The subtitle of this excellent book, by Daniel Koretz, is What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Here is one excerpt:
The distressingly large achievement differences among racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups in the United States lead many people to assume that American students must vary more in educational performance than others. Some observers have even said that the horse race — simple comparisons of mean scores among countries — is misleading for this reason. The international studies address this question, albeit with one caveat: the estimation of variability in the international surveys is much weaker than the estimation of averages.
…We are limited to more general conclusions, along the lines of "the standard deviations in the United States and Japan are quite similar." Which they are. In fact, the variability of student performance is fairly similar across most countries, regardless of size, culture, economic development, and average student performance.
I was shocked to read this but the book is highly reputable and persuasive.
Does he mean that people who do well in school do well in life both places and that the gap in test scores are simlar to gap in icomes or that the gaps in test scores overall are simlar in the USA and Japan?
BTW Maybe we should say that the country in which people have the highest standard of living (excepting the oil rich) is the country with the best education. IMO schools are a very small part of education and the tests do not test important things.
There are all sorts of reasons why comparing the USA with, at least, European countries is often an exercise in futility. Most notably, the early selection process that that determines your life by bifurcating education outcomes at around age 12 — you have good grades you go to gymnasium (college preparatory) or you have bad grades you go to a technical school and become a plumber.
One should also not how the lack of ‘diversity’ is inversely related to educational success.
The recurring PISA exams — given to 15 year-olds across 30 countries or so — show in the latest 2008 report for the latest PISA that the variability of US student performance is in line generally with most other countries. In science, our students are a tad below average (above quite a few EU countries, below even more EU and East Asian ones). In math, worse yet. In reading — (not clear from the charts (easy to read otherwise) if this is for scientific reading or general reading — a no-show for reasons unclear from the PISA report.
Click here: http://earged.meb.gov.tr/yeni/duyurular/13_04_2008/dosyalar/ingilizce/science_competencies_for_tomorrows_world.swf
Michael (Gordon), AKA, the buggy professor: http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Excuse me, the overall US score was 489 rather than 483.
Here’s a simple way to look at variance, from the official PISA 2006 Science Literacy report:
“When comparing the performance of the highest
achieving students—those at the 90th percentile—
there was no measurable difference between the
average score of U.S. students (628) compared to
the OECD average (622) …
“At the other end of the distribution, among low achieving students at the 10th percentile, U.S.
students scored lower (349) than the OECD average
(375) on the combined science literacy scale.”
PISA ranks students on a seven level scale from Below Level 1 (don’t ask) to Level 6 (Jimmy Neutron). Out of the 30 OECD countries, the US has a higher percentage (25%) at the two worst levels than all but Turkey and Mexico. In contrast, Finland has only 5% at those abysmal levels, and Japan only 12%.
See Figure 5 in:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008016.pdf
Stephen Downes asserts:
“And people who explain the results by saying that other countries are less diverse will be unable to explain why Canada, which is very diverse, scored much better than the U.S.”
The word “diversity” can mean a lot of things. What really matters is that Canada has higher median human capital than America. Canada has very little illegal immigration and thus practically no Mexicans, and is only about 2% black. It’s system of legal immigration is explicitly designed to benefit current Canadian citizens by carefully selecting those applicants with the highest human capital. I, for example, took the Canadian immigration online assessment in 2001 for an article I was writing and failed to score high enough to qualify for an interview with a Canadian immigration official. (Their opinion was that they had plenty of journalists already, thank you very much, don’t call us, we’ll call you.)
Here’s the executive summary of the latest PISA report from the federal National Center for Educational Statistics on U.S. performance:
“On the combined science literacy scale, Black
(non-Hispanic) students (409) and Hispanic
students (439) scored lower, on average, than
White (non-Hispanic) students (523), Asian (non-
Hispanic) students (499), and students of more
than one race (non-Hispanic) (501).”
[The OECD average is set to 500.]
So, African-Americans score the same in science as Mexicans do in Mexico. Hispanics in America due considerably better than Mexicans in Mexico, but much worse than non-Hispanic whites and Asians.
