World Education rankings... USA 28th

28th seems pretty good considering that we have a whole class of people here who's culture dictates that they rebel against any kind of self-enrichment be it education or anything else.

originally posted by: Greathouse
a reply to: stumason

Inability to see the actual facts of the situation is why the British Empire is subservient to the U.S. That post was meant to expose the reason for much of the anger against the US it's called envy, the green eyed monster.

Envy? Are you really serious?

I live in a country that ranks #4 on the list of happiest countries. We are first place when it comes to quality of health care. Our society is egalitarian, individualistic and modern. I really don't envy you.

About the vulgarity of overeating and discarding perfectly usable and eatable food: my people have an aversion to the non-essential. Wasting food is seen as vulgar. So, in our country we have a tradition of saving our leftovers ("kliekjes") instead of discarding them into the wastebin. Later in the week the leftovers are reused in other meals or even to create new meals. We even have aspecial websitee devoted to processing "kliekjes".

So, your behaviour rather disgusts me. Envy a nation in which obesity is a problem? And eduction is another one?

a reply to: ForteanOrg

You have to realize that your country is 5% the size of the US with essentially zero diversity. The Netherlands literally has half the number of people in it than the state I currently live in. So it's a little different when your homogenous and everybody has the same values and come from the same background.

originally posted by: Greathouse
a reply to: 727Sky

Do you know what I had for dinner tonight? Inch and a half thick ribeye steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, a big salad, a great big cold glass of milk then I topped it off with apple pie and ice cream. And I actually threw about half of it away. What did the rest of the world eat ?

Yeah we still have it like that! I think the rest of the world is confused by a case of envy!!

Thats got to be one of the dumbest statements......

O as for what I ate? A Fillet vension stake.
That doesn't make me smart though nor you.....just fat.


USA is resting on past laurels. If you dont sort your education out the rest of the world will catch your fat ares up and you will be eating out of bins not throwing food in them.

I wonder... is it Laziness? Entitlement? poor syllabus?

Look at the Chinese, the Indians...Poverty drives them to succeed. Those fortunate enough to attend higher education will go abroad, earn a higher wage and then send money back to their folks who toil for 100 bucks a year. In many cases your Indian doctor is the breadwinner of sorts for his or her struggling family.

Many in the west go to college so they can land a job that 'pays well' but others from a different background wants a job that can 'pay well so I can support my family back home'. Maybe it's a two way street and the students need to take some of the blame instead of pointing the fingers at the educators themselves.

Our public schools are financed via a public tax system.The parents want their children to have the best education but the parents will not support an increase in taxes that would help provide better wages that might attract individuals who want to teach but are unwilling to go into the education field that will not provide an adequate living wage.
Those individuals who do teach in the public school systems are not properly trained to teach. They simply do not have the skill sets to get the information across to the students.
There is a system in place that does not adequately weed out teachers who for one bad reason or another who have no business being around our children. This system protects the incompetent. Simular to what takes place in the medical community.
There are many regions within the USA whereby these regions are either poor or underpopulated to the point where school funding is seriously inadequate. This obviously affects quality of the teaching. Also, those children who are impoverished more often then not do not have a healthy family house hold. Improper parenting, dysfunctional family life, one parent, and lack of healthy diet. All leading to children who have little self-esteem, depression, dysfunctional thinking, etc.. These children have no desire or incentive to learn.
There are regions within the USA where the population is privileged. Some of these children have a privileged attitude causing themselves a serious lack of incentive to learn. I blame the parents on this issue.
The public school system is lead by individuals who have no business leading a public school system. They simply do not have the knowledge nor skill sets to properly administer school systems. For many this is nothing more then a stepping stone for a political carrier. There seems to be an ego issue or some kind of issue whereby these leaders will not search out successes in other school systems and attempt to build on these successes into their school system.
The USA us so large a land mass that it appears to contribute to inconsistency in policies, procedures, guidelines, testing, etc.. I'm wondering that for those countries who have excellent school systems that perhaps because they are small in land mass that it contributes to better management because it's easier to institute policy, guidance, procedures, etc.. I also wonder for those small counties nwho have a successful school system is because there is a culture driven by parents that if they want their children to be successful in a very competitive business world that they must try harder to learn to be able to compete for jobs.

Unfortunately, I do not see a resolution in sight to correct our current USA Public School System issues.

a reply to: 727Sky

a reply to: bucsarg

While I agree that we should invest more in education (and probably spend our money more wisely), the US's ranking is more reflective of its curriculum than its budgeting. This comparison is based PISA, which is a "problem-solving" test, not a "regurgitate things you've heard" test.

Throwing money into education will not improve standings if students are not taught the relevant skills and knowledge to perform well on the assessment. Adopting new curricula and standards is the most effective way to improve performance. Common Core hasn't had a real chance to make an impact yet, so time will tell whether it was a good move or not.

here is a great TED talk on this topic:

embed-ssl.ted.com...

