Tests Show U.S. Teens Trail Many Countries In Academic Performance
Source: NBC
Posted: Dec 03, 2013 12:15 PM EST
by NBC News
Students in the United States made scant headway on recent global achievement exams and slipped deeper in the international rankings amid fast-growing competition abroad, according to test resultsreleased Tuesday.
American teens scored below the international average in math and roughly average in science and reading, compared against dozens of other countries that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was administered last fall.
Vietnam, which had its students take part in the exam for the first time, had a higher average score in math and science than the United States. Students in Shanghai — China's largest city with upwards of 20 million people — ranked best in the world, according to the test results. Students in East Asian countries and provinces came out on top, nabbing seven of the top 10 places across all three subjects.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan characterized the flat scores as a "picture of educational stagnation."
Read more: http://www.wncn.com/story/24123432/tests-show-us-teens-lag-behind-many-countries-in-academic-performance
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jeff47
(26,549 posts)leftynyc
(26,060 posts)any other developed country on education. Obviously more money is not the answer.
kylie5432
(34 posts)When you remove the test scores of poor children, our scores are near the top. We also have a much less homogenous population, we don't encourage reading and in fact are cutting back on libraries in schools and there are many other factors for this. Keep in mind that teachers in many states make very low wages....yet we keep bashing them.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,265 posts)• A comparison of the socio-economic status of the most disadvantaged quarter of students across OECD countries puts the United States around the OECD average, while the socio-economic status of the U.S. student population as a whole ranks clearly above the OECD average.
Among OECD countries, the United States has the 6th largest proportion of students with an immigrant background.
• However, the share of students with an immigrant background explains just 4% of the performance variation between countries. Despite having large proportions of immigrant students, some countries, like Canada, perform above the OECD average.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf
Ezlivin
(8,153 posts)Yet it's managed to educate its children to the extent that they can outscore our children.
Our country was not "bombed back to the Stone Age," it didn't have tons of chemicals dumped indiscriminately across the landscape and have countless citizens killed. Yet we struggle to educate our children.
kylie5432
(34 posts)The bottom line is we educate via political fads not for the jobs that are needed. We don't need every student to go to a four year college and take test prep classes. We need to be reading whole text in middle school and beginning training programs freshman year in high school for such fields as respiratory therapy, aerospace fasteners, airplane mechanics and more. We have no vision and we just want to blame teachers -that's why we're not educating our children.
Jerry442
(1,265 posts)...and cook them.
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)Oh, wait...
You meant cook the scores, didn't you?
SoapBox
(18,791 posts)
Don't know current #s but in the early '00s homeschoolers scored above public school average.
The stereotypical homeschooled kid might not have, but that's the problem with stereotypes--often true for some point in the past or some subset of the population they aim to describe, they're quickly out of touch with reality and form a nice cushion against it.
mike_c
(36,269 posts)Someone pointed out upthread that when you remove the scores of children from poor districts the difference is not so pronounced, but unfortunately, that ignores the reality of American economic life. More and more college is regarded as "essential" for economic security, i.e. something better than a McJob. Enrollment continues to grow.
At the same time, those students are arriving less and less well prepared for university work, and they're under prepared in particularly insidious ways, such as having poor problem solving skills and being averse to intellectual challenge. The result is stress and burnout, and low student success rates, which in turn pressure university administrators to find "solutions" at our end of the pipeline to mitigate a problem that was somehow fostered throughout students' prior educational/cultural experience. Solutions often lead to grade inflation, enormous effort expended on individualized attention outside the classroom to identify academically at risk students and intervene, paring back course content and academic standards, and redefining the relationship between professors and students, often resulting in further erosion of academic standards.
The tension between student/parent expectations and academic/professional integrity has never been higher, in my experience. When I began this work we understood that a university professor's primary responsibility was to their profession, and that academic duties were performed to prepare successive generations of colleagues-- as such, personal success was each students' own individual responsibility and high, challenging academic standards were the guarantor of high quality professional development.
Today, students and parents view higher ed in investment terms and expect a return on investment, i.e. they expect to succeed more-or-less by default. The result is that we graduate far more degree holders than their respective disciplines can absorb, and usually graduate them at levels of professional development that are completely inadequate for joining those professions. The whole point of higher ed is shifting away from professional development and toward vocational training, or at least job acquisition.
I teach a lot of high school seniors. Many just want to check off the boxes on their way to a good job, not understanding that the process of getting those boxes checked is the goal. College is another box to check off.
Many of them assume that nothing in high school could be remotely relevant to college. "I'll learn what I need in college," they say. My response is that if they don't or can't learn it when they have lots of time they have little evidence they'll rise to the challenge when the competition is tougher and the content is harder. They shrug and try to get 70/100 for my class so they can go to college.
Less motivation, less background knowledge, less resilience, less desire for academic challenge. I feel sorry for my kid, the world he's likely to live in.
Bradical79
(4,490 posts)Things like for profit prisons, poor health care, lack of job security for families, etc. all contribute to poor performance. Real improvements in education require a more holistic and positive approach imo.
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)Therefore, we have no roadmap for our educational system. Colleges have decided that a "well-rounded" student is more valuable than a well-read one (or deeply familiar with math, science, &c). So we have students spending hours and hours with extra-curricular activities such as sports to "fill out" their resumes. Some of the parents (not all, so please lay off) who extoll the virtues of home schooling say their choice was predicated on the fact that they felt their children were doing too much home work and thought it interfered with their home life. And while it might be a good choice for some children with learning disabilities or a specific problem, I do not know any person, not even the teachers I worked with, who are qualified to teach all the subjects such as math or science at a high school level. Not one.
Asia puts the emphasis squarely on academics and expects the students to perform at very high levels. Students are blamed, and somewhat harshly I might add, and not the teachers for failure. Parents expect their children to do well in school and put all the emphasis on scholastic achievement. Students who are bored, absent or lacking motivation are not the fault of the teacher. And teachers are paid well and treated with respect.
Because of these differences, the US will only continue to slide further down the scale.
Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)NCLB began in 2001, when many of today's teens were in elementary grades. Are we ready to declare mission accomplished? Four of those years were on Duncan's watch, so he can fold it up into sharp corners.
One_Life_To_Give
(6,036 posts)Seems to me we have part of the answer staring us in the face. Note Mass recently reduced it's standards to become part of the Common Core. Supposedly this was some sort of trade to get other states to join and raise their standards to Common Core. I think Mass also pays slightly better than average for teachers. Although I don't think we are tops in that category. And third we probably have more and higher degrees on average than many other states.