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Why America Ranks 26th In The Developed World For Math (In 1 Common Core Question)
Among the 34 OECD countries, the US performed below average in mathematics and is ranked 27th, according to The Program For International Student Assessment (PISA).
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance (e.g. the Slovak Republic, which spends around $53k per student, performs at the same level as the US, which spends over $115k per student).
PISA adds that students in the US have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. But there is good news - a silver lining they offer - "a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains."
However, they may have to rethink that after looking at the following...
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I passed that test!
You shoulda seen the 104% loaf I passed this morning! Bigger than you average bear's!
And remember you couldn't a done it witout the guvament.
So now you have the answer as to why global wealth is moving to Asia....basically discipline, application and hard work.
BINGO!
What we have here is a break down of culture and discipline (can you say LAZY?).
A lot of young Americans are more interested in sports, partying (blunts and beer), and p*ssy, than academics.
I have a nephew that enjoys these things. When I had a "heart to heart" with him about this one day (asking him to change his lifestyle) his answer was: "I'm young I'm havin fun." This came from a 24 year old unemployed man still living off of his mommy.
I'm studying math right now ( at least i should be, i am taking a 10min break to read ZH ) for my electical eng degree. It absolutely sucks. Math is hard. I will need to do 12 hours a day for the next 8 days to pass/get an ok mark. It really sucks, my friends are out in the nice 30 C weather having a beer.
It's hard. Getting good at it sucks. There are no shortcuts, unless you are born a genius. I keep nearly quitting. I want to quit ALMOST as much as i want to not be working on minimum wage. My reward for this pain will hopefully be a good job ( and a massive tax burden, so all the fuckers that would rather drink beer are free to do so).
But what else can i do? Work hard, try not to have to sell my gold stash. Hope the world returns to some form of sanity.
You are doing the right thing. Long-term the beer-swilling tax burden will find the govt keg pulled away, crying to mommy, because a bankrupt Uncle Sam can't give anymore, like Greece, Spain and Argentina before it.
You, on the other hand, will have preserved your financial wealth, and gained a REAL skill which keeps you in demand in the worldwide tech economy.
There are three types of people in this world: those who are good at math, and those who aren't.
Is that American Pi.
it seems engineers are over-represented in zh going by the comment thread.
But a LOT more "oppressed minorities" were able to pass our lowered standards, so ,really, it's a WIN !!!
Actually, things can be made in the factories. we need more cashiers to sell the products and since cash register got keys to punch and show change so we don't need math.
one third cab rider in Manhattan cannot add 50c in their night cab fare.
I'm a recovering engineer.
I got out of it in the eighty's when it became obvious that computers and software,
were removing humans in mechanical and structural work.
I got out three years ago when being a "defense contractor" was getting to be a morally dubious proposition - wasting the taxpayers' money on hair-brained republican welfare weapons studies. Even being a EE is a poor choice right now - just be able to repair consumer electronics for the time when "just buying a new one" will no longer be an option. Practice SMT soldering and have a good scope and logic analyzer.
That and prepping for the apocalypse is all you need.
Math is like Piano. you need to practice and practice and practice to be good.
Remember tables by heart, at least up to 12. It should not take a millisecond to answer 12X7
you base should be strong.
I don't think he's in the USSA as he's talking about 30 C temperature.
He is using metric, which is suspicious. It is 28 C in Miami and 31 C in Scotsdale right now.
Good Luck. You're competing with people who love what they do. Who don't find it hard, they just find it a challenge and want to master it. Peoplle who get excited about practicing the skills, and building the brain subroutines that make the problem solving more about innate pattern recognition than about trying to remember what the textbook said. Good luck.
If you feel this way about your exams, have fun with doing it for a living the rest of your life. If you can get hired.
You sound like you're about the money. Accountancy, or no better yet, Economics! may be a better fit.
No engineer likes math, especially not when i could do everything on the test in 5 min using MATLAB. The eng subjects are awesome. Linear algebra is just memorising a long list of boring proofs. The math is just the subjects you have to do to meet the requirements. Pretty sure i will never need to know off the top of my head the rules for establishing if a vector is a sub space of RN. If i ever do need to know it, a few lines of code will tell me with 100% accuracy, rather than 15 min of row reducing a large matrix!
It sounds like what you're saying is that Engineering is another career path that will soon be automated.
edit: "No engineer likes math." Times have indeed changed.
No engineering will be the interface between the customer and the solution. Ie take the imprecise language of customers, and convert it into something precise machines can understand. Computers will not be able to do this for many decades, as any course in semantics quickly teaches you.
