Last month the National Governor’s Association for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released the Common Core State Standards, an attempt to standardize K-12 education across the U.S. To date, 48 of the 50 states have adopted the standards, Alaska and Texas electing not to adopt. The final version of the standards is due out by late spring.

It is clear that there is a wide disparity in what students are learning from state to state, and I appreciate the effort to standardize education across the country. According to the Common Core website, the standards are:

• Aligned with college and work expectations;
• Clear, understandable and consistent;
• Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
• Evidence-based.

I’m having an initial look at the standards now, and I have to admit, I’m pleasantly surprised at first glance. The standards are set out clearly (unlike many sets of standards), and there appears to be ample focus on inquiry and higher order thinking skills and activities while allowing flexibility for teachers to adapt instruction to their teaching styles. Moreover, states are free to adopt, reject, or abandon them as they see fit. Keep in mind, this is a first glance, and I’ll report more once I have a deeper look. I think a states-sponsored initiative such as this is well overdue, and I hope it bears fruit. You can view the draft standards here. Let me know what you think.

In the past three years, the number of Chinese applicants to Georgetown University’s freshman class rose from 95 to 208. At George Mason University, the total went from 54 to almost 100, and at George Washington University, it increased from 170 to 350. Brown University’s applications went from 166 to nearly 500, and Stanford University’s, from 268 to more than 400. At the University of Washington, the number soared from about 250 three years ago to nearly 1,600 this year.

And don’t expect this trend to abate anytime soon. Say what you will about the economy; U.S. colleges are still considered by the Chinese as #1 in higher education.

“People just think the education offered in the U.S. is undoubtedly the best in the world,” said Betty Xiong, 20, a U-Va. junior from Shanghai.

Only about one-third of U.S. students could read and do math at current grade levels on national tests in 2007, the most recent figures available. That means millions of kids are a long way from reaching the ambitious goal of former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — that every student read and do math on grade level by 2014.

And the high school dropout rate is dismal — 1 in 4 kids.

But it’s all made to look worse than it is by international comparisons, which at best tend to be misleading and at worst are deeply flawed.

Well, let’s take a look.

The United States has a much bigger and faster-growing population than the other countries that participate in global assessments; China and India do not take part at all. Unlike many global competitors, the U.S. is growing ever more diverse, with a large share of children who are learning English.

Undoubtedly demographics can play an important role in assessing tests scores; consequently, they cannot be dismissed. Flood Singapore with a relatively large percentage students who do not speak Mandarin or English, and you’ll see falling test scores. That would not necessarily indicate that the education system is failing, and it doesn’t necessarily in the U.S. either.  However, it does indicate that a chunk of the future work force could be hobbled, and that is a problem.

Obama says the rest of the developed world is passing America by. “Our schools continue to trail other developed countries and, in some cases, developing countries,” he told the National Academy of Sciences on April 27. “Our students are outperformed in math and science by their peers in Singapore, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Korea, among others.”

That is not the whole story.

The U.S. does trail the most high-achieving countries, mostly developed nations in Asia such as Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.

But the U.S. holds its own in the group that comes next, a group of developed countries that, depending on the test, includes England, Germany and Russia.

In fact, the U.S. has gained on some of its toughest competitors since 1995, making bigger strides in math than Singapore and Japan, and in science than Japan.

That is according to the most recent international tests, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, the study Obama was citing. A lead TIMSS researcher took issue with the idea the U.S. is trailing.

“Certainly, our results do not show the United States trailing the developed world by any stretch of the imagination,” said Ina V.S. Mullis, a Boston College research professor and co-director of the study.

“The Asian countries are way ahead of the rest of developed countries, but mostly the developed countries are relatively similar,” Mullis said. “And the United States might be one of the leaders of that group, depending on whether you’re talking about math or science in the fourth- or the eighth-grade.”

“Our children are competing for jobs against children in India and China today, and those children are going to school 25, 30 percent more than us,” Duncan said at Brookings this past week.

Obama himself said in March: “Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.”

