“[The Massachusetts] population is, in general, better educated than the average in the United States, which means that the parents of the kids are probably focusing a little more on the education of their children,” said Philip Altbach, the director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.
Altbach added that the state is also more affluent, and higher incomes tend to translate into better test scores."
http://www.wbur.org/2013/12/03/massachusetts-pisa-test-results
There is no such thing as an unbiased observer. (Andreas is a he, btw). We all have our vested self interest, right? It is important to remember, however, that those are not Chinese stats. They are OECD stats. The Chinese do not decide who get tested, OECD does.
Actually I don’t believe the school system in Shanghai is all that good, but the students are motivated. It is a land of insufficient opportunities for all those who want them. Sounds familiar?
While the plight of the migrant workers is well known, their children are guaranteed 9 years of compulsory schooling, houkou or no houkou. That, for some reason, is not reported in foreign press. Another thing that is not well known is that, in the Chinese context, students in Shanghai (and Beijing) are considered “spoiled” and “middling” at best. They are no match for students from the more competitive provinces.
In the next cycle, OECD will add results from Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong. I expect Beijing will perform at the same level as Shanghai. Jiangsu is a gaokao powerhouse and Guangdong is the new kid on the block. They will do better, perhaps much better. We just have to wait and see.
The problem is that we’re trying to be all things to all people.
Once upon a time, it was all about the 3 R’s.
But look at all the things that are being taught in schools today. Schools, in addition to their academic focus, are seen as the vehicle for social change. Every social problem is approached through the schools.
It makes sense. It’s where we have the best odds of educating our way out of social problems. LBJ realized that with his Great Society-- he started Head Start as a way of improving society. He knew that if he could somehow equalize the playing field when poor kids were young, they had a shot at finding their way out of poverty.
So every time a new social issue comes up, we look to the schools to solve it. Time that used to be spent on academics is now focused on safe sex and stranger danger and the dangers of putting too much info online and on avoiding sexual predators and on the dangers of obesity and heart disease and a million other things.
And every single one of them is important.
But every single one of them takes time away from those 3 R’s.
“More people would flock to Korea if the language was as easy and accessible as English.”
That’s just incredibly ignorant to say. Everyone I know who does not speak English as their first language (and we’re talking in the several dozens from every continent except Antarctica) says that it’s a total pain in the butt to learn.
Careful as it seems you’re using the American cultural perception of private schools/colleges always being better than their private counterparts. That’s not necessarily true even in the US considering my Mississippi relatives’ experience with the local private schools which were former segregation academies.
An assumption not shared by many societies as the topflight colleges/institutions tend to be public and private institutions with few exceptions regarded with similar levels of dubiousness/skepticism we reserve for our for-profit colleges.
This was underscored in conversations with colleagues and students from those societies where from their perspective, it was the less capable students who weren’t able to pass competitive exams for the best public high schools and colleges who end up attending the private schools.
In my family’s societies of origin, there was actually a bit of a stigma to attending a private high school or college as my mother* did as it meant the student concerned came from a well-off background and yet didn’t have what it took to gain admission to a competitive academic public HS or university. In short, such students were stigmatized as “having more money than brains”.
I was under the impression that the education system in the US historically has never been “all that”, we came up on top largely due to the fact that we didn’t have German or Japanese armies rampaging through our cities during WWII or insane cold war politics turning the countryside into a warzone.
I think there are two different high school experiences.
There are the kids in honors/AP classes – who spend hours on ECs and sports – who are stressed out with lack of sleep and too much HW.
And then there are the other kids, who either get no HW or don’t do the HW they get.
Here’s one anecdote – a mom I know with 3 kids has 2 in honors classes and the other has some minor learning disabilities. She is always complaining about her kids’ workload. One day I asked about the third kid, who is not in honors classes. That one, she said, gets no HW.
I’ve spent time in schools – middle school, HS and college. It is amazing how many kids are perfectly happy to get a C. They do the absolute minimum to pass – which often means not doing any HW, not studying for tests, not paying attention in class. The kids I’ve encountered with this attitude come from a range of socio-economic classes and ethnicities. It’s one of the reasons I found it really hard to be a teacher. Some of these kids get a C because they aren’t very bright and they just can’t do advanced work; others get the C because they just don’t care. I’ve known longtime teachers who stopped giving HW in their classes because they know from years of experience that the kids won’t do the work. (I’m not saying those are good teachers or that that’s the right approach, just that it happens).