An old EE signals/systems professor I had used to say, "they don't make engineers like they used to anymore." And it's true, but doesn't mean that there is a lack of good engineers. What we are seeing is a diversification of engineer calibers. It is now okay to be an engineer without mastering the mathematics and the breadth of the field in theory and practice. I know some good test engineers who understand a good amount of EE knowledge - enough to do a killer job in testing.
Comparing the US to Slovakia or Finland is grossly unfair. Just compare white Americans to Slovakia or Finland. Or better still jam Slovakia or Finland full of blacks and hispanics.
"jam Slovakia and Finland full of blacks and Hispanics". No worries, the EU is working on that.
Great. Then the USA can move up three or four slots without even trying!!!
USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!! USA!!
If it were a really big circle it could go up to 104%.
Anyone can build a bridge that won't fall down -- it takes an engineer to build a bridge that JUST won't fall down.
You quite sure "anyone" can build a bridge that won't fall down?
I'll take the engineer's bridge over. say, the economics major's. It may be ugly, it may be bleak, but I'll happily not fall down.
It's called function over appearance. Appearance is PR bullshit. Speak to the CDC about it, they're showing themselves to be a prime example. Unfortunately, the USSA leads the world in PR bullshit. Not so much in maths. Or function.
"Comparing the US to Slovakia or Finland is grossly unfair. Just compare white Americans to Slovakia or Finland. Or better still jam Slovakia or Finland full of blacks and hispanics."
My hispanic mind can only conjure but one quote when reading the abovementioned statement; a Bill Hick's quote, really:
"So, why do you bring guns to a UFO landing?"
"To protect ourselves."
"From what?"
"Well, we don't want to get abducted."
"Yeah, and leave all of this behind?"
I suppose that I, like my cocoa-complected constituents, would have to be assigned elsewhere in the world to reassemble. Hmmm...Libertatia, ahoy!
Liberia, ahoy?
Take a look at how Liberia was founded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertatia
If you don't have enough intellectual curiosity and interest in pushing your capacity to grasp mathematics, maybe you shouldn't pursue a field that demands mastery of math. This fellow is not pursuing a calling - he's just trying to do something he isn't inspired to do so he can make a good income. Not a good motivation. He just wants to make enough money to drink beer and join the other sloths that are reducing the quality of life in America.
Engineering is changing, you poor little thing. It does not require a "mastery of math" so much as knowing when/how to use math. We are finally at the point where we have no need to reproduce the same work and results over and over - solving the same prorblems others already have.
A real engineer uses whatever is available to solve a problem. We have vast amounts of mathematical models and pre-formed calculations. Learning how to use those is far more important than learning how to derive the equations that build them - unless of course you want to be someone that builds those tools. Sure, then you need to know them maths good.
You will probably enjoy this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg
Although, I think all engineers and mathematicians should be able to solve linear algebra and differential equations from first principles.
I thought all engineering was about siting, geometry and a good concrete pour?
In any case the USA might be bad at math (yes I can figure out how much change I'm suppose to be getting back in my head when I throw down the twenty) but we are number one in instruction sets.
And of course "the reset button" when we have "instruction set fail." (I.e. the stock market goes down instead of up.)
What other math need be known?
MATLAB? Don't you know there is a far superior symbolic computation program? Rather than tell him myself, just out of curiosity, can any of you commentators tell fnord88 what it is?
I've had math through differential equations but still am envious of those fortunate few who have a natural grasp of math. Geometry, calculus, simple algebra and a bit of programming were fun and entertaining, but I went belly-up when it came to, "For every epsilon there is a delta such that..." I survived PChem coming away with the interesting feeling that life is a partial differential equation.
It's a marker of general degradation that science is so widely neglected and disparaged. Many people hate science because it makes then feel inadequate or because they can't stand to hear what it's telling them.
Wolfram Research's Mathematica is superior, but a 10 second internet search would tell you that...
Math is a human invetion to find what already exists.
It is an Axe in search of a Turkey that the Corporatocracy won't pay for.
I suddenly felt on the outside of maths when the square root of -1 became a fundamental concept. Never could get my mind around that one.
not when i could do everything on the test in 5 min using MATLAB
You need to go to a real engineering school if this is what's on a test...AND...if you really are having this much trouble with math maybe EE ain't for you.
Solving math problems by hand is often worse than useless, because the by-hand algorithms that are usually taught are numerically unstable when implemented on a computer, which is inevitable in today's world. In fact, almost all standard schoolbook math problems have been implemented on computers over the past 50 years, and the computerized numerical techniques are fully understood, except possibly for massively large and complex problems.
A great example is handling matrices. Many matrix problems are solved by hand using determinants, and many linear algebra proofs depend on determinants, but determinants are definitely the worst way to solve any linear algebra problem in a software algorithm. Determinants are numerically unstable for even small simple problems.
