Stephen Krashen: Our PISA Scores are Just Right

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1. teachingeconomist says:

   December 9, 2012 at 10:05 am

   It would be interesting to replicate this study at the other end by comparing the scores of the bottom quarter across countries.

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2. Eduardo Andere says:

   December 9, 2012 at 10:23 am

   Well, may be Mr. Krashen is right! The analysis below may help to buttress many people’s view why American education isn’t so bad after all:

   The education of Nobel Prize winners

   By Eduardo Andere M .

   The 2012 Nobel Prize edition is over. Most Nobel’s awards throughout history have been assigned to people of a country, whose pre-university education is deemed, by the fans of league tables, mediocre or deficient.

   In the international league table OECD’s PISA game, the US is located at around the mean result. For example, in the latest published PISA results, 15 to 16 years old American students ranked somewhere between the 21 and 29 position in mathematics out of 34 OECD countries. Mexico and Chile are tied at the bottom. Finland and South Korea, meanwhile, top the list. So, the U.S. is closer to the bottom than it is to the top.

   Most disappointing is the fact—the critique goes—that US pre-university education is among the most expensive in the world. While Americans spent in 2007 (latest published data) $ 129,000 per elementary, middle and high school student, the Finns spent 87 000, and the South Koreans 80 000 (OECD 2010). This makes each PISA point cost the U.S., $87, while Finland and South Korea pay 53 and 49 respectively.

   Let’s see what happens at the other end of the educational and knowledge pyramid. The Nobel Prize is one epitome of the educational, scientific and technological apparatus. The award is given in five categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics and peace. In many cases an award is given to several winners, so there are more winners than prizes. In 2012, for example, there are 10 winners and five awards: two in physics, two in chemistry, two in medicine, two in economics, one in literature and one, peace award, to the European Union.

   Of the nine human-recipient awards, five are American by birth, one is Moroccan, one Japanese, one British, and one more, Chinese (literature). And of the eight who have university affiliation (because the literature prize has not so) six are affiliated to U.S. universities.

   Historically, from 1901 through 2012, 555 awards have been granted to 863 people, of which 246 are US nationals. From a total of 620 university-related laureates 321 are affiliated to US universities. And if one looks at the top ten universities with Nobel laureates nine of them are American.

   China, whose Shanghai province and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, obtained outstanding results in PISA 2009, has a total of 10 Nobel winners in history. Finland, South Korea and Singapore, the top countries in basic and high school education, have earned three, one and zero Nobel Prizes.

   If one delves deeper into science, technology and innovation, the United States shines with most of the production in all three areas. And within the realm of business success in the knowledge era, all, or almost all star companies in the 21st century, which permeate the lives of all of us, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Facebook, Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wikipedia, YouTube, PayPal, and Twitter, among others, are of U.S. origin.

   So, what is going on? If the Nobel contest is the point of a knowledge iceberg, the so-called quality education assessment of students, schools and teachers is missing something. How come the shooting stars of basic education pale in higher leagues?

   Click to access the_nobel_prize_winners.pdf

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3. mtomas3 says:

   December 9, 2012 at 3:14 pm

   This debate whether “American” students are middle of the pack, higher, or “just right” would be simply comical if it weren’t for its insidious message about what constitutes “American” standing or, for that matter, other “countries and economies” in the education of children.
   In short, this is the message; Levine thinks the most privileged students are still doing less than students in other more “advanced” countries, Krashen thinks that looking at privileged students and doing a “better” analysis shows that privileged “American” students are “just right”. The overall message? The education of privileged children throughout the world is an appropriate measure of the “goodness” of the education system among “countries and economies”.

   It is easy to dismiss this “debate” as a useless exercise if it were not for what it tells about “American” intellectuals (i.e.,privileged, mostly, White “educators) and what they consider important in issues of educating a multicultural pluralistic population of youth in the U.S. compared, in the main (but not all) with mostly homogeneous privileged students in other “countries and economies”. PISA scores? “Suburban achievement gaps”? This is what “world class” educators concern themselves about? Did anyone actually learn anything from this last 4 year exercise in privatizing public education based on the fallacy of standardized testing as a measure of an education and the social worth of a truly educated society?

   I am led to think that “progressive” educators are simply poseurs for the pretense of education for all that are in reality perpetuating a system of education focused on “enlightening” the privileged few.

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4. Megan Pledger says:

   December 9, 2012 at 3:57 pm

   Some countries, including New Zealand, don’t allow illegal immigrants to go to school. For NZ it’s no big problem because very few people get here illegally given we are an island deep in the South Pacific. However, it makes comparisons with the USA on PISA a bit apples and oranges given that illegal immigrants, who count for PISA in the USA, are often English Langauge Learners.

