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Most of this has to do with the disparity in education and attitudes toward education among the various social classes. Among 35 developed nations, the U.S. had the second highest child poverty rate. Many European countries are doing better in education simply because they have worked hard to eradicate child poverty. Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)
Part of the issue with studies like these is that they fail to adequately represent what actually defines a demographic from study to study. In America, everyone tends to be lumped together as we have a modern economy, a modern infrastructure and are usually seen as a benchmark in these two areas. The problem is, there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth and, along with that, a rather large disparity in education. In all fairness, you cannot conglomerate a family-oriented, well-fed and loved suburban child with a single-parented, poor and neglected inner-city child. Yet, that's exactly what these studies do -- and only for America. China's/Asia's society is still largely agrarian and its population is mostly uneducated. Outside of its major cities, there is little infrastructure to speak of. So, these studies cherry-pick only the students who have a comparable standard of living to Americans. And, these are the students who would be the equivalent of the family-oriented, well-fed and loved suburban child in the US. There are plenty of studies that show US students either matching or outperforming Asian students when the socio-economic standards are normalized. Put it this way, nobody from the west is flocking to Asian institutions to attain higher education. The opposite cannot be said and there are solid fundametal reasons for that. Institution and infrastructure-wise, the US is a century ahead of most of Asia and, no matter how much some people want to believe it, the gap will not close anytime soon.
I'm not saying that other nations do not outpace the US. I am saying that the. US as a whole is not reflective of our regions and that disparity can be seen within and between the 50 states.
In which case I completely agree.
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Further, answer these questions. I'm curious to what you all think.
I didn't think it would make sense to test reading since different languages are different, but are they not using the same math test worldwide? Personally, I don't believe there is bias in math (maybe a statistically insignificant amount in word problems)
I didn't think it would make sense to test reading since different languages are different, but are they not using the same math test worldwide? Personally, I don't believe there is bias in math (maybe a statistically insignificant amount in word problems)
I don't know about a math testing bias, but I'm not familiar enough with this test to know if the stats are wonky.
Wow this is some popular thread with highly polarized views!
I strongly believe that inherently students from all over the world are equally intelligent. It is the schooling, society’s focus on education and motivation from immediate family that makes an average Asian student perform better than an average US student. We don’t have to go as far as Asia to understand this. Just go to any of your local school districts and randomly select 100 Asian students and compare them against randomly selected 100 American kids – there should be a statistically significant difference in their grades. Go to any top 100 universities in US and check the number of Asian students, forget their grades, just the number of enrolled Asian students; they far outnumber their ratio in terms of their demography in that state’s population. But again, education success does not necessarily have a linear correlation to financial success. So don’t take this thread or the research personally; it is not about “my kid is smarter than your kid”. It merely points to a possibly flawed research that highlights the high focus that Asian society as a whole puts on education and its impact on an average student.
That's still a shortsighted and inaccurate assessment. Select Asian immigrants attending school in the US are the creme of the crop in their respective nations. If you want to compare them to an American, compare them to their equal counterparts in the US rather than the average. No?
When you lower your national standards to coddle less-academic demographics and make them "feel better" about themselves, what do you expect?
Liberal teachers in the public school system try to be "hip" and use Social Studies to talk about Kanye West, P. Diddy, Oprah and their favorite football teams/athletes when they should be talking about people like Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison. The liberal professors in the university halls and the public school establishment decided that this wasn't P.C. and that there was too much focus on "dead white males" and not enough on "alive minorities", so they drastically changed the curriculum. This is what has ruined our public school system in the U.S.
The U.S., at one time, was on par academically with many of those Northern European nations that American liberals always point to as exemplars of social investment.
What's really shameful for the U.S. is that those Asian nations who are besting us are teaching academics the way they should be taught and you better believe that Asian students probably have more knowledge re: Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison than American students do. It's a truly pathetic state our nation's education system is in right now.
Whether American liberals care to admit it or not, things were actually better academically when students were given real education and not the dumbed-down, watered-down B.S. that passes for "education" today. It's just not working and now it's reflected in the international scores.
The reality is that if Americans want to give their kids a fighting chance academically, the best option is a traditional, conservative Catholic school where science, math and literacy are taken seriously.
The truth is often painful and not pleasant to see/hear, but that doesn't make it any less truthful.
Last edited by kttam186290; 12-05-2013 at 01:08 PM..
That's still a shortsighted and inaccurate assessment. Select Asian immigrants attending school in the US are the creme of the crop in their respective nations. If you want to compare them to an American, compare them to their equal counterparts in the US rather than the average. No?
Not really. I can think of a couple different arguments but let me try this one first - it would be a fair assessment to compare a random bunch of students from a school to another random bunch from the same school grouped by origin. Yes, in a way, the Asians in that class could be considered an "elite" if you compare them against an Asian student on a small town who hardly has access to potable water and sanitation. But again, if we were to compare apples-to-apples, better compare two apples who grew on the same tree, right? Not an apple that grew in a well fertilized orchard against one that grew on a tree in a barren desert!
My husband is also a scientist, and a liberal, and is ademently against Catholic school. He had a poor experience. I suppose I feel the same, but unless we move to the likes of Wellesley our daughter is going to private school.
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