Yet another dire warning about the need for workers who can “thrive in the global economy:”
[T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit ourselves to the proposition that all students can achieve at high levels in math and science, that we need them to do so for their own futures and for the future of our country, and that we owe it to them to structure and staff our educational system accordingly.
Gerald Bracey urges us to think critically when we use international comparisons to guide education policy:
Principle 23 of the “principles of data interpretation [pdf]” that organize “Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered,” reads “If the situation really is as alleged ask, ‘So what?’” The question does not call for some smart-ass response, it calls for an evaluation of the consequences of the situation. So the U. S. is not #1 in mathematics or science testing. So what? So, very little.
First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It’s like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have.
Bracey brought this report from the OECD to the attention of the EDDRA list, Top of the Class: High Performers in Science in PISA 2006
Figure 1.2 depicts the number of 15-year-old students proficient at Levels 5 and 6 on the PISA science scale by country. Both the proportion of top performers within a country and the size of countries matter when establishing the contribution of countries to the global talent pool: even though the proportion of top performers in science is comparatively low in the United States, the United States takes up a quarter of the pie shown in Figure 1.2, simply because of the size of the country. In contrast Finland, that educates the highest share of 15-year-olds to Levels 5 and 6 in the PISA science scale, only contributes 1% to the OECD pool of top-performing 15-year-old students, because of its small size.
The US seems to be putting up a fair number of high performers, comparatively.
I am 100% in favor of quality math and science education. And since the Cargegie Commission understands that “America’s young people care deeply about problems such as global warming, world hunger, and poor health and want to be involved in solving them,” I hope they don’t forget to mention this to the corporate interests that are causing all these problems. We’ll want their cooperation when we get around to buiding our “sustainable future.”
5 Comments
The reason why averages matter is that the high achievers do not live in isolation. They are supported or held back by the remainder of society, and this has an impact not only on what they can achieve but also on what their quality of life will be.
To prove this point, and to look at the data in a new light, let’s consider the ‘global talent pool’ diagram included in your post. As you can see, the U.S. has 25 percent, which you suggest is “a fair number of high performers, comparatively.” Canada has, by contrast, 4 percent, Britain 8 percent, etc.
Now the thing about high performers is, they are the primary generators of wealth in a society. They innovate, create, manage, discover and teach. The rest of society, by contrast, might be characterized as the ‘load’ that must be carried by the high performers.
That is not to say that people who are not high performers are useless, that they don’t produce wealth, or anything like that. But when we are comparing nations (as economists always do, since they are in love with league tables) it is the high achievers, not the others, that distinguish one society from another.
The size of the load will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the high achievers. The larger the load, the more of the achievers’ efforts will have to be directed toward supporting that load – by, for example, assuming teaching, public service and government positions, by paying higher taxes, by sharing more social services such as hospitals and schools.
So, how do we calculate the load? We can begin by assuming that the ‘global talent pool’ depicted in the diagram has some given size. It consists of some number of people. This must be true, otherwise we couldn’t say that the U.S. constitutes 25 percent of it.
I don’t know what the size it; the documentation doesn’t say. It can’t be extremely large. If it were a billion people, say, Canada’s percentage would amount to 40 million people, which is greater than the whole population of Canada.
Since the comparisons are rations, it doesn’t matter what the actual value is. So I will assume that the size of ‘the global talent pool’ is about 100 million. This is probably roughly accurate. I leave it as an exercise to construct the same argument with differing values (the results will be the same).
So, with the global talent pool of 100 million people, the U.S. share of this is 25 million people (25 percent), Canada’s is 4 million people (4 percent), Britain’s is 8 million people, and so on.
The total population of the United States is 300 million people. This means that the 25 million high achievers in the United States have a load of 275 million people – a ratio of roughly 11 to 1. So each high achiever in the United States carries roughly 11 people.
The 4 million high achievers in Canada, by contrast, carry a load of about 26 million people. This is ration of roughly 8 to 1. High achievers in Canada are relatively better off, therefore.
Britain, meanwhile, has a population of about 60 million people. Its 8 million high achievers are supporting a load of 52 million people. That’s a bit more than a 6 to 1 ratio. Britain’s high achievers are carrying an even smaller load.
There are countries that are struggling. Spain, with a population of 40 million, only has about 1 million high achievers. This creates a ratio of 40 to 1, which explains why it is more difficult to prosper there, even if you are a high achiever.
I could create the league table here, but we can fairly easily extrapolate the results for ourselves. By considering the load along with the percentage of high achievers, it becomes clear that American high achievers are positioned roughly as OECD data would put them.
So how does the United States manage to appear to be so much more prosperous, when its 25 million high achievers are carrying such a significant load?
Part of it is, as you suggest, volume. With 25 million high achievers, they seem to be everywhere. Major urban areas like Boston and San Francisco are full of them; the density in these areas is significantly higher.
Another major part of it is that high achievers in the United States carry less of a load than they do elsewhere. Taxes are lower, public service positions are fewer, and private schools and hospitals mean the high achievers don’t have to share. High achievers achieve a relatively higher income than those in other nations, but at the cost of a lower standard of living for those in the load.
And a third part of it is that much of the higher standard of living by American high achievers is obtained on credit. This is how Americans have satisfied the aspirations of the load, and how the nation has compensated for the increasing cost of commodities from overseas.
