Don’t take the hat off quite yet Professor Ulf! You have this kid in the back with his hand raised shouting like Arnold Horshack! Ooo! Oooo!
I’ll take your claim that matched high SES for high SES the US does as well at the 15 and 17 year marks with no need for cite. And that indeed we have more lower SES included in the testing pool (and many more going onto college tracks than much of Europe I understand as well). But while Finland’s lower SES pool is smaller (well their high SES is smaller too … they have amazingly low income and wealth inequality), how does the comparison hold lower SES to lower SES?
More broadly, is there data that you know of Professor Ulf that elucidates the relationship among societies between the degree of income inequality and degree of divergence in educational outcomes? And if there is a correlation (as I suspect there is) which is the predominant directionality? This article, for example, makes the case that in Finland as a specific case education is the tool used to reduce income inequality.
Given that in Spain also we only hear of how bad our PISA results are and how badly we’re doing in a bunch of measurements some of which don’t make sense*, I’m wondering if we do better in TIMSS.
Any student who gets to repeat a year, something which when I went to school uphill in the snow both ways was No Big Deal if justified (long illness, boy born late in the year - girls didn’t seem to be as affected by birthdate as boys) is now considered a Failure. My friend’s brother who repeated a year due to hepatitis, graduated journalism among the top students, started his own editorial house, later got bought with the condition (requested by the buyers) that he’d stay on to manage it, he’s a failure. Failure my ass.
We will never be good at educating poor kids as long as we continue to believe that poor kids are unable to learn. And a lot of people do–like the dispute over whether or not Algebra 2 should be required that is referenced above. You can debate whether or not it’s useful, but the argument that it’s just too hard for lots of kids, and that lots of kids just aren’t cut out for it, strikes me as preposterous. This is fundamental attribution error. This is seeing kids who are the product of a thousand mutable forces all hampering their ability to get an education and deciding that the only factor that mattered in the end was some intangible “aptitude” that they lacked, and then using that conclusion to ignore or perpetuate those mutable factors, because any effort there is wasted on inherently incapable kids–though it’s usually phrased more nicely.
This is NOT my area of expertise even a teeny bit.
Agree wholeheartedly that the USA fails to properly educate the lower SES groups. But …
When it comes to a specific question such as “Is algebra 2 appropriate for this school’s 10th grade class?” ISTM we ought to be looking at that 10th grade class as it really is, not as what those kids might potentially have been if they’d all had ideal upbringings and good schools from pre-K to now.
In curing any social ill we’ve got two classes of problem with two largely unrelated solutions. 1) How to deal with the people we have as they are at their present stage of life. And 2) How to minimize the growth of dysfunction in the yet to be born, yet to be educated, yet to be …
Overall it seems society is hamstrung dealing with #1 and has neither attention span, political will, nor budget for doing much about #2. Which of course is ridiculously short-sighted. Fix #2 for just 30 years and #1 will recede into a fading memory.
There’s a difference between offering a course as an advanced option, and teaching it as a required course.
No high school that I’m aware of teaches calculus as part of their standard, every-day math curriculum. Plenty teach it as part of a suite of courses for their best and brightest students, and have for at least 25 years now (when I graduated). But colleges still teach calculus, and you have to explicitly test out of it if you think you already know it well enough. This isn’t the case for stuff like algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
But yeah; I do think they require more of incoming students than they used to; when I was a kid in kindergarten (1978), we had half-day kindergarten, and we learned the letters and the sounds they make, the numbers, counting, and some basic life/classroom skills, such as how to actually behave in classrooms. It wasn’t terribly academic- it was really setting the stage for first grade, which is where it really started being about academics, and we learned to read, to do some basic addition, etc…
Now, I think the academics starts in kindergarten as well as the “how to sit in the circle”, and “how not to make fart sounds while the teacher’s talking” stuff.
The issue isn’t what they are “capable” of, generally. The issue is what they are interested enough in doing. Making someone learn something they have no interest in will often fail, in the classic leading a horse to water sense. Algebra in general, and certainly Algebra II (primarily the study of quadratic equations) has little obvious relationship to the daily life of a mailman, a retail sales associate, a carpenter, etc. Yes, as a mathematician, I can attempt to create relevance, but if we are truly honest, we admit that math like Algebra II is primarily learned solely so you can eventually take part in calculus and other maths that require understanding how to handle quadratic equations, etc. So forcing students who have no interest in the subject to take it on the theory that then they can later take further maths they have no intention of taking begins to be a bit silly.