In looking at these test results – has anyone ever looked at how our top students are doing? If we just took our top 10%, how do they do on these tests?
There is nothing to be careful about! Are you disagreeing with the fact that most universities around the world are publicly funded? Are you disagreeing that the schools that are considered at the pinnacle in the US are MOSTLY private? If you look at the undergraduate level, how many public universities should be considered among the top 20? The USNews thinhs a handful deserve to be in the best 30, and they have to resort to tweak the data to arrive at it. It would not be farfetched to think that NO public school deserve to be considered in the top 50 in undergraduate education. I happen to think that at best a couple might be.
As far as describing the private vs public at the K-12 level, the monopoly of the funding distorts the equation. There are a number of great K-12 in both public and private and poorly performing schools in both systems. There are very rich and very poor schools. The unfortunate part is that overwhelming majority of them are underperforming courtesy of an uncompetitive system that rewards mediocrity.
Careful enough?
That and the fact those wars and totalitarian dictatorships encouraged a great migration of those societies’ best minds to become scholars and scientists in the US…especially at the top colleges. Some of them have even played critical roles in founding some respectable colleges such as Brandeis University.
It was a key factor in the great decline of German/Austrian universities, especially in traditional strengths such as chemistry or engineering while simultaneously, US universities gained greatly from the influx of refugees who were the best minds from their respective nations of origin.
However, most of their impact is at the graduate/PhD level, not necessarily undergrad. Especially at Research I universities notorious for making undergrads a lower priority in relation to academic research/publications and graduate students.
With the exception of ECs, spending hours stressed out with lack of sleep and too much HW when one includes the mandatory “extra tutoring”* expected in many East Asian societies is the lot of the student in an academic high school hoping to excel on the national college entrance exam.
This is underscored by a common admonition given to Japanese academic HS students aspiring to take the national college entrance exam “Pass with 4, fail with 5” which basically discourages students from sleeping more than 4 hours per night.
This happened to my parents as well. Yet the reasons are quite different: private schools were mostly targeting students who need remedial classes. Private schools are to rely on “remedial” and “equating” programs such as the much beloved IB program because they were NOT recognized.
On the other hand, it is important to remember that ALL schools are part of the official (public system) including the Catholic schools that are usually vastly more performing than their secular counterparts. The reason the Catholic schools were not decimated is that the Constitution did not allow the unions and secular forces to dismantle them.
A recent study by ETS of 22 OECD countries revealed that US Millennials (born after 1980) perform near or at the bottom in literacy, numeracy, and “problem solving in technology-rich environments” compared to their international peers, as well as other age groups in the US. http://www.ets.org/s/research/30079/overview.html
I think “Holistic Admissions” at its core is anti-intellectual and is a primary cause in our top high school kids spending far too much time on sports and volunteer activities, taking time and attention away from what they should be doing in high school, which is focusing on academics, especially on time/energy consuming subjects such as math and science. When even our best colleges are giving 3 to 1 preference for athletes over regular applicants, this kind of results is only to be expected and will only worsen.
The study you quoted is along the lines of what has been discussed here. This addresses the issues of a deficient system of education. Your conclusions are, however, covering a different set of issues.
Inasmuch as there is ample wasted time in the K-12 and many wasted resources, the distinction you’re making about sports if unfounded. Not every athlete happens to be a mediocre student, and there are a number of great students who also happen to be the MVP of their school or excel in organized sports. It is not “that” unique to see a valedictorian on his or her way to HYPS to also have a shelf full of trophies or even … national team shirts. On the other hand, the high performing athlete rarely comes from a school that is aiming to produce the “STEM-uber-alles” student. Ask our friend Cobrat for details!
When it comes to the school that practice “true” holistic admissions, the dumb as a rock athlete is an exception. Chances are that you will find most of them at the “paint-by-the-numbers” schools where the only requirement for the athlete is the minimum SAT. Different worlds!
A top athlete with a top SAT score is an anomaly, a needle in a haystack. I don’t buy the “straight A” athlete propaganda they love to cook up on TV, like the way they love to go on and on about Richard Sherman, how he was a straight A student, Communications Major from Stanford, so smart and so smart. Meanwhile, he went to Dominguez High School in Compton, where only 17% of 12th graders met state standards in English Language Arts, and 19% met standards for Math. Anyone can be straight A if they stack their schedule with easy classes, from a school like that, it means even less. Even in Ivy League schools you’d be hard pressed to find an athletic recruit who is good enough to major in STEM.