Eventually, high achievers in the United States will have to come to grips with the fact that they carry a larger load than their counterparts in other OECD nations, and that unlike nations currently building their economies, their relative load is *increasing*. It will become increasingly difficult, or will require increasing disparity or increasing levels of credit, to support American high achievers in their current standard of living.
Other countries are developing their economies by expanding their classes of high achievers, thus decreasing the load and improving living conditions for everyone. Americans will have to do the same, eventually – the question is, how long can their levels of increased disparity and increased credit disguise the fact that the economy as a whole is underperforming.
Your comment, Stephen, interferes with my initial thinking.
Thank you. It forces me to go beyond the facile gratitude for the education that provided this eventual English teacher with the tools, coming out of a rural high school, to enjoy spherical trig and calculate square roots in my head. I’ve gotten too lazy to bother calculating square roots without buttons, but I blame that on the same technology that connects us.
You speak of “high achievers” and “load,” and include educators in the former. Sitting this side of your southern border, I have to wonder what y’all pay plumbers and electricians up there. Down here, your “load” makes more per hour than your “high achievers.”
And then we have to consider the fact that “high achievers” are increasingly connected – bouncing ideas and explications off each other regardless of artificial boundaries: I’m based in Texas, Doug’s in Alaska, and you’re writing out of New Brunswick. I have to wonder if your “league tables” merit anything other than another “so what?”, since here we are, discussing ramifications and taking advantage of Doug’s focused surfing.
And, yes, I’m still mightily grateful that I didn’t just learn to parse sentences and interpret literature in high school, though those frame my career; I still love and use relatively high levels of math, and rudimentary biology, chemistry, and physics.
There’s more to a complete education than marketable skills, and the plumbers and electricians I’ve hired have known that.
To clear up any confusion about the numbers, there’s a lot of documentation in the full report: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/17/42645389.pdf
We’re told (on p. 23) that “More than 400 000 students in 57 countries participated in the PISA 2006 assessment… Nationally-representative samples were drawn, representing 20 million 15-year-olds.”
On p. 26: “Although across the OECD on average about 95% of students were at least able to perform tasks at Level 1, 81% at Level 2, 57% at Level 3, and 29% at Level 4, only 9% reached Levels 5 and 6 (with only 1% reaching Level 6). Thus, only 9% of the 15-year-old student population across the OECD countries are top performers in science, as defined by this report – a highly selective group. It is this talented group of top performers that is the focus of this report.” The amount of high performers in the US was consistent with the 9% overall average.
The graph posted above therefore represents the performance of 9 percent of 400,000 15 year-olds, or about 36,000 high-performing science test-takers. The one-fourth from the US would be about 9,000. Since the sample of 400,000 students represents 20 million, a ratio of 1:50, the 9000 US high-performers represent about 450,000 students. Finland, a country with which we are often unfavorably compared, had about 360 high-scorers, representing 18,000 students.
I mention this so we don’t have to make up numbers.
The report also says that highly skilled people generate large amounts of knowledge, comparatively, and that “investing in excellence” would therefore tend to benefit all. This is similar to Stephen’s statement that “they are the primary generators of wealth in a society.” But I wonder about the distinction between knowledge and wealth here. I don’t believe that people who are not academic high performers are necessarily a “load” supported by the so-called “knowledge producers.” As Amerloc points out, plumbers and electricians might have something to say about that.
Throughout my career as a school teacher, the message from taxpayers has repeatedly emphasized that it is we who are the “load,” as they have supported gutting our public employee retirement system over the last 10 years.
As I indicated at the end of my post, many of the economic elite have wreaked havoc on the environment and social supports for disadvantaged people through regressive tax policies, corporate greed, ill-advised military adventures, zero-tolerance criminal sentencing guidelines, and a totally broken health care system here in the US. A lot of what passes for progress is nothing more than self-serving greed, and it costs everyone plenty.
That said, Stephen, you point out that statistical averages can reveal social and economic inequalities. I agree; we have a great deal of that here in the US. You say, “Eventually, high achievers in the United States will have to come to grips with the fact that they carry a larger load than their counterparts in other OECD nations, and that unlike nations currently building their economies, their relative load is *increasing*.” I think this is the reason why they are pushing so hard on the achievement gap in schools here – trying to bring the “bottom” up – and bridge the economic inequality gap without making big sacrifices themselves.
This is just an aside triggered by this statement…..”Now the thing about high performers is, they are the primary generators of wealth in a society.”
My father in his work with the US Dept of Ag and in Economics often met and knew students that returned to developing nations having been trained in the US. So my mother and father attended many receptions, galas, events with the likes of names I’m not dropping, but I could. But during times when Ag policies and world economics were pretty interesting, i grew up. Mom likes to tell an interesting thing that happened in Washington. Two grad students that had gone on into diplomatic positions from two far flung world places were being introduced in a reception, both of them known to our family from work with my father. One was from South America, Brazil I think, the other Africa. So the one said to the other (the one from South America speaking out first in a kind of manner I recall well) “In my country 1% supports 99% in our economy.”
On hearing this the other, who I can see so well too(as he was someone I dearly loved) from an African country now reconfigured responded, “That is so interesting to me because I have the opposite, for it is that in my country that 99% support the 1%.”
Often I reflect on my sage mother for preserving the exchange and think on these two for basically revealing an insight into something that seems to thrive even to this day.
thoughtful post and comments! I think the exchange is an excellent example of how, using statistics, people can support their own opinions and agendas! That takes us right back to the ‘so what?’ question. Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your story; it added a wonderful perspective to the posts and comments for me!
Post a Comment