Thanks for posting - it's fascinating to see the results of the KIPP program down the line! It reminds me of Finland - they have no standardized testing and less of a focus on pure academic results, and yet they are near the top of the world for education results. Their entire system is geared towards growing the resilience and emotional intelligence in each child - psychological counselling, individualized student guidance, free school meals and easy access to health care are available for every student. It's more holistic than a pure academic focus. Resilience and drive - more than anything else it's what's needed in business, so perhaps this shows it's what's needed in life too?
It's likely that the good outcomes in Finland are primarily the result of the student body, not the education system. Non-Finnish students attending school in Finland tend to perform about 50 pts worse on PISA than Finnish students.
Who immigrates into Finland? Is it ethnic Finns from other countries, or middle eastern/african refugees, or economic migrants from eastern europe, or what? It doesn't seem like a place with a lot of immigration.
This also seems like a strong argument for Australian/Canadian skill points immigration. I don't think there would be a problem with 50mm immigrants who were one sigma smarter/richer/etc. than the current US population, provided they had to spend 3-7 years of residency before citizenship/voting, and ideally if there were some way to spread them out over time or geography to avoid overloading local services (which have funding which lags population growth). Maybe give the states a say in how many immigrant visas they will sponsor, on top of a federal pool. I can imagine Michigan would love to have a lot of high-skill entrepreneurial immigrants move in.
The link you have shared here repeatedly on Hacker News should not be relied on for your understanding of other countries. Much better would be to observe the educational practices of each country directly with an open mind and knowledge of the local language and the history of the country.
The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.
3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"
dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."
The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,
with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"
and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.
4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,
consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not "tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.
This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."
The Census Bureau says
"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."
5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.
Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.
Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.
Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,
Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.
It is a little racist to see a difference in test scores and assume that it is 'likely' due to race. There isn't much in that post (which is pretty good) about why the scores of immigrant Finns are lower.
But schools have experience creating classes that raise test scores. Figuring out the best way to help youths develop “grit”
Schools have extensive experience developing "grit". Go out to the football field or basketball court and those same knuckleheads are showing more 'grit' than anyone in the chess club. The reason they don't have 'grit' with respect to academics is because they aren't interested. Getting them interested is mainly fodder for cliche-ridden Hollywood claptrap.
The article seems to contradict what I previously read about KIPP [1]. I thought KIPP also heavily emphasized 'emotional intelligence' going so far as to giving their students t-shirts emblazoned with the "Don't eat the marshmallow" slogan. The words refer to the famous Stanford experiment on delayed gratification.
It seems the article (or Paul Tough) does not provide a balanced, complete analysis. Perhaps the colleges the kids dropped out of overemphasized academic achievement. It could be that emotional intelligence plays a role in the long-term success, of which college may or may not also be an ingredient.
and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. There is very good research on boosting student achievement in another charter school network, the Uncommon Schools network
Practicing the techniques in that book is improving my own teaching as a private-practice mathematics instructor.
There are a lot of stupid comments that suggest that the main disadvantage of the United States is its ethnic diversity, but the real disadvantage the United States has is low expectations all around, from the most advantaged students
and meanwhile there is abundant evidence--for the rare American who speaks or reads any language besides English--that school systems in other countries sometimes provide a better learning environment simply by expecting more of students,
including, by the way, often learning a second language just to receive school instruction or a third language as a core part of the secondary school curriculum (both of which were part of my wife's experience in Taiwan when Taiwan was still part of the Third World). If further research on KIPP and on The Uncommon Schools network continues to alleviate the effects of the de jure racism in United States public schools that survived into my lifetime, and also gives the lie to ongoing excuses for racism, so much the better.
AFTER EDIT: One more point on the subject of international comparisons in education is that the TIMSS and PISA series of tests don't wholly agree in methodology,
and hence don't wholly agree in conclusions, although the United States plainly doesn't do as well in educational achievement as its high level of spending on public schools would warrant.
P.S. Every time I see a Hacker News discussion of this subject I reflect that my occupation (supplemental mathematics lessons for advanced learners in mostly suburban school districts in one of the states in the U.S. with the highest academic achievement) wouldn't exist if United States schools were really doing so well for the brightest. See my user profile for more details.
I think the research of education (and therefore, teacher education) is a big problem. It's one of those soft sciences where rhetoric and fads are more important than what's actually true. The critical pedagogy page on wikipedia is as mind-blowing as the postmodernism one, and not in a good way. I'm not saying that hard reductionism is a good idea in all fields, but things have to either be grounded in theory or reality, and the theory of education (as taught in a lot of universities) is neither theoretically sound nor realistic. See - learner styles (debunked, still pretty fashionable), MBTI (debunked, still pretty fashionable), and the huge amount of poorly-defined waffle. Tell 'em, show 'em, and make 'em do it themselves is still pretty much the gold standard.
