The Human Wealth of Nations

31 pointsby carlosggover 11 years ago

9 comments

bilbo0sover 11 years ago

I have listened to a great deal of hand wringing since the PISA reports dropped and I think it is easy to concentrate on the negative and overlook the positive news from these results.Three points I think we should keep in mind.One, the results were VERY uneven among the states. More importantly, if you look at the Northeast, (Massachusetts, NY, NJ etc), and the western Midwest, (Minnesota, Wisconsin), the scores were pretty competitive relative the top performing nations actually. For instance, in Massachusetts, even if you only counted the scores of black students, the Math and Science average was higher than Finland, which is continuously touted as a model of educational efficiency!Two, teens in Mississippi, Texas, California and Washington are pretty much the same as teens in Minnesota, New Jersey and Massachusetts. This is good news, as it indicates that there are models out there that can be employed to better the performance of students in other areas of the country.Lastly, something about the US creates an openness in its citizens that drives a good deal of activity beneficial to society. The article references, for instance, "... America's entrepreneurial energies, its openness to innovation and creative destruction ...". This "Creativity" has some value, which I would admittedly be challenged to quantify. It is the sort of thing tests will overlook. Which is curious, because in the future I think it will be one of the most important skills, (or, 'traits' perhaps), of the high value worker.My last point had only a tangential relevance to the PISA, I just thought it was an important point to make. That aside, I think the first two points are clearly cause for a cautious optimism here.

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rayinerover 11 years ago

Another article that misleadingly cites PISA scores without adjusting for demographics: <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-poverty-affected-us-pisa-s.html" rel="nofollow">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-p...</a>, <a href="http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html" rel="nofollow">http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...</a>.The U.S. has problems, but the problems are not schools, teachers, or funding. The problem is Chicago, Philly, L.A., Detroit, etc. Places that have levels of crime and social dysfunction that simply do not exist at that scale in other OECD countries.I live in Wilmington, DE. A city of 71,000 people. Last year, it had 26 murders. London, a city of 8 million people, had 99. That's a 30x higher murder rate (and 2x higher than Bogota, Colombia!).[1] These are mostly 20-somethings killed in gang wars. There's a pipeline from the schools here straight into these gangs. I'm not surprised that test scores aren't the first thing on the minds of kids here.Also, I'll note that the U.S. has one of the highest fertility rates in the OECD, just behind Mexico and Turkey. I don't think its unreasonable to assume that this has an impact on the demographic distribution of children in schools. That is to say, I'm willing to bet that children in schools in other OECD countries were more likely to be planned and born to parents who intended to take care and properly educate them than children in American schools.[1] Four major U.S. cities (five if you count Puerto Rico as part of the U.S.) make the list of the 50 most murderous cities in the world: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate</a>. The only countries with cities on that list that aren't in Latin America are Jamaica, South Africa, and Iraq.

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bicknergsengover 11 years ago

"""Some 7% of U.S. students reached the top two scientific performance levels, compared with 17% in Finland and an amazing 27% in Shanghai."""I'm not normally a stickler for this kind of statistical bullshit, but this is particularly bad. They compared a country of 300mil with a country of 5mil with a city of 14mil. I think the percentages are interesting, but this is ACTUALLY comparing apples and oranges. I'd be interested to see how Boston (or whatever US city with the highest "scientific performance level") does in that mix though.

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danielharanover 11 years ago

"Economies grow by exploiting scarce resources, people most of all."No, they don't. Economies grow because of cheap inputs. Every economic revolution is the result of something becoming ridiculously cheap; the last one was oil, the current one is computation.

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ajucover 11 years ago

The results (png): <a href="http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png</a>Report (pdf): <a href="http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overv...</a>

VLMover 11 years ago

"Since 1998, the Program for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, has ranked 15-year-old kids around the world"Every American 15 year old kid? Probably darn close. Every Vietnamese 15 year old kid? LOL.For a heavily class based country, the USA has quite a blind spot to how other countries organize more heavily by class starting at a rather young age.

KStoutover 11 years ago

I love the smell of a Rupert Murdoch propaganda piece in the morning.

carlosggover 11 years ago

Weird that India did not participate.

michaelochurchover 11 years ago

Here's a terrifying thought (which I believe to be correct).I don't think US schools are that bad on fundamentals. They're probably quite good on average. Of course, a large percentage of what makes a school good or bad is the other students, not the teachers or material. I'll get to that...These indifferent, underachieving students (disproportionately, but not entirely, in poor areas) aren't stupid or bad people. I think they're just rational. They see what society has to offer them even if they do succeed and conclude that it's not worth the effort for them. If middle-class, college-educated people are applying for jobs in fast food, then what should a low-income student, who might be able to scrape together enough scholarships to get through undergrad with merely moderately crippling debt, expect? They see people far ahead of them in the socioeconomic queue ending up miserable and disappointed, and conclude that there's no chance of success for them. Most of them are probably right.This country has a deep-seated morale problem, expressed at the top through corruption and dishonesty and nepotism, and at the bottom through indifference and underperformance-- which is most measurable and upsetting in the schools because that's before society has formally given up on people. It stems from fundamentals that will take a long time to fix.