The president is in luck: The U.S. already is doing it.

South Koreans do have a longer school year, measured in days. But Americans actually spend more time in school. The average U.S. eighth-grader has 1,146 instructional hours a year, compared with 923 hours a year in South Korea.

Not true, if you take into account the hours Korean students spend in after-school hagwons (academic extracurricular programs). While living in Korea, I witnessed first-hand how students would leave school and go directly to hagwons for additional math, science, language and/or music practice. Based on my observations, every student whose parents can afford it are doing it. Now, you could argue that U.S. students are getting extra time also in after-school sports programs, real-life jobs, and clubs, but academically the time spent in class is not even close. Are the students as well rounded as American students? Hardly. But we’re not discussing holistic education; we’re talking about test scores and academic time, in this case.

In fact, the U.S. has more instructional hours than many better-performing countries, though that raises a separate question about how well American schools spend classroom time.

As for Duncan’s comparison, the department says there isn’t reliable data on how much time Chinese or Indian children spend in school.

Helping more students finish college is a priority among the many philanthropies that work on education issues. In a December speech at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the [Bill] Gates said the U.S. problem is acute.

“In the case of college education, we were No. 1 in the world 20 years ago in the percentage of young adults with a postsecondary credential. Now we’re number 10 and dropping,” Gates said.

…

But those figures are misleading for several reasons, said Cliff Adelman, a former Education Department researcher now at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

_They are based on entire populations, not on what actually happens to students who enter college in a given year. Graduation rates in a large, growing country such as the U.S. will not look as good as those of a smaller country whose population is declining.

_Countries have different definitions for who is counted; for example, some exclude noncitizens, while the U.S. includes them.

_Since 2000, many European countries have switched to three-year degrees from four-to-six year degrees, making their rates look better than before.

These are all good points which should be taken into consideration.

Quaid concludes:

What about high school? There again, international comparisons present similar problems. Other countries have more complex systems with many different types of high schools and can limit who is admitted.

No one disputes that the U.S. high school dropout rate, 1 in 4 kids and worse among minorities, is awful.

But as with other international comparisons, measuring the U.S. against the rest of the world is like comparing apples and oranges.

Quaid makes several good arguments in the piece but ultimately does not persuade that our international test scores are not indicative of serious problems within our education system. There are, of course, a multitude of factors not addressed in a test score, and the U.S. continues to lead the way in invention, inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity; however, if we continue to let our primary and secondary schools slip, our leadership will not continue for long.

Bridging the Gap

“The origin of the fissure between lower and higher education in the United States stems, in part, from the laudable way the nation created education systems to deliver curriculum for both K-12 and higher education.” Thus begins Dr. Michael Kirst’s interesting brief history of the curricular chasm between high school preparation and university expectations.

Kirst explains that in the late 19th century there were no organized standards for college entrance so the National Education Association appointed the first commission to try to bridge the gap between high schools and universities. This, in turn, led to the creation of the College Examination Board with regulated admissions testing for many colleges.

In the early 20th century, a new report recommended that high schools adapt themselves to the needs of less academic students, at the same time still providing a different track for students definitely headed to university, which led to the formation of “comprehensive high schools.” This development led to a high school system which was deemed not to adequately prepare students for the rigors of university study. Continuing into the present, the focus on high school as college prep has been diminished for most students, according to Kirst.

Kirst points out that today’s effort to connect the high school and university divide centers in Advanced Placement classes (with standards dictated by the universities) and the International Baccalaureate program. (At this point, Kirst opines that IB is limited in “scope,” which could have a couple of meanings. I’ve asked for clarification on that point.) Meanwhile, the more able students are being better prepared for university while weaker students are getting further away from the target. And the divide persists…

Personally I believe that the IB Diploma program (Grades 11-12) is a good option for many students and can be taken at a higher or lower level of rigor. However the IB Dip is only available in a limited number of American schools, though the number is growing, which may be the “scope” limitation to which Dr. Kirst refers above.

Photo by akahodag