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5. patbuoncristiani says:

   December 9, 2012 at 4:41 pm

   An interesting perspective but I have some sympathy with the previous comments. Putting aside moral issues of equality of opportunity, with the rapid rise of populous nations we cannot put all our eggs in the baskets of the top SES quartile. I think it also neglects to address the per capita cost of education. The USA is one of the highest spending nations on education and our PISA scores do not reflect this. I am also troubled by what I view as a dangerously common attitude. While USA students may perform poorly on the whole in PISA mathematics, for example, they demonstrate high levels of self confidence. I don’t like national generalizations, but I have heard far too many people state that America is the most free, most advanced, most morally correct nation on earth. What I have described as the ‘curse of riches’ makes many of us too inward looking and self congratulatory. There are many of us who find it simply too hard to admit that other nations may be doing things better than us, and so we seek to defend and justify and question the methodologies of comparison rather than learn from outside our own boundaries. I think this may be changing. I hope so.That said, I agree wholeheartedly that PISA needs to be examined more deeply. it should not be seen as yet another league table. It is filled with rich data and information about many of the more subtle influences on achievement than the actual scores on the tests.

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   • ME says:

     December 24, 2012 at 1:02 pm

     @ Pat – “There are many of us who find it simply too hard to admit that other nations may be doing things better than us, and so we seek to defend and justify and question the methodologies of comparison rather than learn from outside our own boundaries. I think this may be changing. I hope so.”

     And what is it that other countries do better? Every classroom around the world is similar – there are teachers facilitating and students learning. In the Asian countries, teachers switch classrooms while the students stay. These Asian countries rely heavily on direct instruction and drill and kill methods. Finland’s classrooms look much like ours, of course, without the standardized testing. The one difference in Finland that is very appealing to me is their vocational track in high school. They don’t pretend that all kids should go to college like we do here in the U.S. In fact, I just wonder how much of the agenda, to send ALL of our kids to college, has to do with the fact that they represent future profits for both public and private enterprises.

     The bottom line is this – with a little bit of research, from both sides of the educational reform argument, it is clear that schools and teachers only play a part in a child’s education. What we do at school only reinforces and builds upon the motivations of children that were developed long before they stepped in our classroom.

     The argument of the “effective teacher” is a sham. It has been built in order to attack public schools. There is nothing “better than us” in the sense that someone in another country is doing something in the classroom that we are not, and that what they are doing would “fix us”.

     Socioeconomic status drives education. It is the engine that produces the numbers we see in every measure. And even the outliers that we may see, schools and/or teachers that produce high test scores, either here in the U.S. or abroad, (given the number of high poverty students), does NOT guarantee success. I have a hard time trusting any standardized test outcomes, especially those of high-stakes state standardized tests. There is so much prepping, coaching, and downright cheating, high-stakes tests in America are meaningless.

     If we would fix our high child poverty rate, instill a respect for education among all people, and provide a safe environment at home and at school, we would do more to fix our schools than any reformy plan.

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     • patbuoncristiani says:

       February 5, 2013 at 12:48 am

       Finland’s teacher education programs look nothing like ours. It is easier to get into medical school than into primary teaching. In Australia – the other country I am familiar with – the entry requirements for education courses at university continue to fall. I was deeply disturbed by the literacy levels of some of the teachers in the school I led in the USA. I was asked to proof a paper being submitted for a M.Ed. at a reputable university. It was awful and that person now has a doctorate in education. Teach for America and Troops to Teachers place minimally prepared adults in front of children, not professionally trained teachers. Is it any wonder we do not trust teachers to control curriculum, methodology and assessments in the ways in which Finnish teachers are trusted? In Singapore, 10% “white time” is provided to all teachers to enable them to meet, talk, think, prepare their teaching. It’s too easy to push aside Asian schools as ‘drill and kill’. That misrepresents the diversity among schools. It also fails to acknowledge the very nature of the PISA assessments which (unlike TIMMS and PIRLS) require students to apply their learning to new situations. Simple rote learning through drilling will not facilitate that kind of learning.

6. Rudolf Rassendyll says:

   November 28, 2013 at 6:04 pm

   I agree, the US PISA scores aren’t bad. Neither are they all that good. More shocking: the comment in the interim report, that of all participating countries, only in the U. S. is there a decline in overall evidence of learned knowledge and so on. The real failure here: The normal colleges and their product. An EdD from Teacher’s College should be grounds for dismissal; a PhD in Educational whatever from NYU should be considered criminal. From the ’60s on, these weenies have been foisting mediocrity and bad learning on American kids. The “conservative” normal-college weenies are no better than the liberals.

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