U.S. 31st in math scoring

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The average math scores of American students put them below 30 other countries.

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“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

In math, the Shanghai students performed in a class by themselves, outperforming second-place Singapore, which has been seen as an educational superstar in recent years.

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Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.

“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.

Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.

here

It occurs to me that these things likely take the best schools in , say, Singapore, no peasants please, and compare them to US students who get measured as a whole. Schneider goes on to say something similar about Shanghai.

Just a hunch, and I certainly am not going to defend the current US education system. Generally speaking, though, I am a bit tired of the "Sputnik" scare.

The response will be more demands for teachers to have salary increases, more taxation, more support of bloated school systems that only serve the administrators and teachers, not the students.
Tenure OR performance. Not both.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about the sample pools, and others to be made about investment vs consumption (example - if we don't apply a discount rate then we should all live in hovels at barely subsistence levels now so that we can save and live in luxury decades from now). Fortunately none are even necessary when we're dealing with a study that uses only relative rankings. Saying we're 33rd or whatever and then using that to suggest being 33rd is BAD is as useful as a study that says the Carolina Panthers are 32nd in their league and rherefore composed of little guys who have no football experience.

Like the article says you can probably make some quibbles. Shanghai is certainly not representative of China as a whole. Many of those countries are very small and very urban.

It's like saying Washington DC has the highest crime rate of any of the states. It isn't fair because DC is a city, while other states have rural and urban sections. However, the reality is that DC still has a very high crime rate even if the metric is poor.

The big picture says something we've known for a long time. Education is still more important in other countries, particularly science and math.

Quote: pacomartin

Like the article says you can probably make some quibbles. Shanghai is certainly not representative of China as a whole. Many of those countries are very small and very urban.

It's like saying Washington DC has the highest crime rate of any of the states. It isn't fair because DC is a city, while other states have rural and urban sections. However, the reality is that DC still has a very high crime rate even if the metric is poor.

The big picture says something we've known for a long time. Education is still more important in other countries, particularly science and math.

I think for years science and math education has not been important to most Americans. The Manhattan Project and Space Program relied on plenty of imported talent. The math and science departments of so many universities are mostly asians. 30 years ago it was mostly jewish. Common thread is that the best minds were some small subset of the population.