done is to create more options for those students who do have high aspirations and are trapped in poor schools.
>There are some world-class universities in the United States. But half >of all foreign students choose to study in Europe, and only a quarter go >to the US (Europe and the US being comparably sized markets).
This has more to do with the costs of studying in Europe vs. the US than with quality. Here is a link to a ranking of world universities from a non-US source; note that 17 of the top 20 are American.
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm
This is pure nonsense. Impoverished schools who do NOT teach communism via IBO.org and UNESCO will bury us!
That’s what the IBO is all about, making sure students all over the world are leftist activists. This “International Baccalaureate: This Atlanta Schools program is in place to develop students who are critical and compassionate thinkers and who are informed participants in local and world affairs” is a big lie.
Rigorous maybe, with an agenda, definitely.
Anti-American — need to boot IB and Goals 2000 out of the country.
Richard, there are studies that correct for that. As I quoted in my comment just above yours, the evidence is that when the advanced students in the USA is compared to the advanced students elsewhere, the advanced US students are doing worse than their equivalents overseas. The “good” US schools are doing poorly by international standards, even with the good students.
> The word “has” implies causation, yet there is no evidence of a causal link between poverty and educational outcomes. [etc]
Ken deRosa needs to learn about complex systems. None of my analyses ever involves a simple cause-effect relationship, and inferring one from my word choice is a deliberate ignorance.
In complex systems, applying a causal analysis is about as appropriate as attempting to use Newtonian systems to explain quantum mechanics. DeRosa should know this. And he probably does, which makes his comment deliberately disingenuous.
According to friends that studied high school in the US an American School loses from a private one from Brazil.
An interesting comment on the film’s trailor at YouTube: IAM frm india and i can tell u this documentry is full of lie Indian education is so sick..it just teaches us how to mug up things by putting un wanted preassure on us…USA is far better and u should be proud instead of making fake documentries just for money.
Since Stephen Downes also said:
One can conclude that either Stephen has an unusual definition of “causal analysis”, or he is remarkably good at explaining quantum mechanics.
> According to friends that studied high school in the US an American School loses from a private one from Brazil.
Which American public school and which Brazillian private school?
There’s a huge difference between the best US high schools (Palo Alto High School?) and the worst ones.
How many Brazillian schools are in the comparison class? (Is it basically the Brazillian equivalent of Choate, Andover, and a couple more or is it a large general class?)
The author wants to say that a) the claim that US high schools are lagging is false (the comparisons are biased) and b) that test scores aren’t important for economic success.
But of course, the US might have lousy high schools AND it might be true that having high scoring students isn’t necessary for economic growth. But it doesn’t help his case that he gives no evidence showing that in fact, the top 70 percent of US public high schools are better than in Europe or Asia.
As Tracy W noted correctly, a fair comparison of advanced high school students does in fact suggest that the US lags other countries in science and math. Moreover, the availability of AP classes does not prove that US high schools are doing well.
The greatness of US universities — especially the elites in science and technology — does little to absolve the public school system of its failings.
For an article that wishes to dispel myths, it would have been nice to have seen more objective evidence that makes a serious attempt to prove the case. Though I am sympathetic to its claim, this article only proves, sadly, that the public schools’ advocates seem lacking in basic reasoning skills.
Oh please, Stephen.
First of all, As TracyW has pointed out, your “complex systems” cover story is hypocritical. If you really believe your own arguments, you should be the last person to be making these irresponsible causal statements. And yet, I can barely read a blog on any given day without seeing some causal statement made by you relating to some complex system, such as healthcare policy, anti-poverty policy, economic policy, education policy, and the like.
Secondly, I don’t disagree that complex systems tend to have complex causalities. But the complexity of the causality in no way excuses you from establishing that causality before you give us your simplistic solutions to admittedly complex spcietal problems. Your solutions imply a casual link, yet all you have are simple correlations, not to mention lots of counterexamples which cast doubt on inferring causality from those correlations.
Your reasoning is based on a logical fallacy and all the more egregious since I know that you know are committing one.