Also, and this must be emphasized, there is the issue of expecting all students to be able to understand the same difficult material in the same time frame. At my school, we figured out that many students do better learning the material covered in an Algebra I class over the course of two “years” (we were on blocked semesters, where a traditional year is taught in one semester of 90 min. classes). But while we had an easy way to allow those students to do that with Algebra I, we had no good vehicle for having them do that with Geometry or Algebra II. So the only way a student could spend two years learning Algebra II was to fail it once, and re-take it. That’s not a recipe for successful learning, as I’m certain you would agree.
Finally, there ARE students for whom the concepts of Algebra II are probably beyond reasonable comprehension. Algebra II is much more abstract than Algebra I; it begins to investigate the underlying “pure” math. For example, students in Algebra II should be able to derive the quadratic formula for finding the roots of a quadratic equation from the abstract ax^2 + bx + c = 0. Thinking in abstract terms about math is not something everyone can do easily, nor can it be reasonable to expect everyone to be able to learn such concepts. Of course, the inability to do so is NOT directly related to poverty; I’ve had sons/daughters of very well-to-do parents who were incapable of grasping abstract math concepts, and I’ve had students who were quite poor show no trouble with the same concepts. So I don’t equate poverty with inability in school by any means. But that’s not the issue I raised, so it’s a bit of a red herring.
Wow, I couldn’t agree more. I had problem with first year Algebra, and needed daily tutoring to pull out a D- in second year. I grew up working class, but I wasn’t deprived of intellectual stimulation at home. Something just didn’t click. It didn’t stop me from earning a Master’s, and hasn’t hindered me professionally. I took a logic class for math credit as an undergraduate and stats in grad school; neither presented a problem.
When I see the way Pearson (the testing giant) presents word problems on standardized tests I can see why test scores often lag. It’s often hard to see what the hell they’re asking for. Word problems are sometimes full of irrelevant information, which would drive my librarian brain insane.
My kids don’t seem to have been hurt by the increased rigor of kindergarten, but they came in ahead of most of their classmates. I suspect that one effect is that kids who are predisposed to dislike school (like me, and probably both our kids) start disliking it a year earlier.
The work our kids have done (one is a college freshman, the other a high school junior) have done much more advanced work than I have. That’s not even considering that our oldest is very advanced in math, having taken Calculus as a junior and linear algebra/multi variable as a senior. While giving all students (including those who need extra interventions) the opportunity to achieve to their highest potential is a laudable goal, it seems that sometimes the expectation becomes that “everyone is above average.”
Huh, I was in high school half a century ago, and it was a subject taught, and one that people in the college prep curriculum were expected to take and pass.
Thankfully, I did NOT have to take it in college.
But, to answer the OP, it seemed my children got much more challenging assignments when they were in grade school–assignments that, in fact, could really not be completed without a lot of help from their parents. Like, 2nd grade. Pick a country (or one was picked for you), and make a travel poster for that country showing what’s fun about it, write about the history of that country, bring in an example of a craft from that country (!!), and bring in a food from that country (!!!). Fortunately my kid got Mexico. One kid got Czechoslovakia. One kid got Bangladesh. Right, send the 7-year-old kid off to Cost Plus.
However, once they got to high school, the standards seemed a lot lower than when I was in HS. Now one son was in the International Baccalaureate program, and they did some pretty advanced stuff, but the other one was just in the regular program and he coasted.
Hmmm… I grew up with elementary school in the 60’s in Toronto.
Robert Heinlein (I think it was) in some rant talked about growing up in rural USA (what, about 1920’s? 30’s?), mentioned that for both him and for his father, the smart students who did finish high school took Latin to the point where they could read the classics. The really bright ones were privileged to also learn Greek. Perhaps some math and sciences were a bit more primitive in those days, but math(calculus) and chemistry were pretty well developed - I don’t know how much was taught when.
In 1960’s Canada, for the college track, calculus was taught the last year of high school. Most history was ancient, or North American, up to about 1900. As Canadians, the American Civil war and other internal stuff after the revolution was glossed over in favor of Canadian history, from New France to the formation of Canada. What seemed typical was that the last month or so was a rush to finish the final topics of any subject after progress fell behind schedule during the year.