Once the student understands the concept of solving a simple set of linear equations, such as 3x3 perhaps, there is no point in trying to develop skills beyond that. The engineer will never solve a problem like that by hand, so why practice it?
Children learning long division is similar. Once the child understands division by doing a few very simple problems, there is absolutely no purpose in building up skills to handle doing more challenging problems, because no one will ever need to do such problems by hand.
Much of math education has been rendered completely obsolete by automation.
Which leaves more time for beer and, my favorite youthful pastime, making new friends.
Not all economics students are Keynesian or Monetarists?
I even know some who love mathematics. Of course they will never be hired by government unless they are willing to sell their souls.
Fnord88 ... NEVER quit ... ever
huh?
Mature age, there was a time i earnt a pretty good living.
Stick with it fella. Don't give up. Keep pushing.
I'm an engineer and I was where you are 20 years ago. I've just finished a masters.
I don't wish to brag...but I have a very good life (i'm on my first holiday iafter 3 years of study and laying on a beach in 'angsana velavaru' in the maldives as i type (no shitting you)). My kid and wife are in the pool at the back of our hut enjoying themselves. We're about to go snorkelling on the house reef.
All paid for in cash I earned because I got off my arse.
i work expat, I have no debt, we own a house in my wife's home country and investment property in my home country. Oh yeah...and a solid stack of phyzz of course.
I have this not because I'm exceptionally smart, but because I put the effort in. I work exceptionally hard...and I always try to be smarter. I also always try to contribute and positively influence others.
I owe nobody anything (except my mum and wife of course!). I take responsibility for myself.
There's only one person standing in your way...yourself.
Get stuck in my friend.
Yea but you are all alone on that island execpt for the old bearded man in the bar room, plus you have to walk on a mile of sand to get to the bar.
"It absolutely sucks. Math is hard. I will need to do 12 hours a day for the next 8 days to pass/get an ok mark."
Been there done that. Its not really that hard. The problem is that the books and most math teachers are terrible at explaining it correctly. I think the reason is that its difficult to find really good people that can teach that are interested in math. Mostly what you end up is with professors that don't have a passion for teaching and simply follow the text book. I had a hard time at math in my first two years, but after I starting taking Physics classes, EE and other classes I started getting it, and it was much simpler. Also as you progress, the higher math classes introduce better and simpler methods. for instance convulsion/LaPlace transforms can be converted to Z-Transformations making any calculus problems into simple algebra. Also Linear math class shows all sorts of simplified ways to solve the mulitple equation problems. Too bad they don't teach you those classes first and save lots of math frustrations. Really math class should be about showing all the simple ways to solve math problems instead of the endless drone of solving equations that have no practical applications. That said, engage homework,like solving a crossword puzzle or some other game that required you to think of a solution. This will make it less frustrating. In addition you also have the Web to look up math. When I was in college, there was no Internet and the professors made you buy their crappy textbooks that they wrote (since no one else would buy them) Most of the time these "professor" written books were half gibberish or just plain wrong. I managed to pick up some alternative text books from older graduating students or from bookstores. These additional sources made it much easier for me.
I often though that the first two years of Math and Engineer classes is like some sort of Fraternity pledge week, where they make you go through hell before you can "join" the club. Also get something like Mathematica which can solve Differentials and integrals. It a great tool to check your home work to make sure your answers are correct. I also found Mathematica great for plotting 3D equations too and creating Bode Plots and other graphs for EE classes (for the class projects). I believe the student version (which is the full version) is less than $200.
" My reward for this pain will hopefully be a good job"
Unfortunately getting a good "paying" job doesn't necessary come from a good education. I have a CS Hardware & EE degree. I could not find a good paying job doing this line of work. There were only a few companies doing this line of work in my region ,and I was completing with a lot of very experienced but downsized EE's (Downsizing & outsourcing era of the late 1980's and early 1990s)
I ended up doing IT (which had much more jobs availability and hire pay). I started my own consulting company more than a decade ago, and did very well. So much I am going Galt. The problem with EE is that you need at least a masters degree in hope of landing a true job in EE, and you need to pick a specialty, RF, Power Electronics, Digital electronics, etc. Digital electronics probably has the most job availability and flexibility. That said, I still would not have chosen I different education path. I do apply engineering to my own personal needs (custom electronics, embedded systems design, complex programming, fix/repair broken equipment, etc). You still have more open doors with a engineering degree than a liberal arts/business degree. What's most important in getting a good paying job is being able to solve problems that few can do or being able to do it faster or more efficient. A broad skill set is extremely valuable and avoid becoming specialized. The narrow the skill set, the few jobs are available.