28th out of 196 is not bad at all.

originally posted by: shamaniski
28th out of 196 is not bad at all.

Of course its not bad.

But you are the country that put a man on the moon!

You should be striving to be number 1 not resting on your laurals.

More words from me, I can't seem to shut up on this topic.

28th place without any context doesn't mean much. It occurs to me that last night I was posting some numbers but didn't post my data source. As near as I can tell the article this OP references is speaking of the 2012 tests as the 2015 ones just happened and won't have scores calculated and published until dec 2016. The PISA test happens every 3 years. There are also some peculiar methodologies at work in these tests. First of all scores are scaled so that they can be comparable, the easy way to explain what this means is that not all students worldwide are taking the same test material. This should be obvious for something like the reading portion of a test (which was the focus of the 2012 tests), you should expect a child in France to be reading French and in the US to be reading English. But this means they're going over different content, it's not like you can just hand some translated Shakespeare to a Chinese student. This means that the testing is easier in some nations than in others.

This also holds true for Math and Science, the constant in these tests isn't course content or grade level but rather age. It tests students between 15.25 and 16.25 years of age, and the nations giving the testing can choose which students take the test so long as they submit ungraded results from at least 5000 students (or all if they don't have 5000). Some nations submit scores from a general population while others only submit from their smartest kids.

Next, I took the published results and used those for my replies last night but since it was late and I was tired I didn't post the composite results I was using. So to fix that here are the scores by nation adding all portions together. The mean should be about 1500, and the scale is from 0-3000 but no one scores that high or low.

China Shanghai, China 1763
Singapore 1666
Hong Kong, China 1661
South Korea 1628
Japan 1621
Taiwan 1606
Finland 1588
Estonia 1578
Liechtenstein 1576
Macau, China 1568
Canada 1566
Poland 1562
Netherlands 1556
Switzerland 1555
Vietnam 1547
Germany 1546
Ireland 1546
Australia 1537
Belgium 1529
New Zealand 1528
United Kingdom 1507
Austria 1502
Czech Republic 1500
France 1499
Slovenia 1496
Denmark 1494
Norway 1488
Latvia 1482
United States 1476
Italy 1469
Luxembourg 1469
Spain 1468
Portugal 1464
Hungary 1459
Iceland 1454
Lithuania 1452
Croatia 1447
Sweden 1446
Russia 1443
Israel 1422
Slovakia 1416
Greece 1397
Turkey 1386
Serbia 1340
Cyprus 1327
United Arab Emirates 1324
Romania 1322
Bulgaria 1321
Thailand 1312
Chile 1309
Costa Rica 1277
Mexico 1252
Kazakhstan 1250
Montenegro 1242
Malaysia 1239
Uruguay 1236
Brazil 1206
Jordan 1194
Argentina 1190
Tunisia 1190
Albania 1185
Colombia 1178
Indonesia 1153
Qatar 1148
Peru 1125

For those who aren't math people here are those same scores plotted on a line graph.


If you look at this graph you'll see something interesting and I mentioned this in my posts last night (back a page or two). The score starts out high and drops off rapidly down to 8th place. The gap between 1st and 8th is 185 points. However the next gap of 185 points takes place from 9th all the way down to Greece at 42 where the dropoff once again accelerates. This means that placing isn't on a uniform scale. There is less of a gap between 20th and 30th as between 4th and 6th. What this means for the US and their 29th place in the composite score is that things aren't so bad. The state of education as a whole isn't anywhere near as messed up as some of the posts here indicate.

What's most interesting about the US scores is the 3 states that submitted scores on their own. Florida is down with third world countries in education but Massachusetts and Connecticut are even scoring above Scandinavian countries with good education systems like Norway and Switzerland.

If anything this data, rather than being an argument that Common Core is broken and needs to be repealed is actually a statement that it doesn't go far enough, because despite the minimum standards it's creating we have a gap in the US where our better states have public schools among the top education quality in the world while our worse states might as well not even bother sending kids to school, yet despite that our average score is putting us right in the group among developed nations where everyone is pretty close together. There is virtually no difference between 28th place and 20th place for example.

a reply to: crazyewok
Striving to be #1 is a great goal, but what is the cost? I attended an elite private high school, I have 4 college degrees and working on my 5th. I think I can speak quite a bit on the virtues of education. In my mind education is about two things, empowering a person to do the type of labor they want to do, and improving ones quality of life. All to often I see the calls to emulate the Asian method of education which is extremely long days, very hard material, extensive memorization, and high pressure. The students who go through this are absolutely miserable during their school years and are seeing little to no advantage in their professional lives though they do test better.

