December 11, 2012

New TIMSS and PIRLS test results

There are new results out from two international school achievement tests:

The U.S. average mathematics score at grade 4 (541)
was higher than the international TIMSS scale average,
which is set at 500.
• At grade 4, the United States was among the top 15
education systems in mathematics (8 education systems
had higher averages and 6 were not measurably
different) and scored higher, on average, than 42
education systems.
•  The 8 education systems with average mathematics
scores above the U.S. score were Singapore, Korea,
Hong Kong-CHN, Chinese Taipei-CHN, Japan,
Northern Ireland-GBR, North Carolina-USA, and
Belgium (Flemish)-BEL. ...
• At grade 8, the United States was among the top 24
education systems in mathematics (11 education
systems had higher averages and 12 were not
measurably different) and scored higher, on average,
than 32 education systems.
• The 11 education systems with average mathematics
scores above the U.S. score were Korea, Singapore,
Chinese Taipei-CHN, Hong Kong-CHN, Japan,
Massachusetts-USA, Minnesota-USA, the Russian
Federation, North Carolina-USA, Quebec-CAN, and
Indiana-USA.
At grade 8, the United States was among the top
23 education systems in science (12 education
systems had higher averages and 10 were
not measurably different) and scored higher,
on average, than 33 education systems.
• The 12 education systems with average science scores
above the U.S. score were Singapore, MassachusettsUSA,
Chinese Taipei-CHN, Korea, Japan, MinnesotaUSA,
Finland, Alberta-CAN, Slovenia, the Russian
Federation, Colorado-USA, and Hong Kong-CHN. 

For example, here is 8th grade math:
Grade 8
Education systemAverage score
TIMSS scale average500
Korea, Rep. of613
Singapore1611
Chinese Taipei-CHN609
Hong Kong-CHN586
Japan570
Russian Federation1539
Israel2516
Finland514
United States1509
England-GBR3507
Hungary505
Australia505
Slovenia505
Lithuania4502
Italy498
New Zealand488
Kazakhstan487
Sweden484
Ukraine479
Norway475
Armenia467
Romania458
United Arab Emirates456
Turkey452
Lebanon449
Malaysia440
Georgia4,5431
Thailand427
Macedonia, Rep. of6426
Tunisia425
Chile416
Iran, Islamic Rep. of6415
Qatar6410
Bahrain6409
Jordan6406
Palestinian Nat'l Auth.6404
Saudi Arabia6394
Indonesia6386
Syrian Arab Republic6380
Morocco7371
Oman6366
Ghana7331
Benchmarking education systems
Massachusetts-USA1,4561
Minnesota-USA4545
North Carolina-USA2,4537
Quebec-CAN532
Indiana-USA1,4522
Colorado-USA4518
Connecticut-USA1,4518
Florida-USA1,4513
Ontario-CAN1512
Alberta-CAN1505
California-USA1,4493
Dubai-UAE478
Alabama-USA4466
Abu Dhabi-UAE449
△ Average score is higher than U.S. average score.
▽ Average score is lower than U.S. average score.
There are a bunch of different tables like this for different subjects in different grades, so don't take this one all that seriously. I just plunked it in because it was handy.

Here's 8th grade science:

Grade 8
Education systemAverage score
TIMSS scale average500
Singapore1590
Chinese Taipei-CHN564
Korea, Rep. of560
Japan558
Finland552
Slovenia543
Russian Federation1542
Hong Kong-CHN535
England-GBR2533
United States1525
Hungary522
Australia519
Israel3516
Lithuania4514
New Zealand512
Sweden509
Italy501
Ukraine501
Norway494
Kazakhstan490
Turkey483
Iran, Islamic Rep. of474
Romania465
United Arab Emirates465
Chile461
Bahrain452
Thailand451
Jordan449
Tunisia439
Armenia437
Saudi Arabia436
Malaysia426
Syrian Arab Republic426
Palestinian Nat'l Auth.420
Georgia4,5420
Oman420
Qatar419
Macedonia, Rep. of407
Lebanon406
Indonesia406
Morocco376
Ghana6306
Benchmarking education systems
Massachusetts-USA1,4567
Minnesota-USA4553
Alberta-CAN1546
Colorado-USA4542
Indiana-USA1,4533
Connecticut-USA1,4532
North Carolina-USA3,4532
Florida-USA1,4530
Ontario-CAN1521
Quebec-CAN520
California-USA1,4499
Alabama-USA4485
Dubai-UAE485
Abu Dhabi-UAE461
△ Average score is higher than U.S. average score.
▽ Average score is lower than U.S. average score.


I have no idea how representative the samples are, or how hard the students felt like trying.

These things are a lot of work to set up. Think of how hard it would be to coordinate all over the world in all these different languages. Then try to think about all the things that could go wrong if you were in charge. It's pretty daunting.

Looking at all 53 education systems that participated in PIRLS at grade 4 (i.e., both countries and other education systems), the United States was among the top 13 education systems in average reading scores. The five education systems that had higher average scores were Hong Kong-CHN, FloridaUSA, the Russian Federation, Finland, and Singapore. Seven education systems, Northern Ireland-GBR, Denmark, Croatia, Chinese Taipei-CHN, Ontario-CAN, Ireland, and England-GBR, had average scores not measurably different from the U.S. average score. The United States had higher average reading scores than 40 education systems.

