Sam Dillon's front-page New York Times story on December 7 about students in Shanghai trouncing U.S. student scores on the global PISA exam has stirred quite a debate, as it was clearly intended to. Dillon quoted Reagen-era U.S. Department of Education official Chester Finn comparing the score gap to "Sputnik," the Russian satellite that launched the "space race" a generation ago. ABC News called the PISA results a "wake-up call." The Times online closed comments on Dillon's article after receiving 712 of them.
Much debate centers on China: why China leads PISA scores, China's focus on rote testing, China's challenges in promoting creativity, and critical thinking. China's "high test scores aren't everything," one Times online commenter writes plaintively. Other debaters question PISA test results. Dillon quotes Bush-era DOE researcher Mark Schneider demurring "there was no evidence of cheating" in Shanghai scores. A National Review blog derides "bogus" comparisons between Shanghai municipal scores and U.S. national scores (a point Dillon also raised); National Review comments rage against Chinese cheating and censorship. Even the excellent James Fallows, while reminding us to take PISA scores seriously, spends most of his blog on possible statistical flaws.
Methinks the bloggers doth protest too much. China is not the issue. Chinese statistics are not the issue. The statistical issues Dillon and Fallows discuss may explain why Shanghai significantly topped scores from ALL non-Chinese nations tested. They don't explain why the United States ranked 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of 34 countries surveyed. Or why students across Europe excel in two languages (three in Finland, which also tops the science ratings) while ours score in English below countries for which English is not a native language.
The truth, the real news, is that there is no news here. These results should be no surprise. The long slide in American student performance relative to global peers has been a constant drumbeat, paralleling the domestic failures of our schools shown in Waiting for 'Superman'. The DOE's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), tracking math and science scores since 1995, has long found us in 15th place globally or worse. A 2005 panel on "Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio" concluded that given poor U.S. scores, "high ranking within the United States is no longer enough" to count as global excellence.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the perennially sad comparisons between United States' and global scores. The left tends to focus on poor teacher salaries and budgets that favor the military over education. The right tends to focus on poor parenting, teacher's unions, and an overgrowth of educational bureaucracy. Many also blame our students themselves. "PhD scientist," commenting on the Times online, fumed "Most of the people who work around me did not grow up in the U.S... There is a complete lack of interest [among U.S. students] in learning anything of economic value." Those criticisms may well ALL be right -- none of those factors are mutually exclusive.
The real question is how to get past the politics, and the blame games, and work together to better our educational results. While China is not the real issue, if a Sputnik-style push to do better based on being trounced by Shanghai helps spur a real answer, that's fine by me. Together with my frequent co-author Rebecca Weiner, I have long focused in my writing on the need for stronger global awareness, more foreign languages, and greater overall excellence in our educational systems. If the PISA test results give us the impetus we need to truly prioritize academic education -- in our families, communities, governments, and schools -- then all the hype will be more than worthwhile.
What do you think will help the United States improve its test scores and better prepare our students for global competition?
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Programme for International Student Assessment - Wikipedia, the ...
In PISA Test, Top Scores From Shanghai Stun Experts - NYTimes.com
How poverty affected US PISA scores
What international test scores really tell us: Lessons buried in PISA report
China Debuts at Top of International Education Rankings - ABC News
What is wrong with this picture? Answer: Greed.
Follow the money and ask, "Cui bono?"
• Waiting for Superman as a basis of argument discounts the credibility of the entire piece.
• Making sweeping claims about the role of MEASURED student achievement in the economy of any country compared to the rest of the world is evidence of falling prey to Urban legend while ignoring the evidence (See Bracey's Setting the Record Straight).
• Seeing education as a tool in global competition misreads the value of education and ignores the corrosive influence of all competition.
• Examining international comparisons without identifying differing populations among nations and the powerful impact of poverty on all test scores (80-90% of scores connected to out-of-school factors, not teacher or school quality) is misleading and careless.
Really?! That's why Americans always compliment me on my English..I was getting suspicious.^^
Like it or not, we will not get a "world class" education system unless all the elements that make that possible come together. It is not happening. If anything, what exists is unraveling at lightening speed. Americans are aiding and abetting the war on public education with their wilfull ignorance of the issues and their silence as teachers and teacher unions are tarred and feathered by self-proclaimed arrogant education reformers with large and unjustified egos.