To me, this says that method is lowering quality of life which goes against one my goals in education which makes me think we shouldn't worry about trying to get #1 on the tests. If our students are capable of performing adequately and being competitive in global markets while also being happy and enjoying life I think that's a much better outcome than systems where student suicide rates are through the roof.

I certainly agree. Good curriculum is one piece of this issue. And thank you for providing the Ted Talk.
a reply to: wagnificent

As of 2014 Japan is 7th out of 111 countries regarding suicide rates. Greenland is 1st. Your point is well taken.
a reply to: Aazadan

originally posted by: bucsarg
I certainly agree. Good curriculum is one piece of this issue. And thank you for providing the Ted Talk.
a reply to: wagnificent

If a good curriculum is part of the requirements then surely you agree with Common Core? States like Florida which are leading the charge against it (Rubio and such) have resisted it and have scores rivaling third world nations while early adopters like Massachusetts have been shown through the PISA test to be in the top of the world educationally.

Or do you reject the testing data and on what grounds? If you do reject the testing data, what metric are you using to quantify the poor state of US education?

I have worked in American schools. The “good” ones in the suburbs and the inner city schools where on the most part they are literally like jails, the security is so tight.

BUT THEY STILL DON’T LEARN!

Strangely in the inner city there are some exceptional schools with kids as smart and astute as any rich suburban district amongst the bad schools inside our inner cities.


That’s real strange and don’t entirely understand it.

But is seems to boil down to what the parents convey to the children, their own intelligence and desire to succeed and the relationship of the parents to education.

An ignorant mother may have a bad child in school

originally posted by: bucsarg
As of 2014 Japan is 7th out of 111 countries regarding suicide rates. Greenland is 1st. Your point is well taken.
a reply to: Aazadan

I can't say much of Greenlands education system, I know nothing about it and they weren't in this testing. Japan however is not just 7th but South Korea which has just as rigorous an education system if not more so is 3rd, and China also has a massive suicide problem, so large in fact that they simply don't publish numbers so that no one can accurately criticize them.

a reply to: 727Sky

While I am not here to defend the USA being ranked 28th, I do have some issues with the rankings in general.

China for example has multiple different separately ranked "countries". They also have schools in which they need to put bars on the windows so kids don't jump out to commit suicide. Sure they might be better at math, but they are tortured in the process.

Also, the US doesn't cherry pick it's results, and has a much larger test pool to deal with. How many kids in China don't go to school at all? How many schools in China aren't counted in these tests?

Being intelligent isn't based purely on how well you can do Math. I had an extremely high IQ in middle school, but had no desire to focus all my time and energy on academia. My sister on the other hand who was a bit less naturally intelligent had to spend all of her time studying, and spent the first 30 years of her life entirely focused on school. Did she get into a great college? Yes, and she has a good job as well. Does the world consider her more intelligent than me on paper? They surely do. Is she completely street dumb? Darn right she is. Does she know anything about the world other than her general field of study? No she doesn't.

While she is lacking in some areas, she is still far ahead of Asian students when it comes to knowing HOW to think. That is why everyone around the world tries so hard to get into Colleges in the USA. We teach HOW to think. We teach how to be more creative. We teach how to be social.

We aren't robots here in the US like they are training Chinese student to be. We have computers for that type of thinking.

a reply to: Aazadan

I am a teacher in Florida, and we have essentially adopted Common Core. We just plagiarized the standards and called them Florida Standards to pretend like we are non-conformists

originally posted by: wagnificent
a reply to: Aazadan

I am a teacher in Florida, and we have essentially adopted Common Core. We just plagiarized the standards and called them Florida Standards to pretend like we are non-conformists

In what year? The most recent PISA tests that scores are available for is the 2012 scores (which is what the OP uses, but the article makes them sound like they're new). The 2015 tests were taken this year (the testing happens every 3 years) but those scores won't be published until Dec 2016.

Still, being that you're in Florida and Florida scored so poorly I would be interested in what you see as being the problems (or perhaps you said them in this thread already, I don't remember the name attached to each post).

One of the big problems in my mind with evaluating education is that it's something each of us only sit through once and when you go through grade school you're not equipped to adequately criticize the education you're getting. By the time you reach that stage, it's your kids going through the schooling and you're a third party looking at their homework rather than sitting in the classroom learning.

Even teachers who spend their lives in the classroom are only experiencing things from the perspective of the student desk once, the rest of the time it's trying to impart knowledge rather than absorb it.

a reply to: Cuervo

I think his point is that despite the rankings, Americans' standard of living is still way above others, and he's right. Lots of countries would love to have the U.S' problems.

a reply to: Aazadan

These scores and statistics won't matter if we don't avoid nuclear war. At this point, it's probably better to teach our kids to be respectful of others, regardless of differences, than to worry so much about education.