Here’s my rant - I just missed the “new math” and “whole word reading” fads. There was a place - OISE, Ontario Institute for Studies In Education, that tended to set the tone for education theory. No doubt, similar academic fads existed in the USA. These were full of bright, airy-fairy ivory tower types who wanted to revolutionize education. Nobody every got recognition for saying “gee, the way we’ve taught math/literacy for generations is pretty good.” So they developed radical new techniques, made sure by judicious experiments that they “proved” their efficacy, and set out to destroy North American education by applying them.
Remember the original push for “New Math”? Basically, the pitch was “everything you knew about math is not good. We have a much better way. If you parents try to teach your kids your old way, you’ll mess them up. So step back and leave this to the professionals.” Then they tried to teach set theory and number theory to grade 5 kids. Similarly “whole word” was deigned to get kids to learn entire words by sight instead of learning letters, sounds, syllables, and how to put them together. (A friend’s son once was reading a definition of anthropology, read “origins” as “organs” because it was an unfamiliar word.) Hmm, the kids don’t seem to be making demonstrable progress? Let’s boost their self-esteem and change the marking system, get rid of percentages and exams…
I wonder, too, how much of the problem with North American education comparisons is based on the notion that children cannot fail - thus a grade 5 classroom contains some children with grade 5 education in name only.
Ulf the Unwashed already gave a great answer to the question, so I’ll add a little bit:
-Everyone I know who’s taught kindergarten for more than a decade will attest to the differences in expectations now. I knew one kindergarten teacher who’d been teaching it for a quarter-century and who strongly believed in the learn-through-play, take-a-nap-at-naptime approach. She basically refused to incorporate new stuff and was pressured into early retirement therefore.
In NC, children are tested for reading skills before they even come on the first day (it’s part of enrollment in kindergarten). There’s a huge battery of literacy tests given to kindergarteners at least three times throughout the year, the results of which are uploaded to a statewide database and the testing of which is treated as Secure Testing Materials. Children are expected to be able to read a simple text by January of their kindergarten year.
Third graders, my specialty, are expected to have mastered the basic decoding skills. Encoding (i.e., spelling) continues apace; but because it’s much more difficult to test writing skills with standardized tests, there’s no real accountability for that, and writing is treated as an almost optional component of education in many districts.
Same goes with science and social studies.
Math? My third graders aren’t really expected to know their times tables, or even their addition tables, and if I want them to learn them, I have to find time in the year to teach them. On the other hand, they are expected to be able to use the commutative properties of addition and multiplication and the distributive property of multiplication. They are expected to be able to use letters as variables in equations, to add fractions with similar denominators, to recognize some equivalent fractions and to explain why they are equivalent, and to solve multi-step story problems. None of these were requirements when I was in third grade, a third of a century ago.
Dseid, I know you said “not talking common core,” but CC is a central part of that discussion. It was developed, as near as I can tell, by working backwards. What do we expect kids to know when they graduate from high school? What should they learn in 12th grade to accomplish that? What do they need to know in 11th grade to prepare them for their senior year? What do they need in 10th grade? and so on. One of the main criticisms of common core is that when you get to young kids, K-2 especially but even third and fourth grade, the common core requirements aren’t always developmentally appropriate.
For folks who complain about “new math,” especially of your generation, I love this video of Tom Lehrer’s son New Math. I’ve linked to an important part, which I encourage you to watch right now.
Watched it? Good.
Chances are very good that when he’s describing how “we used to do it,” it looks like total mystifying gibberish to you. I mean, you can decipher it, because you’re smart, but on first glance it’s nothing like what you’re used to. When the music starts, he describes the method he’s satirizing–and that’s almost certainly the method that you used when you were in school, the “borrowing” method that makes perfect sense.
The reason he mocks the reasonable method and likes the weird method is because he’s old. That song was written a half-century ago. I have no doubt that Mark Twain could have written an essay very similar to Lehrer’s song, complaining about these newfangled late-19th-century math techniques.
Ah. The “New Math” I remember mostly missing was getting into rings and other number systems, “closed under addition”, multiplication, etc. Which then drags in whole numbers, integers, modulo, rationals, closed sets, set theory, other bases, irrationals as math advances.
It was gibberish for parents attempting to help their kids.
Funny thing, when it came time to do numerical analysis of math calculations on computers, I found it was eminently applicable. But I don’t think educators set out to create a generation of computer geeks. they just had this idea kids would do so much better if they were exposed to a wide range of theory about numbers. The Leher bit about “understanding what you are doing when you borrow” is simply an example of this.
