<p>That consideration has been debunked in the past. The OECD tests such as PISA do NOT exclude students who are in vocational schools. Fwiw, if adjustments should be made for high school dropouts, the US would not fare very well. Not everybody goes to high school in the US, let alone graduate! Today, the United States’ high school graduation rate ranks near the bottom among developed nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.</p>
<p>In addition of the complete lack of logic to compare AP students to national pools of international students, previous efforts to compare the performance of US students at the end of high school were not very comforting for the US. </p>
<p>Why is so hard to admit that our education performance is not what we think it is? In simple words, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor.</p>
<p>I, for one, am happy to acknowledge the horrendous overall situation of U.S. education relative to the rest of the industrialized world. I take issue with how this article presents what it claims is a poor showing of “elite” school districts. I think any school district performing at or above the 50th percentile (yes, only %32) cannot be said to be in serious trouble. However, given that in most, if not all other countries, schools are funded nationally and not by district, there is much greater educational equality in the rest of the developed nations. This would probably show up if you dissected their perfomance in the same way. The incredible disparities found in the U.S. system by district just don’t exist.</p>
<p>Most people suck at math (myself included). As badly as math was taught in my birth country (a place that has a lot of famous mathematicians, ah, the irony :-)) it is taught pretty badly at the K-12 level in this country as well. </p>
<p>Also, there’s math and there’s math. I sucked at calculus, but breezed thru heavy classes in statistics, linear algebra, numerical analysis (wonder how?), discrete math, descriptive geometry, and topology. </p>
<p>In my humble opinion, Calculus goes way too fast in this country at the college level (for no apparent reason other than having the Math dept act as a profit center when people repeat classes it would seem)… Plus, there’s too much emphasis on winner-take-all tests rather than actual applications of Calculus in meaningful homeworks. </p>
<p>Somehow the academic world has not heard that real life engineers rarely, if ever, get to entertain their bosses or customers with Calculus III Powerpoint slides. There are some areas where it’s useful but in my team of 100 hardware and software engineers developing mobile communications equipment the world ‘derivative’ seems to be as common as the word ‘vacuum tube’ (except maybe the antenna designers, but they’re wierd)</p>
<p>The extremely wealthy district where I attended elementary and middle school has 64% math and 78% for reading. </p>
<p>However, in that (very wealthy) area, the high school I would have attended (moved locally, went to an urban private school for high school) is technically part of a district, despite being in the same town…this district encompasses all the high schools for one of the wealthiest counties in the nation. And guess what? No data! I agree, there is something weird going on here…</p>
I don’t have trouble believing the above statement.</p>
<p>
This is what I have a hard time believing. More accurately, I’m not sure what it means, quantitatively. I’ll have to look into the report to see the numbers for what is wealthy and what is mediocre, and the associated statistics. Assuming that’s in there. THe selected example snippets from the article description don’t do it for me.</p>
<p>I think it is likely that the top students of wealthy families living in the Beverly Hills school district do not go to Beverly Hills High School. From those I know who live in LA, pretty much everyone who can afford it, sends their kids to a private school (like Harvard Westlake). According to Wikipedia, 35% of BHHS kids are not US born and 41% speak other than English at home. Let’s blame the internationals! :)</p>
<p>If I’m reading the PISA data correctly (apologies, I learned math in the US :)), you can see the TOP US students still aren’t doing as well as those in other countries, including ones from countries with diverse and immigrant populations. </p>
<p>This website has very handy system for comparing countries and looking at different data. Start by clicking on an area, such as ‘math’ on the right, close that weird middle window, click on the countries you want to compare to on the left, and then the data you want to see (such as 95th % confidence interval, or mean score for boys). </p>
<p>And if you read the article, it’s not about a few well known towns covered in the magazine article, it looks at 14000 school districts. And I assumed they controlled for demography anyways. </p>
<p>Part of the problem is the unwillingness to admit the US’s performance is not simply reflective of ‘other people’ bringing their scores down…and instead admit there is a bigger issue that needs resolved.</p>
<p>Of course you could just not read the article or data, and argue among yourselves that yes your country is superior and anyone suggesting otherwise must be messing with you :)</p>
<p>With that I was referring to any specific district where the average student was at the 50th percentile. In such a district, it stands to reason that the whole bell curve of achievement is similar to the overall international group’s distribution. Of course, that is not the same as saying the top 10% of U.S. students are as strong as the top decile of the international group. </p>
