<p>The annual OECD report is out. Yet again, American students score BELOW AVERAGE in math, and the predictable self-flagellation has begun:
PISA</a> test shows 'stagnation.' Is US education reform failing? - CSMonitor.com</p>
<p>OK, so why are American students mediocre in math? Are American kids dumber? Is our education system broken? Or are we too dumb to cheat like other countries?</p>
<p>Maybe part of it is all the crazy fads about how to teach math.</p>
<p>Another might be that it’s socially acceptable to be “bad at math.”</p>
<p>I assume that your conclusion of American students to be dumber or other countries to be cheaters is not meant to be taken seriously.
How about the idea that math is more important in other nations’ educational system, that Asian students try harder, that Finnish teachers all have a graduate degree, that Polish students know without good knowledge in math there is no career for them etc.? </p>
<p>I am sure there are many factors which play a role, some of which may be changed.
Also, when you look at the way the PISA study is conducted you might doubt which meaning these standardized international tests really have. They are comparing students who live and study in very different situations! Maybe the most important aim in American education is not only high scores, but also a well-rounded personality and happy people.
But why do you suggest that the nations with the higher scores are “cheaters”?</p>
<p>I don’t see how this is cheating…
It’s a matter of the inequality of the school system, in large part. Because of the huge role of local funding, some schools have twice as much money to spend per student than their poorer counterparts. That is a problem. We need to fund our education sufficiently, encourage top students to become teachers, and provide sufficient resources to all schools and students. Will this increase some taxes? Most likely. But is it worth it? Again, most likely.</p>
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How does this explain why students in China are out-performing students in the U.S.? Do u think China spends more per student than the U.S.?</p>
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<p>This.</p>
<p>How many parents laugh off not being able to help junior with his algebra? 8th grade math, and they are not embarrassed by their lack of ability…this sends a very bad message to their kids.</p>
<p>On the other hand, why can’t people remember 8th and 9th grade math? Maybe it has to do with how we teach it in the US. I think in the majority of our schools, students are taught to memorize a laundry list of facts. The facts are never pulled together and they are never applied to the real world until calculus. It’s sort of like teaching kids to write music without actually playing it.</p>
<p>I believe it has to do with cultural differences. In China there is one ethnicity, Chinese. Chinese parents place a huge importance on education regardless of socioeconomic status. The US is made up of many different ethnic groups and not all of them place education as the top priority. </p>
<p>US children also have many more distractions than Chinese children. US children are bombarded by the media with being cool, looking great, being skinny etc. Add to that the emphasis we place on sports and not education. I think it is much more complicated for kids growing up in the US. They are distracted and not singly focused on school. Just an opinion.</p>
<p>The fact that the US has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world is a contributing factor, although some relatively poor countries like Vietnam scored well abvove the US average. </p>
<p>Three US States particpated separately: Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida. The first two, which also happen to have among the highest average math SAT scores, scored slightly above the PISA average while Florida scored well below. </p>
<p>The absence of a uniform national math and science curriculum in the US is also believed to be a contributing factor by PISA and the introduction of the Common Core is expected to improve the situation if only marginally.</p>
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<p>While I agree there are cultural differences, I caution you to not buy into stereotypes. For example, this may be the stereotype of Chinese people but it isn’t reality. While there may be one vastly dominant ethnicity, there is a lot of variation within the Han ethnicity - dialects being the most noticeable. Also, given the sheer population of China, ethnic minorities number around 100 million - not a trivial number.</p>
<p>Don’t assume that ALL Chinese people place a huge importance on education. Largely the Chinese who came to the US (many for graduate school and now, undergraduate) are self-selecting. If you come to the US get your PhD, yeah, you tend to emphasize education to your children. The typical street vendor, shop girl, factory worker, farmer, may or may not value education. In my own family, I saw one cousin self-teach himself through books but another eschewing books and probably didn’t know how to read (their education stopped at the elementary level in the 1960s/70s).</p>
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<p>This is probably closer to why the scores for Americans have not budged in 10 years. There is a built-in excuse to NOT excel at math (“I’m just not good at math”). Even when there is an effort to improve math education, people are too impatient to wait for results before changing up the curriculum again. There are several families with a child in 11th grade and another child in 6th grade and the parents tell me that the middle school curriculum and schedule has totally changed from when their older child attended.</p>
<p>Lastly, even here on CC there was a debate on whether or not people needed to learn long division. Well, if you don’t value the basics, how can the students possibly be better educated?</p>
<p>China PISA scores include only students in Shanghai, not all of China</p>
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Because they’re in school from 7 am until 5pm 6 days a week and their parents won’t let them sleep more than 6 hours a night once they reach 8th grade. Their ENTIRE life as teenagers must be dedicated to memorizing and scoring as high as possible on tests, even the many kids enroll in Western-style or international schools. The Gaokao makes the SATI+II look like a joke - imagine SATI+II for 9 hours where if you don’t get 700’s, you will NOT have a job, nobody will marry you, and you will bring shame to your parents. In addition, Shanghai tends to have high performing schools and well off families so it’s not typical. If you compare Shanghai to COnnecticut (a more appropriate comparison) then the differences in results would favor the American school system since performances are good without exacting such incredible demands on youngsters.</p>