+100
LOL I think most fields are like that. Chem is, and I remember taking a Comp Sci 101 course for general interest at UC - one of the first assignments was a bunch of math problems in binary. I was working on it in the cafeteria and an advanced CS major happened to join us. He saw what I was doing and was trying hard not to laugh - showed me a simple technique that made all the problems trivial. I think they may be starting students on theories and techniques from the 1700's just to find the Liebnizs and Newtons in the class. Or more likely, because that's the way it's always been done.
It's worse than that. A lot of university level professors now aren't degree'd in Math, but "Math Education". They're trained and certified to read a text that they don't understand in front of a class. Look up professordoom on rense.com for more on this scam.
(edit: I was being lazy but then I felt bad. Here's the link: http://www.rense.com/Datapages/profdoomdat.htm )
Excellent advice, Guy. And thanks for initiating this discussion, Fnord88. So many (all) great responses, great reading. So much better than the "FUCK (WHOEVER)" spam that clogs this site these days. Sincere wishes for good luck in your endeavors.
Hang in there! Engineering is one of the few disciplines where you can really make a difference in the world! There were multiple times I wanted to give up as well, but I hung in there and it is a great feeling to help solve huge problems.
I don't personally have to use all the math (Metallurgical engineering and I caught a glimpse of partial differential equations, but didn't end up having to finish it thankfully), but the math is still incredibly useful when I am looking through the literature to understand what the hell they are talking about.
Anyways, you can do it! Way too many people went into finance over the past 30 years and we are seeing a generational gap where us young engineers have to glean information extremely quickly from a huge wave of retiring engineers.
There are no shortcuts, even if you are born a genius (or so I've heard).
I suck at math, fortunately not as much as I suck at typing, and it didn't stop me. However, by doing things the long way, one develops an ingrained appreciation of the consequences an error in step 5 upon the result at step 42. There are no "minor errors" - the work is either right or wrong.
Even if someone is a genius who can at look at a pile of Greek and "guesstimate" a result with amazing precision, or has the common sense to use a good scientific calculator, the result then must be transposed correctly in order to proceed (so I am double fucked). At least if you understand the math you can identify and correct your own errors. As others have suggested, the frat initiation metaphor is not off the mark. If we all had to constantly proofread and check the math of each others' work, no one would have time to do their own work.
Been there, done that. Yeah, I had a really good job! Got flushed out in the tech bust ...was going to go to graduate school but, I got a guitar instead.
I did Mechanical Engineering, graduating about 16 years ago. My school was the Naval Academy, which has its own additional set of challenges to go with that 21-semester-hour course load; but the academics are probably very similar to what you're doing. It was tough, and my grades were not great. But sticking with it was the best decision I ever made, and it has opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to me after I resigned from the naval service 9 years later and needed to get a job. Nobody ever asks me what my GPA was.
As a bonus, I get to drink beer pretty much all every afternoon for the rest of my life. Delayed gratification fnord, delayed gratification.
Maths is worth doing for it's own sake. It's everywhere and in everything, though 99% of those who do maths have no idea how to apply any of it.
The monetary system. Maths. Business processes. Maths. Computer systems. Maths. What many don't understand about maths though is that you're not really learning maths in school. You're learning how to use mathematical tools. It's a toolbox you can use to look at the real maths inherent in our world. You still have to be able to look at something and see the maths there, and you can only do that if you know the maths exist. I only hire people who can do a simple maths problem which is core to my business. Most qualified interviewees can't do it, they aren't really engineers though they have the degrees.
fnord88, Fuck! What the fuck is wrong with you?????? Or are the math teachers that bad? Advanced maths is fucking awesome and anyone who doesn't understand it's application has a great big stupid fucking hole in their head. You're definitely not engineering material. The funny thing is, you'll probably end up an engineer while I am not. When I learnt calculus, my first question was, "Why didn't someone tell me this ten years ago? It would have saved a lot of time!" And then I remembered that ten years ago I was only 7 years old and I needed to learn a few other things before I could understand calculus.
You remind me of the guy I met at uni who thought transistors were irrelevant to electronic engineering. Chances are that fuckwit scraped through too, while I dropped out. Why did I drop out? 1. Lack of social skills (for want of keeping a long story short) - brought about by too much study in the subjects I loved. 2. I didn't like debt and I didn't like signing blank cheques and one-sided contracts - what student loans in our country basically look like.
I'm right. All the good engineers will never graduate because they CAN do maths. All the idiots will graduate because they have maintained enough social skills to not have the problems I had plus they can't add up and don't give a shit about debt. Weerf huccked.
Keep at it. My nephew got his EE degree last year. He quickly got a job with a pipeline company. $70,000 to start with full housing allowance.
