The Unites States spends more per student than any country in the world but is getting only mediocre results when compared to other countries. For the next meeting we will explore how US education compares with the rest of the world. We will use these talk by Amanda Ripley, the author of The Smartest Kids in the World, as the the starting point of the discussion:
The PISA test is used to rank the countries. Here is a TED Talk which will attest to the validity of these tests.
We closed our last meeting with the observation the US educational system does not fair very well when compared to other developed countries, and even some less developed countries. We should not take our eye off the ball on how average is defined. If average is defined either as median or mean the comparisons may not be accurate and tell a more reasonable story. The United States educational system is highly decentralized. Most other countries have either national systems or less decentralized systems than the United States. Currently, I believe there are 15,000 school districts in the United States. There is a great deal of variation among the 15,000 school systems, as we must recognize the variation in excellence among the 50 states. Education in the United States is fundamentally local, with the states playing a large role. As a side note, I grew up in Erie County New York which currently has 29 school districts in the county. Local in New York is really local when compared to Maryland. The national government, which is usually (inaccurately) referred to as the federal government has not been a major player in the educational system of United States. Let me qualify the national government throne education. One of the very first if not the first national grant programs to the states was the Northwest Territory treaty that I believe was in 1789. The Northwest Territory Treaty granted land, which at that time, included five states such as Ohio and Michigan, and few others that are now in the Big Ten conference, to be dedicated to their educational system. The states were divided into townships and a portion of each Township was dedicated to education. The National government had a lot of land and little revenue to share with states at that time. So I contradict myself and say that the national government had a large role early on in the history of our country, but the issue of education was taken up and dominated by the states and eventually devolved into local systems.
ReplyDeleteLet me use a case example to strike at the issue of what average might imply. In Maryland I believe we have 24 school districts, generally configuring tooth counties and quite possibly a city or two like Baltimore . If we contrast the Howard County School District with that of the City of Baltimore, the evidence would show a massive difference between the two systems in the quality and any measurement of educational output. If we lumped the two together and obtain an average what do you suspect the measurement would be; and what would it really say about overall education in Maryland? When selecting school system we must give extreme caution to our numbers of educational output and how to interpret them.
In sum, we need to take care when we use averages to describe a complex educational system.
Vince
Amanda Ripley's PopTech Talk above directly addresses the point that education in the US is a local issue, She shows that even the best states do poorly in math, when ranked internationally.
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