At the other end of the scale, there's the way education is treated by policy makers. Teachers come from a wholly ivory tower, into "teach them how to pass the next test" grinder. Which is fine, if the tests were valid, but they generally aren't. For the vast majority of students, the best way to improve their marks (in the short term) is to help them exploit weakness in the test, not properly teach them the material they should be learning. Write lots of words on written response tests, and have a few widely applicable "big words" or "big phrases" ("Despite these not inconsiderable factors, the balance of evidence seems to suggest that ..."). "Science" is even easier to hack, as there are very predictable questions, and a shallow memorisation of the process of "solving" the problem is sufficient to pass (and easy to teach to the students who won't really "get it"). Sure, they are learning an important lesson - "work the system", but I don't see how the system (society) really benefits from this.
You're clearly more of an expert than I am on this (although your tone seems unnecessarily condescending), but I was hoping you could articulate in a clearer way:
What's the accepted explanation behind the vast racial divide in scores? Is it a proxy for poverty? Is it a cultural issue? My understanding is that white + asian Americans, on PISA tests at least, perform at a level that would put them in the top 5 countries in the world, were they alone. I'm not interested in race-based theories -- those seem obviously wrong to me -- but that fact does seem to stick out. Can you explain what the prevailing theory is? Or should I be ignoring that data?
Also, do you have data to support your "rare American who speaks or reads any language besides English" gibe, or was it just offhand snark? The famous Arne Duncan bit cited people who speak more than one language in their home, and the only other data I could find was a gallup poll (suspect already) about people "able to have a conversation in a second language" -- about 25% of Americans.
EDIT: I should stress that my natural bias is irritation at arguments that try to layer European policies over American populations. Forget race -- I don't think it's interesting -- but it seems a lot easier to to design an education system for a culturally homogenous society than a culturally diverse one. This is akin to when people were exclusively blaming the American health care system for a higher mortality rate rather than, say, the massive obesity rate in this country.
To answer your specific question, there is a quite long article by Roland Fryer at Harvard to explain where "race" differences in educational achievement in the United States began and what needs to be done to further narrow the divide.
by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom (which is a thoughtful book about the history of relations between the "white" majority and black Americans). Its description of public schools in the south sets the scene for today's legacy:
"The poverty of the South and the blindness of its planter-dominated leadership to the need for an educated labor force made the region the educational backwater of the country. School expenditures per pupil in Georgia in 1940, for example, were 42 percent of the national average; they were even lower in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Those were figures for both black and white students; blacks of course fared worse than whites. Thus, in 1940, Alabama spent 3.2 times as much per pupil on whites as on blacks; Georgia 3.3 times as much; South Carolina 3.8 times as much; Mississippi a staggering 7.2 times as much. In the most heavily black counties of the Black Belt (so-called because of the exceptionally rich dark soil), per-pupil expenditures for black children were less than one-thirteenth of what was spent on whites. A pamphlet documenting such inequalities issued by the National Conference of Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes in 1934 observed wryly that 'if we assume the democratic principle of equal educational opportunity for all children, it would appear that it takes seven times as much to teach a white child as a Negro. As Booker T. Washington used to say, it is too great a compliment to the Negro to assume that he can learn seven times as easily as his white neighbor.'"
As that book points out, and as Roland Fryer points out in his more recent publication, today spending disparities are nowhere near that large (although they still favor "white" students in most jurisdictions), and now cultural factors and specific school practices are most at issue in the current divide. But the divide is narrowing, and has narrowed quite a bit in my lifetime, and there are identifiable improvements in United States schools that could make it narrow further.
with different methodology. I had three grandparents, all born in the United States, who spoke a language other than English at home. The United States has long relied on immigrant families keeping their heritage languages (as in the case of my grandparents' families) to have people in the population who speak a language other than English. I have been a contract English-Chinese interpreter for the United States government and other clients. By test, I reached a high level of proficiency in a second language. But I would see highly proficient English in use among mixed groups of young people from other countries throughout the time I lived in Taiwan, and there is no comparable phenomenon of anywhere near as many Americans who grow up in English-speaking homes learning a second language of any kind. Singapore, by contrast, has four official languages from four different language families, has a population that spoke NONE of those official languages at home as recently as a generation ago, and yet has achieved good educational results in English (the sole medium of primary and secondary schooling) during my lifetime. Singapore is a very diverse country that has been more successful in getting good schooling results for that diverse population than the United States has. Similarly, repeating my previous comment here, my wife used a second language (Mandarin) to receive all of her schooling, and then learned a non-cognate foreign language (English) beginning in secondary schooling, and so is genuinely trilingual, a rare condition among Americans in her generation.
It's good to see someone that is much better read on this topic than I. You comment implies that you reject a hypothesis that I find interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on it more directly.
