What Do You Know?

 

In  The Decline and Fall of American Education, Paul Peterson writes:

The longer students are in school, the worse things get. Among fourth graders, U.S. students rank high on the International Test of Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Despite this head start, by eighth grade, American adolescents have slipped to the midpoint on the TIMSS; by age 17, their scores trail all but those in a few developing countries.

So, we start out okay in 4th grade, but by the time our kids have gone through eight years of school, they’re down near the bottom. How does something like that happen?

What’s worse, the TIMSS test upon which that disturbing statistic is based might actually have been skewed in our favor…

Only 74% of the 4th grade math  test questions were "considered appropriate" by  Singapore, while 100% were approved by the United States. The percentage for Korea was even lower at 43%.   Yet Singapore and Korea ranked first and second on the TIMSS 4th grade math test, scoring "significantly higher" than the United States.

Similarly, the TIMSS test may have favored us in another way:

…some of the superior countries in grade 8 (especially the Asians) were not included in published 12th grade results.

The TIMSS test, which shows the disturbing fact that the longer our students stay in our schools, the WORSE they perform, actually may have given us a better ranking even than we deserved. That is bad.

Keep reading for more disturbing facts…

The Decline and Fall of American Education
By Paul E. Peterson

Americans barely reach the international literacy average set by advanced democracies… Despite the high expenditures on education in the United States—and the large numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities—the United States ranked 12th on the test.

The United States is living on its past. Among the oldest group in the study (those aged 56–65), U.S. prose skills rose to second place. For those attending school in the 1950s, SAT scores reached an all-time high.
As the years go by, the United States slips down the list. Americans educated in the sixties captured a Bronze Medal in literacy, those schooled in the seventies got 5th place in the race. But those schooled in the nineties ranked 14th…

All signs point to a deterioration in the quality of American schools. Europeans and Asians alike have rapidly expanded their educational systems over the last 50 years. In the United States stagnation if not decline has been apparent at least since the 1970s. Even our high school graduation rates are lower today than they were a decade ago.

Education Statistics: International comparisons
Heritage.org

Despite higher than average per-pupil expenditures, American 8th graders ranked 19th out of 38 countries on the most recent international mathematics comparison, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R) of 1999. American students scored 18th out of 38 countries in science.[16] On the TIMSS 1995 study, which tested 12th graders, American students were ranked 19th out of 21 countries in both math and science general knowledge.[17]

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