"young Americans are more interested in sports, partying (blunts and beer), and p*ssy, than academics."
it's funny how you post that on ZH where most commentors support legalizing drugs. the same drugs you say are part of the problem.
I laughh when I think about ZH potheads complaining about how lazy everyone else is.
You don't have to be a pothead to support decriminalizing pursuits that, at worst, harm nobody else. I would think it was fairly fundmental to a free society. One or two here support freedom.
Equally bad is now the Millenials are no longer ever trying to get Engineering degrees. It has moved off the top 5 degree choices. Not that all of those that try will achieve those degrees, but they are not even trying to get them.
Plus they can recognize that they give among the highest paying jobs...
This does not bod well for the future.
Look to Qatar to see what the US will become.... We will be Qatar without the Oil revenue....
We will be worse than Blade Runner.
People who can add up don't like debt. The people who can calculate compound interest hate debt. The people who can add up, can calculate compound interest and understand the liabilities that come with signing a blank contract will run in the opposite direction from a student loan. The system is deliberately discouraging the best potential engineers from becoming engineers. It really is that simple.
You want your Common Core, you can have your Common Core.
i thought it goes: "You want your Common Core, you can't handle Common Core", no?
Did it look like a 12" Obama doll?
Slovak Republic, which spends around $53k per student, performs at the same level as the US, which spends over $115k per student).
These numbers are totally bogus. NYC spends about $20K per student (most of which goes to the teachers) which is way too much.
Something tells me the Slovak Republic doesn't have nearly as many niggers as we do.
I love that word ! ! !
What, Slovak?
They have Slavs, we have Slaves. I'm sure there's something to think about there.
Meattrapper
Good observation. Take a look at the top 12 or so nations and tell me how "diversity" improves the breed. Poor Sweden, all those years of importing southern hemisphere retrogrades are finally having it's unavoidable effect.
One thing you can be sure of, the Slovak Republic has a lot less Americans than you do.
Can you even imagine how low scores from an African nation like Nigeria would be? To get an idea look at Brazil, a full hundred points below the US, and it has a strong european component, though a minority. Lets do a fair comparison and break the scores out by race. i'm betting we wouldn't be doing so poorly without the cognitively challenged imports from south of the border and Africa. Warm temperatures are just not very challlenging from an evolutionary standpoint.
We selected slaves for strong backs and the ability to survive conditions on a ship that would kill any white man. Still the IQ of american blacks, though 15 points below the average of whites, is still 15 points above that of Africans. But remember 100 IQ average is just barely functional in a modern high tech society. Colonizing Africa and South America was Europeans worse venture. Everyone would be happier if we just left them alone. Not to mention we would be totally unaware of Ebola etc.
Racial admixture studies, trans-racial adoption studies, MRI brain volume studies, and regression to the racial mean scoring, all falsify the environmental/cultural hypothesis for Average General IQ race differentials.http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/Race-differences-in-average-...
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
Scientists Discover the Genes Which Causes Brain Size and Intelligencehttp://newobserveronline.com/leftist-lies-destroyed-as-scientists-discov...
Note:there were plenty of strong white men who survived being sent to the penal colony of Australia, where they also endured extremely hard conditions, labor, as well as the transit being longer, and they created a vibrant industrialized nation. Not many could survive the extremes of the hardy white global explorers, read about Shackleton's quest for just one example of a real tough guy.
LOL. Americans always have an excuse for their failures. It's always someone else's fault.
The beginnings of our modern high tech society came from
- Paper
- Gunpowder
- Row cropping
- Bureaucracy
- Base 10 numerals
Pray tell, which white man invented those?
Slovak Republic has a lot less blacks and Hispanics than America does....fixed it for you.
Never heard of Roma gypsies then?
I think that's the average amount to put a student through high school. Most school districts spend around $12K/year per student. That $115K total seems low for 12 years. Places like NYC, LA, and DC spend over $20K/yr per student.
Most of it does go to the teachers, administrators, and crony contracts. The Detroit Public Schools superintendent Otis Mathis was illiterate and regularly jerked off during board meetings. Public education is nothing more than a lifetime job for most of the morons involved.
That's because EVERYTHING in the US has turned into a RACKET: Health, Education, Banking, Defense, Governance.
Pigs at a trough. Everybody wants onto the Greed Train, and it's not gonna stop until it meets an immovable force.
We are all warned of gluttony in the bible. What you describe is sinful and will ultimately lead to complete destruction.
does Slovak R have forced busing?? I thought not ---
my friend's step-sister makes $67 every hour on the computer . She has been fired from work for 7 months but last month her pay check was $14130 just working on the computer for a few hours. blog here... www.Yelptrade.com
Cool.
That must have been your friend's sister I just watched fist herself via the interweb for $2.50.
