The teaching gap

What Hacker News says

1. tokenadultJun 2012
   I don't know how to get a breakdown of US distributional information by race, but your language is, at best, highly misleading.

   The last time I saw a comment of this nature in a thread on the subject of mathematics education in the United States and east Asia (both places I have lived), someone advised me not to feed the troll. But that was a different troll, and taking your comment, even where you incorrectly say "highly misleading" about my comment, as an attempt to advance the discussion, I'll invite onlookers to look at the evidence.

   I backed up my statement with a link

   http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

   and anyone who takes a look at Exhibit 1.1 of that link (on pages 34 and 35 of the .PDF document), which is a good example of a comparative data distribution display, can see how the national median level of performance in the United States compares to the bottom quartile level for Singapore, and on the other hand where the top quartile line for the United States appears compared to the median line for Singapore. Q.E.D.

   Unfortunately, once upon a time a blogger ignorant of the large body of research on textbook content and classroom practice in different countries for elementary mathematics in different countries of the world

   http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education/d...

   http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

   took the lazy way out and said that if "race" is taken into account, then the United States is second to none in provision of public education, which is simply a lie. That meme has spread through some politically tendentious blog networks, but every serious professional researcher on comparative education policy can, and does, point to more meaningful differences between the United States and other countries. It would have helped that blogger also to be more familiar with the huge literature on "race" issues in countries all over the world,

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

   but let me just disagree with the suggestion in your comment by pointing that nobody who makes the suggestion made by the blogger has actually gathered the data to show all the steps to prove that "race" as such makes any difference at all in educational attainment. Meanwhile I have taken care, in links already shown in my first comment above to document both the known inferiority of provision of primary education to some "race"-defined groups in the United States

   http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

   and the degree to which other countries outperform the United States in providing primary education to the most disadvantaged groups in each of those countries.

   http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

   Moreover, and this link is new to this thread, but not newly posted to Hacker News,

   http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

   the United States is conspicuous in how little it meets the educational needs of its strongest students in mathematics.

   in the big picture it's hard to conclude that our education is failing

   There is certainly room for semantic disagreement about how bad performance has to be before it is regarded as "failing" performance, but I note for the record that the United States has abundant resources devoted to K-12 schooling

   http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf

   but underperforms compared to what other countries do with less abundant resources. I didn't use the word "fail" or "failing" or "failure" in my comment, but I did suggest, and I think I suggested this with warrant, that United States schools could do a better job of teaching fraction arithmetic to the young people in their care.

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2. tokenadultDec 2011
   I have lived in one of the other countries, know hundreds upon hundreds of people from several of the other countries, and own and have read textbooks from several of the top TIMSS countries, including textbooks written in languages other than English. (I speak, understand, read, and write Chinese to the level of a professional translator and interpreter.) I reject the facile analysis you picked up from a blog post--so far not published in a peer-reviewed journal--by a graduate student who has yet to complete his degree because I have read better research on the subject by authors who have completed their Ph.D. degrees at better academic institutions, and who have published in peer-reviewed journals of high quality. I'm sorry for you if you are stuck on one lame explanation for the phenomenon of underperforming United States schools, but especially if you would take the time and effort to read good-quality dead-tree literature on the subject,

   http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Elementary-Mathematics-W-Sawyer...

   http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

   http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

   you could learn something new that could help you better understand the other countries in the world and what the United States might learn from them.

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3. tokenadultOct 2011
   A good reality check on several of the assertions made in the article, or in the comments here, about Finland is to look at another country high in international educational rankings, namely Singapore. I have known people from Singapore (mostly students at my state's flagship university) since the mid-1970s. Always, they have been amazingly smart people. I have been curious about how schooling is done in Singapore since well before the first time that Singapore was included in an international education study.

   Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35)

   http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

   a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I have lived for years in one of the other countries that regularly outperforms the United States in those studies, Taiwan, and will also comment on the Taiwan educational experience as a reality check on the comments on Finland in this thread.

   I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. Singapore is very diverse linguistically--the MAJORITY of the population in my generation spoke NONE of the four official languages (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or English) in standard form at home, and certainly not the main language of school instruction, English, but Singapore has become part of the "outer circle" of use of English internationally and now maintains a high degree of multilingualism. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well both in language learning and in mathematics learning in the current generation.

   The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"

   http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

   by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. The key aspect of Singapore's success is a MUCH better curriculum in primary school mathematics than is used in the United States. Homeschoolers in the United States, including quite a few parents of top-scoring students on the American Mathematics Competitions tests, have become aware of the Singapore curriculum materials,

   http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...

   and those are generally helpful for American families who are looking for something better than the poorly organized, often mathematically incorrect materials used in United States schools.

   Professor Hung-hsi Wu of the University of California--Berkeley has written about what needs to be reformed in United States mathematics education.

   http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf

   http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf

   http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf

   http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf

   http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf

   Other mathematicians who have written interesting articles about mathematics education reform in the United States include Richard Askey,

   http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf

   http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf

   Roger E. Howe,

   http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

   Patricia Kenschaft,

   http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

   and

   James Milgram.

   ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

   ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html

   All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). I have seen (and used) the textbooks from Singapore and from Taiwan. They are much more clear in their presentation and much more conceptually accurate than the typical United States textbooks. Moreover, elementary mathematics teachers tend to specialize in teaching mathematics while other elementary teachers teach other subjects, at much younger ages than when United States pupils typically encounter specialist teachers. The United States model of elementary education is to have teachers who are jacks of all trades and masters of none, and who do equally poorly (by reasonable international standards) in teaching reading, mathematics, science, and all other elementary subjects.

   The United States could do a lot better and reach the level of Finland by staffing reforms

   http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...

   and by using best practices

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

   in provision of elementary education.

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4. tokenadultSep 2011
   Obligatory link to Paul Graham essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known," with advice on how to do deal with boredom in (high) school:

   http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

   This essay was the second essay (after "Why Nerds Are Unpopular) that made me aware of pg's interest in education policy.

   See also the book The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom for ways that school could be done better.

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

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5. tokenadultApr 2011
   I have worked in education, both in the US and in east Asia. The difference is vast.

   What are the most crucial differences that United States policy-makers should be aware of as they try to improve education in the United States? (For that matter, what should east Asian policy-makers learn from the United States?) I like the books by Liping Ma

   http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

   and

   James Stigler and James Hiebert

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

   as examples of what the United States could learn from the practices of other countries, but perhaps you have other suggestions for readers here.

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6. tokenadultJan 2010
   subjects don't really start getting "split" subjectively (with different teachers) until middle and high school.

   That's a mistake of the system in the United States. In many other countries, teachers specialize by subject in the elementary grades, the better to teach their subject effectively. See Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States

   http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

   for a detailed discussion of elementary math teaching, or The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

   for a broader perspective on other ways to organize schools.

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