<p>I will need to read this in detail, but three points to look at are:
<p>Shoutout to whoever brought out the racial/ethnic stereotypes. Good job.</p>
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<p>No, that’s not it, you are plenty good enough at cheating.</p>
<p>“China PISA scores include only students in Shanghai, not all of China”</p>
<p>^This. </p>
<p>There was a discussion last night on Chris Hayes’ show and it was noted that those not at the tippy top in Shanghai are sent out of the city to school - so they are not even testing all the students in Shanghai.</p>
<p>“OK, so why are American students mediocre in math?”</p>
<ol>
<li>Elementary teachers are afraid of making students memorize math facts. Too much time is spent on “multiple strategies” instead of making the kids learn the basic facts they really do need to be successful.<br></li>
<li>Calculators are being put in the hands of kids who should be doing mental math. The decay of math skills is appalling. Honors high school kids don’t know their times tables, even if they once did, which some of them never did.</li>
<li> Once the kids master the basic math facts, they aren’t being asked to think enough. It’s all formulaic regurgitation. Kids get the idea that “word problems” are something scary.<br></li>
<li> Poor pedagogy. Lessons seem to tie themselves up in knots using all kinds of weird jargon to explain what should be simple concepts. This goes along with silly waste-of-time assignments. I recall my daughter being asked in 4th grade to fill out an entire page of questions about a problem something like: Bill has 9 apples. He eats 2. How many apples does Bill have left? She had to state the problem being asked, and then write a long justification for the operation she chose to solve this complicated word problem. I think she had to identify key words in the problem that led to her choice of operation. She had to show intermediate steps in solving the problem. And so on. I couldn’t believe the huge fuss being made.</li>
<li> Fear of variables. One thing that seems to slow down students around middle school for several years is that the textbooks are afraid of variables. They think this is so hard to understand it requires literally years of tippy toeing up to it. I think this is really the point at which we fall way behind other countries. And such a big deal is made about it, students think it’s much harder than it is.</li>
<li> Poor applications. Some kids dislike math because they don’t see any need for it. Math programs could do a better job of showing kids how math relates to their lives, and its importance in history. Instead, I’ve seen all kinds of weird stuff in textbooks. One of my daughter’s math texts (algebra1 maybe?) had a photo of Hillary Clinton in it, among many other irrelevancies. Nothing wrong with teaching kids about Hillary Clinton, but she doesn’t belong in a math textbook.</li>
<li> Wrong or misleading stuff. Now I am remembering another example, perhaps from an algebra1 text, which showed Olympic swim times for women and men over the past few decades. The women were improving faster. The kids were asked to figure out when the women would be faster than the men. They weren’t asked to think about why the rates of improvement might different, or whether they thought the women would really overtake the men. Score 1 for rote problem solving, 0 for critical thinking.</li>
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<p>It’s not just that it’s acceptable to be bad at math, but we, as a culture seem to buy much more into the idea that you succeed through natural talent instead of hard work. One of the best books I’ve read on math instruction is [The</a> Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom: James W. Stigler, James Hiebert: 9781439143131: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education/dp/1439143137/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y]The”>http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education/dp/1439143137/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y) which was based on observations based on videotaped classrooms in Germany, Japan and the US. It was fascinating and a lot of the reforms of the last 15 years are based on that research, though I think many have missed the point in implementation. Also worth reading is [Learning</a> Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education: Harold Stevenson: 9780671880767: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Education/dp/0671880764]Learning”>http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Education/dp/0671880764) .</p>
<p>There’s sort of a summary of the book here: <a href=“Redirect Notice”>Redirect Notice; If that link works.</p>
<p>The most surprising result to me was Finland’s decline in recent years. Finland’s results by year are below:</p>
<p>2003: #1 in science and reading, #2 in math
2006: #1 in science, #2 in reading and math
2009: #2 science, #3 reading, #6 math
2012: #5 science, #6 reading, #12 math</p>
<p>A decade ago, Finland topped PISA scores with their unique education system with focus on learning rather than homework, tests, and levels; teachers required to have grad degrees and be in top 10% of class; and teaching considered to be a highly respected profession, sort of like doctors are in the US. It’s not just certain countries are increasing faster than Finland due to things like not providing data for the full country (China)… Finland’s scores are declining. What happened?</p>
<p>In comparison to Asian countries, school here is seen as a chore and not an opportunity. </p>
<p>In comparison to most other developed countries, our child poverty rates are sickening. A child cannot learn if he or she has an empty belly and doesn’t know where he or she is going home to. </p>
<p>We treat our teachers like glorified babysitters and continue to add more work for lower pay and at higher (and stupid) standardized standards.</p>
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<p>Finland’s system is excellent at making sure nobody falls through the cracks. There is also very little variance in the results between high schools. The entire focus is on equality of opportunity. At the same time, they don’t really push their top performers: no advanced classes, no homework, no honors. This has made them fall further and further behind the best Asian countries and even some European countries who track and reward their best students.</p>
<p>China has apparently decided that the stressful lifestyle needed to do so well on tests is not worth it, and homework is being eliminated (younger children) or cut down.</p>
<p>Mathyone, I totally agree with your post on math and fought a curriculum change to “whole math” way back when. The results are now becoming more evident since those children are now in high school.</p>