I frankly can’t remember what system of borrowing I was educated with, other than “don’t create a mess of the question by crossing things out and rewriting numbers”.
True, but badly taught (as a cookbook course). I taught calculus the last term before I retired. I taught the section for students who had in HS and my colleague taught section for students with no HS calculus. We used the exact same syllabus. IOW, I started from zero. The only difference was that my students had one tutorial (essentially problem solving) while the other section had two.
But at the lowest level, when I was in Kindergarten (75 years ago!) we were not taught any reading; that started in first grade. Now they are expected to at least learn their letters before kindergarten.
As it happens, “New Math” was a reaction to changes in the way math was being taught. In simple terms:
The teachers began to drop math from schooling. They never used the math they learned, it’s a useless waste of effort wasting time that should be spent on “discovery learning”.
The mathematicians who were parents reacted by devising a curriculum that lead to actual mathematics (which is why you found it useful in higher math).
This is a very long-running battle about the meaning and purpose of education. “Discovery learning” has a very long history, but the US Army wanted more arithmetic content going in to WWII, so there was a WWII resurgence of content teaching, followed by a resurgence of discovery learning, followed by a resurgence of content learning (new math) followed by…
Other parents (and the media) championed “the way I did it in school”, but “New Math” was not primarily an argument with them.
Queensland.Aus recently added a new “foundation year” before grade 1. Now the students are at about the same level as students in other Aus states. Before that, Queensland students were about 1 year behind students in other states, that already had a “foundation year” (used to be called “prep’s”).
“Prep’s”/Foundation year is 6yo. There is no alphabet teaching/learning requirment before that.
Calculus was taught in college-track courses in the 60’s in Aus.
There is no direct comparison with Finland: yes, they learning reading late, but they already speak 3 languages at that point, they start multilngual “pre-school” at 18 months, and they don’t share mutually-intelligable spelling with other countries, as is the case for English. If the USA wants students to be able to speak Urdo/Hindi, instead of being able to read the spelling written by people from India, then Finland would be an possible model. Otherwise, not so much.
Hi, DSeid there in the back! Always happy to have such an enthusiastic student!
Sorry I did not respond earlier.
My post above is pretty much pushing at the limits of my knowledge regarding the ins and outs of international testing these days. There was a time when I knew a bit more, but I devote only about half of one class period to this stuff these days and so it’s not really my area of expertise. What I’ll say, therefore, is a little lacking in the details department. It’ll be more of a basic outline than anything else. Hope that’s okay.
For starters: yes, differences between the scholastic achievement of high-SES students and low-SES students (achievement as measured in traditional ways, at least) is noticeable in pretty much all countries. Take a low-SES kid more or less anywhere, stack him or her up to a high-SES kid, and you’ll find that the high-SES kid is likely to have a bigger vocabulary, more effective reading strategies, greater problem-solving abilities in math, etc., etc.
Those differences, however, are more muted in some countries than in others. I believe Finland has less difference than most other countries where distinctions between SES achievements are concerned. (Finland, as you note, is often held up as a model of relatively low variability in SES, and perhaps this is one reason why the differences aren’t so big.) I think–again, emphasis on think–that the gap between low- and high-SES students in Canada is likewise fairly small. In both cases, though, the gap is there, and measurable, and has an effect.
In other countries, the gap is greater. The US is one of these, though I don’t think it stands out especially among Western-style democracies in this regard; seems to me (but do not quote me, please) that the UK and Australia are in the same general ballpark, maybe Belgium as well? So it’s not quite as simple as “more egalitarian country is associated with a smaller gap in SES student achievement.”
Worth noting: The difference in the size of the gap in any given country between high- and low-SES student achievement generally depends on the performance of the low-SES students. That is, high-SES students achieve roughly equally in most developed nations*, and achieve pretty well at that. The size of the gap, then, is about how well or poorly the low-SES students do. In (I think) Canada and Finland, they achieve fairly closely to their richer, more upper-class counterparts. In (I believe) the UK, the US, and Australia, they do quite a bit worse.
