Tuesday, December 21, 2010

PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know

A lengthy post but interesting. Below is a breakdown of the three-yearly OECD's PISA results by country and some by race. What the author is trying to illustrate is what no one wants to admit -that race actually plays a big part in the intelligence of countries. For example, New Zealand whites scored 541 on reading in 2009, 16 points above American whites. But the Kiwis’ national scores are dragged down somewhat by the indigenous Maori and by Pacific Islander immigrants, who do more for the current competitiveness of New Zealand’s national rugby team than for the future competitiveness of its 21st Century economy. Finland is also a conundrum - except when you realise that they haven't fallen for the multi-cultural myth that other countries have (yet). But then you don't have to tell us that - we see it in our daily lives...

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Every three years, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], the rich country’s club, announces the results of its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These are tests of school achievement for 15-year-olds in the 34 OECD countries, plus 31 other countries or regions.

And, following the announcement, there is always wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the U.S. is doomed by the failures of the U.S. educational system relative to the rest of the world.

This time, for example, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared: "This is an absolute wake-up call for America. … we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education." (Investing = spending more on teacher salaries).

Similarly, Chester Finn in the Wall Street Journal compared the release of the latest test scores to 1957, when the Soviet Union shocked the U.S. by putting Sputnik into orbit.

And the New York Times headlined Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators.
I wasn’t stunned. But then I’m not an educator.

It took me two days of looking through the voluminous PISA results to create the simple graph below. It shows what the Great and Good don’t want you to know about the 2009 PISA results: When broken down by ethnicity, American students did reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came.

In this chart, I’ve depicted American ethnic groups in red to show where they fall relative to other countries, which are colored to reflect their dominant populations.


As my chart shows:

  • Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
  • White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
  • Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
  • African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.
Here’s my bar chart of American scores by ethnicity. Interestingly, American Hispanics did significantly better in reading in 2009 than they had done in science in 2006 and in math in 2003.


Why does my second graph have to compare reading scores from 2009 to science scores from 2006 and math scores from 2003?
 
Because PISA and the U.S. government apparently conspire to keep the ethnic breakdowns of American scores a secret, except for whichever subject is the main theme of that year’s PISA (reading in 2009, science in 2006, and math in 2003). Thus the only American scores broken down by ethnicity yet released for 2009 were for reading.
 
Yet all three subjects are tested each year, and scores for all subjects are released in mind-numbing detail cross-tabbed for every conceivable factor … except race.
 
Considering the hundreds of pages of data PISA releases on its website on all three tests for 2009, it’s ludicrous (yet unsurprising) that PISA won’t publish the ethnic breakdowns it has collected. The words "Hispanic" or "Latino" don’t appear anywhere in the otherwise endless PISA 2009 data.
 
Instead, PISA conveyed the ethnic data confidentially to the U.S. governmentwhich then released the racial breakdowns for just the reading test on its National Center for Educational Statistics website (PDF).
 
The goal of this byzantine process is evidently to make it more inconvenient for crass outsiders and possible critics to grasp the patterns underlying the scores.
 
Where’s WikiLeaks when you really need it?
 
A few caveats about the strong performance of the U.S.:
  • First: in 2009, the U.S. did slightly better in reading than in science, and moderately better in science than in math. So, my top graph, showing the 2009 reading results, puts America’s best foot forward in what ought to be a three-legged race. But of course I can’t show you PISA scores by ethnicity for 2009 in science and math because they are, apparently, federal secrets.
  • Second: my top chart does not offer a true apples-to-apples comparison of whites in America to whites in other traditionally white countries. For example, New Zealand whites scored 541 on reading in 2009, 16 points above American whites. But the Kiwis’ national scores are dragged down somewhat by the indigenous Maori and by Pacific Islander immigrants, who do more for the current competitiveness of New Zealand’s national rugby team than for the future competitiveness of its 21st Century economy.
(By the way, unlike Arne Duncan’s Department of Education, New Zealand’s Ministry of Education has released its 2009 scores by ethnicity not just for reading, but also for math—Kiwi whites averaged an impressive 537 in 2009—and science—an excellent 555. This is how we can conclude that responsibility for stonewalling the release of two-thirds of American scores by race is the choice of the U.S. government, rather than of PISA. This suggests that a citizen might be able to use the Freedom of Information Act to compel the Department of Education to release all the PISA data by ethnicity. Or maybe some newly-elected Tea Party congressman can make an issue of it.)

  • Third: America pays royally for the results we do get. We spend more per student than any country in the world, other than Luxembourg, a small, rich tax haven. We spend about fifty percent more per student than Finland does.
What about China and India?

Rich, bustling Shanghai is not likely to be representative of China as a whole. Yet, Shanghai might not be the highest scoring part of China, either. Traditionally, the top scorers on the Imperial mandarin exams as well as on the current national college admission test tend to come from farther to the southeast, especially from Fujian province on the coast across from Taiwan. The Fujianese are the central component of the Overseas Chinese who dominate the economies of Southeast Asia.

The other gigacountry, India, is often lumped with China by American pundits like Tom Friedman. India certainly has a large number of highly intelligent people, but major questions remain about the Indian masses. India has never participated in PISA.

However, a version of the similar TIMSS international math test was given to a sample of Indian students in the states of Orissa and Rajasthan, as reported in a 2009 paper by Jishnu Das of the World Bank and Tristan Zajonc of Harvard, India Shining and Bharat Drowning: Comparing Two Indian States to the Worldwide Distribution in Mathematics Achievement. On average, the Indians performed poorly: "These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist." Note, though, that India was the second-most internally unequal country on TIMSS, behind only South Africa.

Finally, what about Finland, which always does very well on PISA? (Although Finland only scored above average when it participated in TIMSS in 1999.)

Finns tend to be both patriotic and public spirited, so it might not be hard to talk most Finnish teens into giving a solid effort on a two-hour PISA test by rationally explaining to them how that would be good for everybody.

Or, maybe Finns, who rank with Icelanders as the most northerly advanced culture on Earth, really are smarter (although IQ tests suggest they are about average for Western Europeans).

Of course, one obvious factor contributing to Finland’s high national scores: Finland benefits from not having its scores undermined by immigrants from low-scoring cultures. (Yet).

And maybe Finnish schools are better. But it’s noteworthy that American education reporters who have taken junkets to Finland since the PISA tests began a decade ago report back that Finnish schools are the laidback opposite of the pressure cooker cram schools popular in the Northeast Asian countries that score similarly to Finland.

It may be that, enjoying a non-diverse population, Finnish educators have been able to fine-tune their system to meet the particular needs of Finnish students.

That would be a major contrast to the United States. Here, the needs of low-scoring black and Hispanic students obsess educators and pundits and inspire a great deal of double-think and mendacity. But no-one has any idea what to do about it, especially in the one-size-fits-all culture of the government school industry.

Bottom line: Keeping the U.S. globally competitive turns out to depend less upon our endlessly-discussed need to "fix the schools “and more upon the need to "fix the demographic trends".

But this topic currently unmentionable in public debate and, for many in public life, literally unthinkable.

It might even lead to Americans doing something about immigration policy.

Read more here

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