In a decade, there will be little left. America will be further behind then it is today. The preteens of today will be facing a future without meaningful opportunity and American democracy will be gasping its last breath. When that happens, I will remind you all that you reap what you sow.
But where does a parent go to begin a dialogue, if not to a teacher on the ground in their own community.
The current educational reform movement is not about real reform. Instead it is a particular set of ideas that originated in the corporate boardroom being spun to the American people as educational reform. The very community that has brought us the current economic catastrophe is taking control public education and they are doing a skillful job, thanks to the state of the media today in this nation.
When the very people who work day in and day out in classrooms with school children suggest these reforms are not solutions, they are called obstructionist and their very power to organize is challenged, by both the conservatives and the progressives; thanks to our media.
This faux reform being forced upon us, withot discussion, amounts to the 21st century incarnation of the factory school, whose mission is to educate compliant workers who don't challenge or question orders.
Authoritarian leaders, oligarchs and the like, know a truly educated, informed, thinking and reasoning citizenry with the power to question the status quo and to ORGANIZE themselves is always the enemy.
To identify successful, longterm reform, Americans should look to nations that have pulled themselves up through carefully building an empowering public educational system over a period of years. Fear tactics and short term quick fixes are largely a waste of time and money.
Look around, it is in vogue in corporate circles to always be making more money. While I acknowledge that businesses must make money, the trend toward disregard for human capital in the interest of ever larger profits was not always the m.o. here in the U.S. There was a time when many (never all) employers considered their workforce to be their greatest asset. Loyalty to your workforce (and it worked both directions) was an important variable.
Today we watch as corporations off shore jobs to pay lower wages, and engage in wage and benefit cutting in the U.S. It is disturbing to watch a company that has just produced increased profits the quarter employ these practices to further boost profits in the current quarter.
I do not fault our educational system entirely for the decline of the American worker and for the business practices we are seeing today. The American corporate mentality is doing its part to wreak havoc on our nation and now we have all but turned our public schools over to that regime. Time will tell.
If you teach them to read their math and science will go up-when you struggle to read you struggle to comprehend everything.
Stop letting your billion dollar publishers kill your education system with their edutoys.
theschoolprincipal@inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com
www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com
We need to ask critical questions: how do we improve our teaching workforce? what is the purpose of public education? what should be the relationship between school and community? how do we decide what to teach? how do we close the achievement gap? how can we measure teacher and student success effectively? what do students need to know in order to succeed in their communities, in the larger society, and on an international scale?
Enabling and encouraging this kind of critical dialogue will be the second step towards improvement. The first step, simply put, is to make education a higher priority. We have to value the process and commit to improving it before conversations about 'how' can really have power behind them.
That would be a start.
I would like to see what the results are by comparing our top 5% vs. theirs. We still might be behind but not on the scale suggested in this article.
Also, when have the Chinese ever had an original idea? Never! There is a lack of creativity in that country which will soon sweep over the USA now that we are putting such a heavy emphasis on testing under NCLB and Race to the Top.
I would like to see what the results are by comparing our top 5% vs. theirs. We still might be behind but not on the scale suggested in this article.
Also, when have the Chinese ever had an original idea? Never! There is a lack of creativity in that country which will soon swoon over the USA now that we are putting such a heavy emphasis on testing under NCLB and Race to the Top.
We do not ever to that here. We shout and stomp our feet, dig in our heels and blame our teachers.
Incidently, China has a system where every family has a legal place of residence (a city, town or province). The many poor who leave their provincial homes and travel to Bejing or Shanghai, etc. in search of work do not have legal status in those cities, so their children do NOT have the right to a free, public education (except in their place of legal residence). This is a pernicious way of keeping some of the most needy out of the public school system and these, perhaps millions, of students never need be tested. They are typically, and obviously, the children of the poorest people in the cities (the "migrant" worker).
Many factors are not considered. We must intimately know a country, its practices and culture to know whether we are comparing apples to apples, or not. Usually it is not.