Why this should be true–well, that’s anybody’s guess. Is Finland’s success due to demographics, and therefore difficult to replicate? Finland is not exactly a diverse country by US standards. Is the presence of a universal pre-K program responsible for narrowing the gap? It is very misleading to say that Finnish kids don’t start “school” till age 7, as some do, given the enormous coverage of state-sponsored day cares and preschools. Finnish spelling is almost entirely phonetic–what is the gain from having to spend so little time teaching kids exceptions to reading and spelling rules? What are the differences in spending on education between Australia, say, and Canada? What about teacher licensing procedures, the ways in which kids are assigned to schools? There are a myriad of possible causes, and it’s difficult to tease out what’s real and central to the success of the countries that generally have lower gaps.
To make things worse, these are not all educational questions–some are societal. There’s evidence in the US that where vocabulary is concerned, for instance, high-SES students enter kindergarten with hundreds more words than low-SES students–which according to the measure you use may cause a gap of two years in achievement (at the age of five, when kids are just starting school). We can make all the changes we want in the school systems of this country, and that may not be enough to close the gap by more than a small amount.
And to make things doubly worse, these are political questions, not just educational ones. If universal pre-K can be shown to be a good idea, will we pay for it? Who will pay for it? How will we pay? If it seems necessary to ensure that teachers in all schools are well qualified to teach their subjects (many are not, especially in math and science), how will we go about attracting better teachers–and will we try to ensure that they end up in places where the need is greatest? (At present, better-trained teachers in the US, and more effective teachers, tend to wind up in schools with higher-SES populations.) Nor are people necessarily open-minded, or completely scrupulous, regarding the data. Agendas are rampant. Some people will use the data, whatever the data is, to argue for more local control and more charter schools. Others will argue, no matter what, for less testing and a more hands-on approach to education in the younger grades. Some will argue away evidence that more spending on schools is effective–or wave away evidence that it isn’t. Etcetera, etcetera.
And: On a broader and more foundational level, do we really want to use schools to create a more equitable society? This is an argument of long standing, in the US at least; sometimes we move in one direction, sometimes in the other. Funding of our public schools, in general, is not equitable–from state to state, from dictrict to district, from school to school even within a district. Attempts to change funding systems tend to provoke much ire among certain powerful constituencies. It seems doubtful that much closing of the gap is going to take place in the current mindset.
Well, okay, DSeid in the back, I’ve probably said way more than you wanted to know, and I apologize for not being able to answer your question entirely. Still, I hope I’ve addressed at least some of your wonderings, and I commend you for having them to begin with. Let me know if you have more questions; it’s definitely an interesting topic. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about it.
*Some of the East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, pretty routinely test significantly higher than just about any country in Europe, North America, or Oceania. So I’m kind of leaving them out.
My brother has been teaching American History and AP History for about 30 years now. He was griping a few days ago that this year any student could choose his AP course instead of relying on test scores. He has had an awful year with students who were in no way prepared for the work involved with an AP class. What’s worse is he has been told to “dumb it down”, which is not a nice way of putting it, but I’m assuming he has to lighten the workload considerably. They will not be able to cover everything so everyone can keep up, and that essentially means his AP history class has become a history class.
Of course when we were in high school there were no AP classes at all so maybe it’s all just a game.
That’s an interesting question. Hard for me to answer, for at least a couple of reasons:
Common Core addressed the issue of having more than 50 different standards across the nation. What was expected in one state could be significantly different from what was expected in another.
My familiarity with standards is overwhelmingly at the second and third grade level. I know I saw a lot more fractions enter our curriculum, with not much lost from it (I think we stopped teaching gallons and quarts at third grade, that moving into fourth grade instead). A high school teacher–Manda Jo?–might better address what changes CC brought to high school expectations in their state.
Nah, less than I want to know because you were a good teacher who was willing to admit that you don’t know.
So I’ve dug a bit more on my own and can find this Economic Policy Institute analysis of 2009 results anyway. It is an attempt to take into account that the United States both has a greater degree of socioeconomic inequality than many of its reasonable to compare with peers, and more of them that take the tests.
It’s a very detailed report and the section on achievement gaps in comparison with the post-industrial peer group - France, Germany, and the U.K. - less of a gap in the U.S. - and in comparison with the top-scorers - Canada, Finland, and Korea - generally more of a gap in the U.S. - is interesting to read. And the trends by social grouping are actually quite good for the U.S. relative to meaningful comparisons.
Yes, they raise some of the same issues of potential confounders that you do.
This does however greatly move away from the immediate subject of the op.
The hard to answer interesting questions seem to be my specialty in this thread!
But yes I understand that it is hard to know if the new national standards were on average higher or lower or in what way different than the variety of individual state standards that had previously been extant.