Many well educated parents push their kids towards sports participation because they are fully aware that athletes are favored 3 to 1 in elite admissions. I see kids as young as 3rd grade now participating in select soccer and/or baseball and traveling all over the state, even out of state, to compete several weekends a year. That’s on top of 2 to 3 practices a week, game day Saturday, winter/spring break/summer sports camps. There are only 24 hours in a day. After all the sports practices, games, volunteer activities, club and music/dance activities, how much time is left for studying? Diane Ravitch crowed about American kids being more “creative”, I’m not seeing the evidence. They don’t have time to be creative. Creative people need time and space to think. Our kids are too busy rushing from one activity to another after school, then they have to do homework, socialize, there’s no time left to think and be creative.
Holistic admission is a giant waste of our kids’ time and energy. If Ivy League schools don’t want too many kids of one demographic, they should just go ahead and set a hard quota. If people don’t like it, too bad! They’re private and can do whatever they want. Stop making our top kids run themselves ragged thinking they actually have a shot when they don’t. Their time could be better spent elsewhere. We have a shortage of STEM majors in this country, that’s what we should be encouraging our top kids to go into, not sports and more meaningless ECs. Companies keep lobbying for more H1B visas for foreign STEM grads, while 55% of our college grads are either unemployed or underemployed, all thanks to the anti-intellectual “holistic admissions”. :-q
I think the number of students who are knocking themselves out with EC’s in pursuit of admission to a top “holistic admissions” college is way overstated on this site. Many of the top students at our school don’t even study for the SATs. Yes, many kids are highly involved in activities but they aren’t doing so for the purpose of holistic admissions. They like the activities. Some of them would prefer that the time commitment be less than it is but they would rather do X than not do X, even if X requires more time than they would ideally like. Our school routinely wins state awards in many EC areas, yet very few students, probably fewer than 10, are applying to top holistic schools. I can’t say for sure because we don’t even have Naviance. That sort of thing is not on the radar here–I’d never heard of it before cc. They mostly go to state schools. So I think it’s a mistake to assume that students all share the cc mantra of Ivy or bust and that is the only reason why they would spend a lot of time on their ECs.
Our top students could most certainly do better if the public schools would drop the pretense that all students are equally capable and be willing to offer students instruction appropriate to them starting in kindergarten. An enormous amount of time is being wasted “teaching” the better students things they already know.
@mathyone They are certainly not overstated in our highly competitive area. The number of kids participating in select sports and ECs like piano/dance competitions is staggering. In one local school there are at least a hundred kids doing the IB diploma, most aiming for elite schools, and that’s not even the best high school in the area.
Lack of challenge for gifted kids is another issue and I agree that too, is a big problem, especially at the K-8 level. In our district we constantly have to fight the district and the schools to get proper challenge for gifted kids, especially in math and science. The liberal left and their love of “equality” i.e. equal outcome, is preventing too many of our gifted children from reaching their true potential, and we are paying the price as a country. I love Charles Murray’s book “Real Education”.
You are talking about Richard Sherman. Would it surprise you that some of his teammates were majoring in the hard sciences despite playing of the team that should have won the NCAA championship? Do you realize that many athletes at Stanford would have gained admission based on academics? Do you realize that some students were admitted to Stanford and, despite being athletically qualified and recruited, did not accept the athletic scholarship.
I know this, not because made for TV stories, but because of real life experience!
So the reason the US is scoring so low on these tests is because kids are too busy participating in extracurriculars in order to get into elite colleges? Try comparing the number of applicants to these colleges with the total number high school graduates. For simplicity, maybe you can assume that no one applies to more than school, overestimating the number of applicants to elite schools.
What do Singapore (East) and Finland (West) win for being at the top?
@cmsjmt, hate to break it to you, but the fight to get proper challenge for gifted kids is a losing battle here in the red zone.
Our system is a joke. I wish I knew the reasons for that but I think they are many, and varied. My wife is a teacher and the stories that she comes home with are unbelievable. From the students, to the administration, to the School Board, to the parents, it is just one sad cluster after another.
Add in our socioeconomic problems, and combine it with our societal issues, and you have the makings of a big problem.