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Originally Posted by obs20
All that is true but it doesn't explain what the scale means or if the differences are statistically significant. It does show that Singapore and Shanghai are outliers and that is all we can draw from the table.
In the US we test only public school students. Private schools are not required to test. Other countries choose to test who they like. It's not a direct comparison.
We do have cause for concern but our situation isn't as desperate as some would have you believe.
If you get a chance read: The War Against America's Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Education by Gerald R Bracey
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Americ...1755499&sr=8-5 |
Bingo.
The US education system works very differently then the rest of the worlds. Students don't take entrance exams to get into high school. So when you randomly pick from a US high school you are going to get kids in AP classes and kids in remedial classes or even kids who are going to drop out the following year. When you pick students from a high school in Japan or China or even some European countries you are picking a student who had high enough scores to be allowed to attend that school.
The high school I graduated from was one where the majority of the students were Asian. A large percentage of those students were parachute students. Their parents bought or rented property in the town so that their high school age students could go to school in the US. These were the kids who did not score high enough on the placement exams to get into the elite high schools in Taiwan and Japan and whose parents did not want them going into a vocational track for high school.
Let's compare the scores of US students who take AP classes and exams to the hand pick sampling of the other countries and see what the results are. I have a feeling that the US would do a great deal better if we compared our elite students with the worlds elite students.