Posted on 12/07/2010 7:43:56 AM PST by SeekAndFind
America's children rate embarrassingly low again on the latest round of scholastic tests from the OECD.
The Program for International Student Assessment, which is released every three years, tests 15-year-old students in reading, math and science.
Basically, America earned a "C." We tied the OECD average rating of 496. Teenagers in East Asia and Europe scored significantly higher.
There's one caveat to these scores. Some countries test a irregularly narrow sample of kids. Like China -- which we're not counting in our ranking because its sample of 5,100 Shanghai teenagers scored ridiculously high.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I don’t doubt it for a second.
But we’d show a lot better than 25th if the stats were figured the same way.
Its sorta like infant death statistics. They way they’re computed, Cuba does better than we do. But we count every underweight crack baby as a “live birth” where as Cuba doesn’t count infants that die within five days of birth. Hence the difference.
Way to go, W! No child got left behind! They made it to #24!
You are right — and yet this week millions of folks will watch “Are you Smarter Than A Fifth Grader” and buy into this silly notion of our kids being sooooo smart — smarter than the parents — in fifth grade.
A bi polar nation.
You’re certainly right on the infant mortality numbers.
If anything, the US seems to be moving further and further from testing its whole student population, however, with ‘special students’ exempted or given unlimited time, etc..
If anything it wouldn’t surprise me if the U.S. ranking here is high. However, if you matched up demographic-for-demographic, I suspect most of our student subpopulations would do just fine against their counterparts worldwide—despite how we handicap them with our dreadful approach to teaching reading.
I’m not against vouchers. I am against rewarding irresponsible behavior.
Right now we are rewarding people who drop out of school, get pregnant, don’t work, and act like animals.
Then we’re surprised when we get more of the same.
A lot of questions can no longer be asked or answered in “polite” society. That’s why we’re on FR. ;)
I’ve heard this alot on the forum. I taught for a few years in city schools and I guarentee you that if we went to a private system their would be alot of kids that would never see the inside of a school. That’s how little the parents care.
We’re still testing the whole population, we’re just giving certain groups special privileges. They still get figured in.
I agree, most sub-populations would do okay. Its sort of like our crime statistics. Eliminate certain groups and we look as good or better than most other societies in the developed world.
I’m saying all our subgroups could probably stack up okay with their demographic equivalents worldwide.
Wrong, at least with respect to the European countries. They import large percentages of Mooselims every year and those that are there are breeding like bunnies and spreading their “culture”.
Mooselims as a whole are less interested in learning (and working) than our illegals. Doubt me? Ask a German. Frenchman, or a Swede, for example. I would also point out that most of the countries are much poorer than we are and spend less on education.
We score badly because of our government school system and its entrenched educational pathologies (whole language, “Reform” math, “invented spelling”, multiculti everything, sodomite acceptance and promiscuity studies, etc.). Most of the countries that do better have some form of school choice. The element of choice has prevented the idiocy that prevails here from getting the same stranglehold on education.
BTW, I wouldn’t place much importance on the reading scores. Comparing reading ability across languages is very difficult - unlike math and science. It is, for example, comical that they think that they could compare the reading skills of Americans and Taiwanese in a study like this.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. In a prior TIMSS our “advanced” students did worse than our average students versus their international peers. Yes, the school population may have a bimodal distribution of achievement, but it isn’t relevant.
Homeschoolers aren’t tested. If they were it would embarrass the government school establishment.
We don’t test our dropouts either (about 35%), so no comfort can be taken from alleged unschooled populations in other countries. In fact, I doubt that the dropout rates or school leaving rates in other countries are as bad as ours, which places us in a worse light.
To get the highest score on the Global Warming exam they have to name 10 bad things cuz globzal warmingz. They can also choose to write George Bush 10 times.
Our students are the highest scoring in the world.
They certainly feel smart.
“You’re such a bigoted ignorant racist. I’m way smarted than you. Watch me do division without my fingers!”
Our students would rank quite well if only students in the top 1-5 schools were tested. Not to excuse how overall poorly the US students perform, but this is not a fair comparison.
If those countries’ education systems are so great, why do they send so many of their own top students here for college and graduate schools?
Simply not true. Go study the TIMSS results of a few years ago and you will find that our “advanced” students did worse compared to their international peers than our average students. The “advanced” students, I hardly need add, are overwhelmingly white and Asian. You have to have a very special school system to turn normal children into idiots or talented students into mediocrities, but with a great deal of effort AND money our highly trained education professionals mange to do it.
Large Percentages? Care to define what a "large percentage" is?
The UK, as an example, only has .025% Muslim population. That's it. We import more Latin-American immigrants EVERY month. Do you realize that the ENTIRE non-white population of Great Brattain is just under 8%? That's ALL non-whites.
There is a provision in NCLB that forbids the government from testing homeschoolers under NCLB. Some states have tried to mandate it. If a school does, however, it loses federal aid. Those wiley people from Homeschool Legal Defense Association made sure of that.
Now, under Obama’s administration, I don’t know if that has been changed or if the fine folks at his Education Department just haven’t thought of it yet.
bookmark
You’ve clearly never had to write a private school tuition check around here.
Agree wholeheartedly on vouchers, though.
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