She's very talented and she clearly works hard to pull those bucks...
But tell her she needs to tidy her room.
Man, your friend's step-sister can't seem to keep a stable job, every time I read a different article here, her wage has changed.
This is actually a simple math problem and the answer is she has more than one job.
Jobs = >1
1+1= whatever the libtards want it to be happy don't worry lah de dah de deee, look a Unicorn!
How do you add 6 + 9? Well, first you wack that unsuspecting six down to five (wealth redistribution) and add The One *OBAMA* to nine to make ten, the number of years he will rule us before handing the baton to Princess Hillary. Any more questions?
Take 9 up to 10, then add the 5 ......
Homeschool. It's better and cheaper!
This explains the BLS.
It also explains Bush and Obola
Know why there are no more Unicorns?
They were eunuchs!
If America ranked #1 in common sense, all the rest of the charts would be moot.
This country has squandered it's resources and intellectual advantage through short cuts to profits, and pork barrel politics.
This whole "open borders" scheme is going to backfire on the progressives. Many immigrant business owners are already infuriated!
Small Business owners are conservative. They know the value of labor, and sweat equity!
"We're not throwing enough money at the Dept of Ed bureaucracy, nor do we have enough school bonds/debt. It's for the kids!"
-The average voter
Fucking communist pig public sector unions. The fucking scourge I tell you. Far more damage to the US than Ebola could ever cause. Eradication is only solution.
I don't think a teacher in North Carolina in her 10th year making $38,000 a year is the problem, but, then again, I could be wrong.
I'll say it again, I don't care what you do with education, (charter schools, pay teachers for performance, union busting, spend more money) if society does not value education (and it does not) your outcomes will not improve. It just won't, the rest is just colored bubbles.
I remember when I was growing up in the 90's, I always used to hear reading was for "white people", implying blacks didn't read.
Fuck, as a white kid, I'm not sure if I knew ANYONE who read anything by choice.
How about the pedophile teachers sitting in "rubber rooms" all day collecting huge salaries and doing nothing. Meanwhile the union lawyers drag out the case for years before they can be fired.
Fucking outrageous. Public sectors unions are a plague worse than ebola.
I get your point, but in the large scheme of things, the money that goes to that is irrelevant. It's fractions of pennies on the dollar, and I'm not gonna spend my time worrying about that. I'm just not.
I went to a middle class public school growing up where the teachers made between 40 and 60 a year. They were good teachers. But I don't care how good they are, if the kid and parents of the kid don't care about his/her education, the kid is not going to get one. There is only so much of an impact a teacher can have. I can only imagine what teachers are up against with less of a salary in poor neighborhoods (especially now with half of kids living in poverty)
Blaming public sector unions doesn't even come close to drilling down on the issue. Love them or hate them, I promise you if they were gone tomorrow, the education system would not improve one percent in any of the league tables.
just as there are very good underpaid teachers, there are also worthless teachers that should be immediately fired but cannot because of teachers unions.
I don't disagree.
My point for vehemently defending teachers is that they are not the main problem. Not even close. We have a cultural problem that does not value education.
There are good charter schools, there are bad charter schools.
There are good teachers and there are bad teachers.
Some school districts spend too much, others not enough
The end result is we have been on downward trend in our overall education levels for about 30 years now.
I have read through all of your comments and while I can agree that teachers may not be our biggest problem they are part of a huge problem not only in the US but most all of the developed world. The fact is that if you go in to most any community in the US where the teachers are unionized they and the administrators are some of the most well paid in the community. Many times that is true based on salary alone but add in benefits and a full retirement it is not even close. Teachers should cost half what they cost.
Most government jobs are nothing more than pushing paper around and transferring money from one pocket to another. These jobs should not exist let alone the individuals occupying the job making 2 to 4 times what they would in the private sector. It is the government and unions that have destroyed jobs in America, not businesses. Government policies and unionization have been highly inflationary and have lead directly to a complete lack of competitiveness.
BTW, all of the welfare is a symptom of the government and unionization illness. There would be plenty of jobs available for everyone no matter their intelligence or work ethic. Lazy people existed in droves in prior generations just like the current younger generations, but all prior generations needed to do is basically walk down the street into some factory and do some menial job, and make half decent money given the costs they faced in their community. But the unions came in a blew everything up.
"The Underground History of American Education"
It's darker than you think.
SB
The US out spends everybody on primary education than anybody else in the world and look at the results. Throwing more $s down the hole is not the answer.
I 100% agree with you.
But blaming the teachers (the easy way out) accomplishes nothing.
My point is society clearly does not value education. Until that changes (As (George Carlin used to say), it's not going to get any better, be happy with what you got (as shitty as that is).
As for how to fix my above stated problem....I have no idea.