<p>This whole study is comparing how individual districts measure up to the international standard (helpful for people who want to see how well their own school system fares). Any subgroups of districts, by nature, must be arbitrarily defined for comparison. It certainly does not alter the overall poor national results.</p>
<p>My point is ignore the study and just look at the PISA data by itself which is about individuals within a country rather than by school districts.The high achieving US students aren’t doing as well as the high achieving international students.</p>
<p>The PISA results that focus on the positive tails of the distributions seems to refute the argument that Americans score poorly when comparing national average scores because ‘some groups’ bring the average down and other countries don’t have those low performing groups.</p>
<p>All those internationals are just featureless textureless math drones who don’t have leadership and anyway it’s all about creativity, Steve Jobs went to school in America.</p>
<p>“Sixty-eight percent of all U.S. districts have average math achievement below the 50th percentile when compared to achievement in 25 developed nations.”</p>
<p>How can this statement be true when there is not data for all US districts?</p>
<p>The district with either the largest or second largest (not sure which) high school in our state has no data.</p>
<p>Interesting, our tiny school was 68% math and 80% reading. I’m not too surprised as the school was teaching some pretty strange math concepts all through elementary school with the kids that would have fallen in the group they are using for comparison. Many parents simply ended up teaching their kids basic math up to Algebra I. They called it “new math” and my H and I called it “crap math.” The school rival was at 80% and 82%…they must not have taught new math to their elementary kids.</p>
<p>Starbright, this thread was started based on the premise that the “elite” districts in the U.S. performed weakly against international standards. That was what the original article that Xiggi linked to was saying. Later a more in depth article on the study gave more information and allowed one to look up individual district data. So my points were made with that in mind–performance in wealthy districts.</p>
<p>Your point seems to be that there are not as high a percentage of top performing students in the U.S. as a whole as there are internationally–for example at the highest math level, level 6, the U.S. has 1.9% students, where as all OECD countries have 2.8% at that level. (Korea has 7.8%) I completely agree that the U.S. falls short on this measure. But chances are the percentages of those at level 6 are much greater in the wealthy school districts, where the average performance is much higher.</p>
<p>Now I wouldn’t mind a debate on whether the incredible disparities from district to district, state to state, is due to the inequitable distribution of funding as compared to other countries. I understand that it is a difficult issue in the U.S.–I grew up in one of those wealthy suburbs where people were willing to pay hefty property taxes to have an excellent public school option, but it is a fairness issue that warrants a national discussion if the country is ever going to bring up the results in poorer areas.</p>
<p>The low-scoring districts are of great concern to me. The average student in those districts is really at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>The fact that the US does not have so many districts where the average student is in the top third internationally is not of particular concern to me. Looking at the countries that were involved in this study (not the PISA study that starbright is discussing), why would one expect the US to have a lot of districts where the average student scores in the top third internationally?</p>
<p>I think there is an issue of the standard deviation in the individual measurements vs. the standard deviation of the mean involved here. The standard deviation of the mean of a set of scores is much smaller than the standard deviation of the individual scores.</p>
<p>This amplifies the concern about the low-performing school districts, and reduces the concern about the number of districts where the average student is in the top x%.</p>
<p>We must be in relatively good shape then since my district (wealthy++ by region standards but overall just middle class ‘rich’) came out as 77% math, 81% reading :-). I seem to remember we are in the top 1% of high schools in the US. (there was a list of some 28000 HS’s and we were in the 500-600 range.</p>
<p>well, all right. we no longer have a space program, our economy’s in the toilet, we have no healthcare, no adequate safety net, we outsource our labor force, import far more than we export and we generally suck at math. maybe we just suck. I’m thoroughly bummed now.</p>
<p>I looked up a few districts I’ve lived in–in several states, from upper-middle class suburbans (scoring 70-80%–better than mediocre, IMO) to extremely poor rural districts–some of them tiny with one building K-12, no resources, poorly educated parents, etc.–shocked to see 60%+ in several of these poor rural districts. One district that is regarded as one of the top in state, university town where the high school churns out a couple dozen NMFs a year, was in the 40s-50s–not much different than its not-so-highly regarded and largely Hispanic neighboring district in the 30-40s. Interesting to see the stats, but better than I thought. Wonder how they identified the “wealthy suburban districts.”</p>