By the way, educational performance by Mexican-Americans, while it improves considerably between the immigrant generation and the first generation not born in America, does _not_ improve in subsequent generations, leaving Mexican-Americans permanently well below the non-Hispanic white average. See the landmark 2008 book “Generations of Exclusion” by Telles et al of the UCLA Chicano Studies Center for a brilliant study comparing Mexican-Americans in 1965 and their descendants in 2000.
If you don’t want to buy the “Generations of Exclusion” book that Steve Sailer mentions, you can still read the informative UCLA press report:
“Mexican American integration slow, education stalled, study finds”
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-of-four-generations-46372.aspx
excerpt: “unlike the descendants of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation.”
What converted me to the view that intelligence and human capital differences are likely intractable and quite probably genetically based? In large part, blog posts like this one, where people like Gordon and Sailer reference fact after fact after fact and go unanswered.
So Roberto, why not come out and say that you are a racist if that is what you mean. If you mean something else, please explain.
Realists believe the truth is better for humanity than lies, ignorance, or wishful thinking.
Lots of people, however, disagree.
Steve Sailer,
Canada does not have a particularly selective system of immigration; among other things, it has the highest per-capita immigration rate of any large country.
Nearly half of immigrants can be considered “non-economic” migrants. There are some recent government proposals to prioritize the applications of more qualified immigrants, similar to Australia, but there is opposition and it’s not clear whether anything will come of it.
There is also in fact a considerable amount of illegal immigration, in the form of bogus refugee applications. Refugee claims can take years to sort out, during which time claimants can legally work in Canada.
A large percentage of these bogus refugee claimants end up staying, even if their claim is rejected. Removal orders are only spottily enforced; sometimes even deported persons simply come back. People sometimes grumble about that sort of thing, but it isn’t anything like the white-hot issue it is in the States or Europe. There is fairly broad support or at least tolerance of high levels of immigration across the political spectrum and within Canadian society, and not everyone cares whether you came in through the front door or the back door.
It’s true that there are far fewer Mexicans in Canada than in the US, but that’s just for obvious reasons of geography: why cross an extra border just to get to a colder place? Some of the Mexicans in Canada are there thanks to a guest-worker program. Interestingly, in 2005, Mexico ranked number one in the number of refugee claims by country of origin, followed by China.
I’m afraid the strict, selective mostly-all-legal Canadian immigration model that you hold up in contrast to the US policies that you oppose seems to be, well, mostly a product of your imagination.
John Faben said: “Am I the only one who thinks these cross-country comparisons might be highly skewed by which people in which countries are likely to take these tests. E.g, I would guess that the average student in the UK who takes the International Baccalaureate is probably significantly better educated than the average student in the UK, purely because the IB is taken more commonly in private schools.”
PISA tests are given to a sample of all 15 year olds in all types of schools, so there is noeffect of the type you conjecture. See http://www.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,en_32252351_32235907_1_1_1_1_1,00.html and links
Most people looking at the results have concluded that the route to better educational outcomes lies in the path the higher-achieving countries have all taken: greater attention to social and economic equity, higher pay and status for teachers, no separation of students into ‘elite’ and ‘other’ categories, limited testing, and greater emphasis on autonomy for individual schools.
Who are these “most people”, and have the higher-achieving countries actually taken the path you prefer? Many of the highest-achieving countries are East Asian, and as far as I know, the education system there is very traditional, with lots of rote learning and the like. Your recommendations describe the top-performing Finland better, although teachers are not well-paid in Finland, and testing and grading is very central to the Finnish system.
An interesting article in the Washington Post (from 2003) about the less-performing parts of the Japanese school system: Fast Times at Asakita High (via Craig Newmark)
Why not cheating? If you do recommend “charm”?
He could be, more profoundly, saying that poor people at x level below average income on average score x perfect below average on these tests and that the different ethnic groups scores differ similarly in both countries.
Why is this profound?
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