I mean, fuck, most people don't even like baseball anymore because THAT is too boring. How to get a 10 yr old kid to read a book....fuck if I have a clue.
IMO the loss in purchasing power of our currency plays into it. If mom and dad both have to work full time jobs to keep a roof, groceries, and the lights on who has the time and energy to tutor the kids at night?
And now, if a college education is = debt slavery with diminished job prospects the incentive to care is less. Low wage service sector jobs don't require skills much above 8th grade.
At least it's clear that it's just Shanghai and not whole goddamned China that's No. 1.
At 24 million people, greater metropolitan Shanghai does have more people than several countries on that list.
I heard the superintendent in where I live makes slightly over $1million a year and there are five guys under him and each pulls in more than half a million annual salary plus very generous benefits in the name of education.
The answer is to spend more money, because we know that flat sceen LCD TV's, MacBooks, and ipods will help the children learn.
Electronics in the class room are detrimental. A recent study compared learning from books / physical material Vs tablets and monitors. Retention of material learnt from books was better.
That's the joke.
Idiots.
Some samples:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373840/ten-dumbest-common-core-problems-alec-torres
Well, one way they've engineered this fiasco from the get go is thru the nutrients in infant formula.
Maybe I should say lack of them. I'm sure the soy is non-GMO
Shameful.
nmewn
Yikes! We are totally freaking doomed...
Yep, that pretty much looks like my daughter's math work. I do not know why they take something as simple as addition and subtraction and make it complicated with drawings, charts, etc. I'm one of those people who was very frustrated by algebra, as in if I know the answer why can't I just write the answer?
At the very "core" of Common Core it is recognized by the observant as a form of indoctrination, whereby the student is being instructed in how to think not on what the correct answer is.
As we note, even when the student arrives at the correct answer but gets the methodology wrong in explaining how he or she arrived at the correct answer, the question/test answer is marked as...wrong. It (Common Core) is more concerned with the structure (obviously) of thought, of HOW the student came up with the answer, not if the answer is correct or not.
And the teacher cannot stray from the practice as set forth by the state, that is to say, if little Johnny has his "own way of thinking" or relating to a subject that a normal teacher would recognize in him and use it in order to allow him to discover what is being taught that the rest of the class already gets so he can pass, it is verboten.
Conformity, uniformity...Common Core.
This is because no one has been taught critical thinking skills. Critical Thinking Skills 101 used to be a reasonably well attended, and I might add, required part of a college curriculum. For the last 15 or 20 years it has disappeared from the curriculae. Liberal Arts is dying out as a major, too. If you cannot think critically you cannot learn other disciplines such as mathematics or foreign languages. Besides, TPTB don't want citizens who can think for themselves. They are quite happy with the sheeple they have. Are you happy with the sheeple we have? 'Cuz I'm not.
JFC, if it were anyone else. I read the article and took the test.
I'm moar retarded for it nmewn. I'm guessing the visual part along with the simple mathmatical part was for (touch screen) assimilation?
Kinda like how clerks can't count back change at you're local 7/11 , Circle-K.
The US doesn't value education, it values credentials. And math / science has very poor esteem culturally. You can't be good at something you don't value.
education or grading?
We need another czar for this tragedy. In 4..2..3..1..
Can we have a racial breakdown of these numbers?
Interesting that Israel scores worse than the US.
That's because calculating usurious interest was only 15% of the test.
Its bad when Italy does better than the U.S. If you want to estimate the U.S without divisity look at Canada which is way up there.
That's because the population share of lunatic whackball primitives (Chabad and other welfare-dependent fundamentalist nutjobs) in 'Israel' (always put it in quotes: makes it clear it's fake) is greater than the population share of 'minorities' in the US.
Folks complaining that the US score includes blacks etc, ought to try and have a scientific conversation with one of those nutjobs who tie a box to their heads and rock like a mental patient in order to propitiate a foreskin-obsessed genocidal Sky monster.
If this is for real, then Gates, evangelist of the Common Core, and the rest of the elite are laughing their asses off right now at the American sheople.
Unbelievable.
Some years ago when I was doing research on the west coast of the US I was invited to a high school graduation. There were 86 valedictorians. On a scale with an alleged max of 5 they all had the exact same grade average close to 6
It reminded me of t-ball where everyone gets a hit and everyone is a winner. Standardized test scores mean practically nothing except that the person taking the test can dance well to the tune of the slave system. Which nowadays is being directed to herd mediocrity, maximize control and intellectual property theft
And since America used to lead the pack, but is now being destroyed through every means possible by internal and external forces, this is not surprising. Don't laugh too hard at this US math teacher showing you how its done. No wonder these kids don't have a clue and can't even score high on standardized tests. But it will begin to explain why the future math score chart will put you at the bottom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2QGiGqz-xs
And if you still doubt me go to deagel.com and look for the 2025 forecasts for US among other countries such as population and GDP. Be sure to check the wayback machine for previous estimates. This should give you an idea of what the plans are for the future of the world including a big drop off in the US
Edit: link correction
I disagree. Most standardized tests are very easy. They make sure you know the basics. This shows too many American students don't know the basics. Go to a restaurant or grocery store and how many of the cashiers can give you correct change without the computer telling them how much?
