From Russia (best, country, German, Greek)

[erasure]

Originally Posted by rebel12

American public school system deals with many challenges absent in other developed countries like number of immigrants for example.

Oh but immigration is America's strength.
For successful American business in particular; hiring those illegals for pennies cost much more in the long run, innit?
The "formula of success" is catching up with the US I suppose..

[Vic_Vega]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

OK, then I agree with the Finns. The US needs to beef up spending on teachers and staffing, and teacher-training and teacher education.
I wonder how other countries deal with Special Education, education of the handicapped? Still waiting to hear from the Finns on achievement in the Saami schools, too.

Are you talking about wages now, or perhaps class sizes, or what?

Saami schools are identical to any other public schools, with the obvious exception being the language. And it has been like this from the 70's. That's the official story, and that's all that i can really tell you, they're a very small minority that mostly lives way up north. Someone else is going to have to chime in on this.

[russiaonline]

Originally Posted by rebel12

Ivan. You can't afford much. Numbers don't lie. Take it up with the UN if you think they are incorrect. Until then Russia is behind Gabon lol

I rather take it to a propagandist idiot, who doesn't know what GDP is.

[russiaonline]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

I wonder how other countries deal with Special Education, education of the handicapped?

It's just getting started (the national project "Education" is for 2011-2015), but here it is: distance learning for kids with limited abilities, Republic of Northen Ossetia - Alania, Russian Federation.


ДИСТАНЦИОННО� �• ОБУЧЕНИЕ ДЕТЕЙ-ИНВАЛИДОВ - YouTube

[Judge_Smails]

Originally Posted by russiaonline

There are way too many faults in such tests. 1. They are biased towards certain type of problem solving. 2. Results in different years are often completely different.

3. Results in Russia not looking good at all.

But OK. Can you describe which types of problem solving PISA fails to identify that Russian students excel at? And what results in what years are totally different? By my reckoning, the top of the table looks pretty much the same year after year.

Whatever your answer, man, at least share a more objective metric than pictures of miserable kids with bows in their hair staring blankly forward in the middle of an Ikea showroom.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Vic_Vega

Are you talking about wages now, or perhaps class sizes, or what?

Saami schools are identical to any other public schools, with the obvious exception being the language. And it has been like this from the 70's. That's the official story, and that's all that i can really tell you, they're a very small minority that mostly lives way up north. Someone else is going to have to chime in on this.

Thanks for trying. And I meant both: teacher wages and the number of teachers/school or the number of students/teacher, i.e. class size. It seems like Finland tries to maintain a relatively small class size, and that costs money. And paying teachers with a post-baccalaureate education also costs more than paying teachers who only have a BA. So jeff was saying, this is why Finnish schools get better results.

And I was wondering if the tests from Saami schools measure up with other schools. Or if there's a difference in quality of education between rural and urban schools in general. But it sounds like there isn't. In Russia, there's a big difference in the quality of English teachers in small towns and rural areas, compared to bigger cities. I don't know about other subjects.

[rebel12]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

Ever heard of Oxford?

Yes I have. I heard about many great European schools yet American heavy weights still prevail at least when it comes to research.

[Vic_Vega]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

Thanks for trying. And I meant both: teacher wages and the number of teachers/school or the number of students/teacher, i.e. class size. It seems like Finland tries to maintain a relatively small class size, and that costs money. And paying teachers with a post-baccalaureate education also costs more than paying teachers who only have a BA. So jeff was saying, this is why Finnish schools get better results.

And I was wondering if the tests from Saami schools measure up with other schools. Or if there's a difference in quality of education between rural and urban schools in general. But it sounds like there isn't. In Russia, there's a big difference in the quality of English teachers in small towns and rural areas, compared to bigger cities. I don't know about other subjects.

How underpaid do you consider US teachers to be compared to the rest of the world? Any examples of this, do public employees on average enjoy inferior benefits and job security compared to private sector employees? I know the pay and conditions can vary hugely, maybe you could provide us some of the most shocking examples? Again, i wouldn't consider the teachers here on primary level to be very well paid at all, considering the education requirements, and the fact that it's a job you many times have to take home too.

Understand this is just my opinion, boosting teacher wages will likely not solve anything. And i doubt higher education requirements for teachers in some of the inner city schools with a less than well-performing student body will have any effect, having a group of military drill instructors substituting for teachers might produce much better results. I think i already mentioned about the curriculum and the standardized testing.

I think the major advantages for finnish education are a good student body, a culture of good work ethic, almost nonexistent amount of families living in absolute poverty, and the fact that our teachers are allowed to mostly genuinely teach, not just worry about rushing the students to achieve good test scores all the time. I'm not aware of the class sizes these days, i guess they actually vary alot here.

[russiaonline]

Originally Posted by Judge_Smails

3. Results in Russia not looking good at all.

If I wanted to defend Russia, then this is very easy - the national ranking is calculated by simply combining all data. 400 from Asian or Caucasian republic + 550 from some Russian region /2 = 475. While it is a lot higher, if population is taken into account.

This test is also probably suffers from good schools giving it to the best students, while ordinary schools don't care. Otherwise, Moscow wouldn't score that much higher than all other regions - it should actually be much lower than most, thanks to immigrants.

But OK. Can you describe which types of problem solving PISA fails to identify that Russian students excel at?

This test is alien for Russians.

Some criticism:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...q2OvKAEMKAQDQA

students sometimes just misunderstood what the item writer meant to ask.

it becomes apparent what the competence values actually measure: no more and no less than the number of right responses.

This suggests that little bias is needed to distort test results far beyond their nominal

disparities in student sampling
one-dimensional ?competence? scale is neither technically convincing nor culturally fair.

The ways students react to the lack of time vary considerably between countries:

Dutch students try to answer almost every item. Towards the end of the
test they become hasty and increasingly resort to guessing.

Austrian and German students skip many items, and they do so from the
?rst block on, which leaves them enough time to ?nish the test without

Greek students, in contrast, seem to be taken by surprise by the time
better than in Portugal and not far away from the USA and Italy. In the
last block, however, non-reached items and missing responses add up to
35%, bringing Greece down to one of the last ranks.

Between-country variance may be due for instance to school curricula, cul-
tural background, test languange, or to a combination of several factors. This
factors are particularly in?uential in PISA because students have little time
(about 2'20? per item) and reading texts are too long.

If the languages di?er, correlations are at
best about 0.96, as for the Czech and Slovak Republics. If the languages do not
belong to the same stem, correlations are hardly larger than 0.94. While some
countries belong to large clusters, others like Japan and Korea are quite isolated
(no correlation larger than 0.90). These resultshave immediate implications for the validity of inter-country comparisons

Thirdly, it is clear from the outset that little can be learned when something
as complex as a school system is characterised by something as simple as the
average number of solved test items.

And what results in what years are totally different. By my reckoning, the top of the table looks pretty much the same year after year.

At least regional results in Russia are BS. That's expected, since sample size in each region is basically zero.

[russiaonline]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

In Russia, there's a big difference in the quality of English teachers in small towns and rural areas, compared to bigger cities. I don't know about other subjects.

Lack of good teachers in smaller locations is a serious problem in the past two decades.