With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai ”” an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country ”” are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
I trust no one is surprised. “A wake up call”? To whom? Perhaps we’ll succeed by paying students to do school work? Or by dissing males so that they are no longer willing to compete? Or by allowing marijuana to leak out in large quantities into the adolescent public from legal “dispensaries?” Or by encouraging the young to spend their days on line or on the cell phone or the play station? Hello? Hello? How quickly decadence goes from a tasty side dish to a whole meal. Larry
Well, Larry, whatever we do, we don’t want to spend money to do it. The market, with its American Idol and reality TV programs, seems to be what the people want.
RE: ” . . . we don’t want to spend money to do it.”
Hah hah. [i]That’s[/i] obviously not the case.
The problem with many of these standardized international tests is that the USA will sample a cross section of ALL our students whereas other countries China included will sample only the brightest and best. I wonder what the outcome would be if we sampled only our brightest and best. I suspect we would not be ranked so low.
I wonder what kind of scores they would get from just home-schooled 15year-olds.
But John we have thrown money at this system, fortune upon fortune, without significant effect – because money is not the issue. The issue is the parental expectations and the students accepting these as their own. I know Chinese students and their families; their expectations are VERY high and so competition is BRUTAL. But they succeed. We, on the other hand, use the same basketball, but lower the net so everyone can score. Larry
“But they succeed.”
Well, not so fast —
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/12/02/what-is-a-college-degree-worth-in-china/high-test-scores-low-ability
But #7, they DO succeed, only not in the traditional ways. They graduate from high school, or not, live at home, parents pay, go from job to job. find cheap easy sex, beget children, score drugs at will, go to junior college, get another job, and, in the end, find ways for society to get them what they want. Or they go to college, get high grades because of grade inflation, graduate, live at home, get a job that makes good enough money, have children which they let grow as they grew, continue to smoke marijuana, and lead aimless, pointless lives marked by shopping and more shopping and fads and agendas, but at last, having no need for upward mobility but needing more and more money, dedicate all to that end, This is success. You need only go into a shopping mall.
All of this Knapsack, all of this is being done by people who have nothing greater than their own desires, to hope for. The present depression has only made clearer what we all should know, that the broad range of American life has lost hope. Larry