If you think standardized tests are bad, do away with them and every child will graduate with honors.
all ' US average' statistics are meaningless. a multi-racial society can report an average, but this average hides great variation among different sub-populations. height, iq, math ability etc. etc. there is no such thing as an US average.
26th in math and a financial system that gets more complex by the day does not bode well for sheople and their shearing.
It's no wonder the 'no-brainer' simplicity of sound money was eliminated and abhorred by the elite...it kept the simpleton from maintaining the fair fight.
Where has it ever been proven that spending more money on 'education' created a better educated populace? doesn't the content of what is being taught matter, or only the $$? If you are spending that money teaching kids bullshit and propaganda, $10m per student won't make them smarter.
When you have 50 years of teachers unions campaigning for smaller class sizes (more union workers, less work per worker) and pushing down the standards across the board, there's no question why the US is in this position.
That and half the parents of public school kids look at this as free babysitting.
I remember my classroom sizes were always around 30 kids. Now the schools and teachers claim 20 per classroom is too many.
Throw more money on it. It will make the retarded minorities perform better and the tenured retards teach better.
Here are my son grades thus far. Math 86%, PE 100%, Music 92%, Art 82%, Lang Arts 83%, Soc Sdudies 117%, Science 108%. Now the average is 95.4%, but how can he get more than 100% in a class?
I read recently the AVERAGE grade at Harvard was an A. Back in the 1950's it was a C+. You know......C for average.
Actually, it's about B-....It is honors at Harvard though.
When I was at Yale (1980s), they ditched grades and instituted a pass-fail-exceptional system (I forget the actual words used to describe these grades). At the beginning of the new system, it was "suggested" that five-percent of students be given the exceptional grade.
Within a few years, five- became fifty-percent.
At about the same time, SAT scores were renormed around so that the mean score was 500 for each test.
Bell curve?
I arrived at x times 26 = 100 and got 3.84615 to compensate for those students that are relocating, dying, and being abducted by aliens; to compensate for discrepancies in real-time data. In other words 26X3.84614 = 100%
Why work extremely hard at math, science, or engineering when you know that the job you would have had is going to Hadji H1B Baba?
spot on
USA #1 USA #1 in paying public school democrat teachers highest salary w/benefits in world. Chinese pay about $500 per student per year for education. BTW Chinese engineering schools are pumping out 5 times the number of U.S. engineering grads per year.
The teachers have great pay and benefits for the children
Get smarter :
See
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/09/prodigies-update-i.html
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/10/prodigies-update-ii.html
This survey is misleading...
China is rated too high... Shanghai is the most intelligent & advanced city in China & not representative of the entire country. It's like Boston or Wesport, Con representing the US.
Normally, schools in china are sloppy, corrupted & teach you propaganda....it's easy to get stupid over there.
Yeah, let compare Los Alamos, NM students in science and math to Shanghai. I'm betting the "average" Shanghai students would seem retarded by comparison. Helps genetically and otherwise to have parents with advanced degrees in either science or math.
That graph is correct for a number of reasons:
1. The top 1% (if not less) are getting more than 100% of income increases in GDP. That is , in addition to the 100% of GDP increases that they are scoring, they are also eating up some of the existing GDP of lower income earners.
2. The USA has been conning the world into accepting paper dollars in exchange for real products, materials and services for a few decades now. In other words the exchange of dollars for goods etc is totally unfair.
3. The US Government and the the USA have been consistently been spending more than than they been earning for over 30 years and yet somehow lay claim to being the biggest economy and most powerful government in the world. Well in my view they have become the biggest con.
4. This graph also suits the retirement funds of the USA whereby they ASSUME an earnings rate well above the real earnings rate with a resultant shortfall, i,e, undefunded pension plans.
So the pie chart really reflects the lies, theft, propaganda and deceit of a nation gone crazy.
Here's the problem with math...hold on it's a real PLOS ONE medical journal study, the fear of math gives people real physical pain, MRI imageas and all. But we know there are exceptions to this called Wall Street:)
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2012/10/algo-duping-plos-one-journal.html
JUNIORS BITCHEZ!!!!! The biggest 26% majority EVEEEERRRRRRRR!!!!!!!