A blogger pointed out that American racial groups score better on PISA than their countries of origin. Asian Americans do very well compared to Asian countries, White Americans outperform every European country except for Finland, and Hispanic Americans outperform every Latin American country. Subsaharan African nations aren't included - the only real "black" country is Trinidad and Tobago, and African Americans do better than that.
I am aware of the scientific weakness of the concept of race (there is a ton of diversity that is obscured by a simple label like "black" or "white"!). But I think the data can support the statement that Finland does well because it is populated by Finns - with all the cultural advantages that Finns enjoy. Whereas America has many cultures, some with a stronger evaluation of education than others.
Surely a country that receives an immigration equal to 10% of its population over a few decades from a country that performs lower than the country's average on the PISA is going to see its PISA scores go down.
And yes, I know Sailer is racially obsessed and not a creditable source. But his analysis holds up to reason, and maybe we could check his numbers to make sure they are true? I do not read Sailer's blog, but I found a link back to this from a more mainstream source that I normally enjoy.
I'm going to be reading through your other links. I'm browsing and there is lots of great material here.
Finland is officially bilingual. (The minority official language is Swedish, which is not even cognate with the Suomi language that is usually "Finnish" in English.) Because schools in Latin America, and particular in Mexico, are notoriously underperforming (the reason for that is the role of schoolteacher trade unions in national politics), it is not surprising that first-generation immigrants to the United States from the largest source country, Mexico, start out disadvantaged in school compared to native-born children from English-speaking families. But the latest PISA results look separately at the issue of how the surveyed OECD countries do in helping the least advantaged students in each country's school systems,
My primary concern with the privatization of education is not that charters, like KIPP, can't and won't educate students effectively and efficiently. As a teacher I understand that there are many ways in which our educational system can fundamentally improve.
My worry is that the incentives of private enterprise could very well lead to an education system that doesn’t strive, as a core mission, to education all Americans to a high level.
If we did transition to a privately held education system we would, naturally, need to consider whether or not funding would be guaranteed by the government (as is currently true, within bounds). If funding is guaranteed it seems like that cost of education would explode. Private programs would have few incentives to restrict overhead and procurement costs, as is true in contemporary military procurements and fee-for-service healthcare delivery models. Schools would be operating, after all, in a persistent, non-voluntary market.
A second – and more damaging – possibility (if funding is not government backed, though it seems likely to take place regardless) is that that private educational institutions would be incentivized to either reduce the quality of education provided to low performing (and thereby low-value) students – perhaps through low-overhead online coursework (which has not yet proven itself an equal method of educational delivery – see failure of K12 Inc. online schools) - or to outright reduce the availability of education to low-performing/low-value students. While this clearly undermines the long-standing tradition that all children the United States must be provided with an equal education, we might find a corollary in the current national conversation regarding healthcare availability, or lack thereof, for the poor.
In this case, it is unlikely that withholding education would carry the same moral difficulty for the public as restricting healthcare does when a poor individual comes to the emergency room with a grave injury. As such, these low-performing/low-value students would likely be allowed/encouraged to drop out of primary and secondary charter education (which we already see, for instance through zero tolerance conduct rules, in small charter school populations of ELL students and students with cognitive/behavioral problems) – or they would fall onto a governmental supported educational system specifically tailored to their educational/SES class. It is possible that this safety-net education system would allow for more specifically tailored education practices – however, judging by the historically tiered and inequitable education system we see today (Reese, 2007), (Kozol, 1992) it seems unlikely that these schools would constitute anything more than a dumping ground for struggling students.
It is, instead, more likely that these safety-net schools would be highly stigmatized and exacerbate negative self-perceptions of students’ future economic opportunities (Ogbu, 1987) while also limiting students access to academic knowledge and skills necessary to enter a modern workforce (Oakes, 2008). The reframing of the term “public education” to carry the same connotations as “public house” or “public hospital” is already underway – as discussed by Lee Raudonis, former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party.
If we’re not concerned with education as a primary empowering force for personal advancement and an initial level playing field for all Americans, then we can just move along.
For me, as a white/middle class/privately educated k12 teacher – it is something to protect against.
Readings (in order of use):
Reese, W.J. (2007). Public schools and the common good. In History, education, and the schools (pp. 141-158). New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Kozol, J. (1992). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Chapter 3: The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York (pp. 83-132).
Ogbu, J. (1987). Variability in minority school performance: A problem in search of an
explanation. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 18(4), 312-334.
Oakes, J. (2008) Keeping track: Structuring equality and inequality in an era of accountability. Teachers College Record, 110(3), 700-712.
If you have unexplained weight loss and are concerned about a change in your ability to focus, you should consult with a medical professional about your health concerns, and provide them with far more context. You might also (though not nearly as advisable) seek information from sites and discussion communities specifically dedicated to similar health concerns.
This thread is followup for a story about primary/K-12 school student achievement, and not a good place to get personalized health advice.