Education system Overall reading average scale score
   PIRLS scale average 500
Hong Kong-CHN1 571
Russian Federation 568
Finland 568
Singapore2 567
Northern Ireland-GBR3 558
United States2 556
Denmark2 554
Croatia2 553
Chinese Taipei-CHN 553
Ireland 552
England-GBR3 552
Canada2 548
Netherlands3 546
Czech Republic 545
Sweden 542
Italy 541
Germany 541
Israel1 541
Portugal 541
Hungary 539
Slovak Republic 535
Bulgaria 532
New Zealand 531
Slovenia 530
Austria 529
Lithuania2,4 528
Australia 527
Poland 526


France 520
Spain 513
Norway5 507
Belgium (French)-BEL2,3 506
Romania 502
Georgia4,6 488
Malta 477
Trinidad and Tobago 471
Azerbaijan2,6 462
Iran, Islamic Rep. of 457
Colombia 448
United Arab Emirates 439
Saudi Arabia 430
Indonesia 428
Qatar2 425
Oman7 391
Morocco8 310
Benchmarking education systems
Florida-USA1,4 569
Ontario-CAN2 552
Alberta-CAN2 548
Quebec-CAN 538
Andalusia-ESP 515
Dubai-UAE 476
Maltese-MLT 457
Dhabi-UAE 424


December 10, 2012

Education Realist responds to Unz essay on college admissions

Education Realist has a long post up entitled "An Alternative College Admissions System." Here's a sample:
….the overrepresentation of Asians is explained more by their dominance in GPA, as opposed to test scores. And that’s harder to fix. It’s easy enough to tell white kids with high test scores to go to test prep and maximize their scores, but by junior year, the GPA damage has been done. 
What that means: no more room for, say, the idiosyncratic white boy who scores 2250/34 on the SAT/ACT, scored 4s and 5s in 7 AP tests, got 780, 730, and 690 on the US History, English Lit, and Math 2c, but whose weighted GPA is a 3.8. 
So just raise the GPA, you say. White parents need to raise their expectations for their own kids. Hahahahaha. This is me laughing. Unless the white kid is ruthlessly driven and competitive on his own merit, parental pressure as a means of raising his or her grades to the degree needed to compete with Asians is a non-starter.

Okay, but this isn't to say that white parents shouldn't push farther out on the diminishing returns curve than they are doing right now on average.
Amy Chua isn’t kidding. If a white parent tried to drive her kid the way Amy Chua did hers, the kid would end up in therapy, and the therapist would make the parent stop. Asian parenting techniques are abusive in white people world. Full stop. (What disgusts me most about Chua’s story is not her own behavior, as she doesn’t know any better, but that her white husband stood by and let her abuse her daughters. But then, I’m a white parent.) 
Not only does this difference between white and Asian cultural expectations lead to lower GPAs for whites, but smart white kids with B averages are then denied access to AP classes (in most Asian schools, access to AP is strictly limited by GPA), which put even a lower ceiling on their GPA. 
And finally, understand that those Asian good grades do not necessarily translate to a well-educated student. As my primary second job, I teach enrichment at a private educational company (aka, an Asian cram school), which over seven years adds up to a lot of Asian high school students. I love them. They’re great kids. But my experience has taught me to question any straightforward comparison between white and Asian academic credentials. 
All of my enrichment kids, as sophomores, are taking honors English and pre-calc. Maybe 10% of them can reliably read a complex text and offer an interesting or informed analysis without referring to Wikipedia and repeating verbatim what they read there, and in seven years and probably 300 kids I have never once had a student who could explain the derivation of the quadratic formula (that is, the generalized case for completing the square). 
I also teach an AP US History prep course every year, at two different locations, to a dozen students per class. All but a few kids each year will have taken six months of APUSH by the time my class starts, and fewer than a quarter of them have ever known who wrote the Federalist papers, or the most important achievement of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when the class begins. Very few of them can even make a stab at naming the presidents in order, or even identify any of the “forgettable” presidents. These are kids attending public schools with some of the highest SAT averages in the country, more than a few of them topping out at 2400. [Northern California]
In comparison, I’ve tutored and taught (in public schools) a lot of bright white kids and their awareness and retention of their own education, including the above benchmark questions, is far superior, on average. There are, of course, white soulless swotters and creative inquisitive Korean eccentrics. But the betting goes the other way. 
So, for the grade manipulation that goes on at the bottom end of the scale, and the cultural skew that goes on at the top end of the scale, grades are just flatly useless. Unless or until we move to a system in which grades are taken out of teachers’ hands and determined by outside standardized tests, grades must be eliminated from any truly meritocratic admissions process. End rant. 
(Two points before I go on: 1) bright Hispanic and black kids are also more likely to retain their knowledge than Asian kids, but they are rarer and are going to write their own tickets regardless; 2) just as Asian test performance may overstate their abilities, black test performance may understate their abilities because the tests focus too much on abstraction and generalized situations. That’s another reason I want a much more competitive test market, to see if perhaps we can find a more meaningful way to test the bottom half of the ability spectrum. )

The real money would likely be for new tests for the high end, however. White people in Park Slope would like some objective test that shows their kids really are as amazing as they think they are.

For 45 years, people have wanted a test that closes The Gap. But, blacks really aren't going to be that big of a deal in the America of the Future. 

The future of testing will arrive when somebody comes up with a test that Asians can't crush whites on. 

In theory, blacks and whites could wind up on the same side on testing reform. Some clever Park Slope SWPL might someday come up with a new test that cuts down on Asian advantage over whites and then push it through because blacks do relatively better on it than on old tests. Recruit a third-generation Asian-American to push it as well, and it just might work.

Barone: "The End of the Wave"

A popular idea right now is that amnesty wouldn't cause more illegal immigration in the future because Mexicans are done coming to the U.S. (and don't even think about the possibility of large flows from other countries). Michael Barone makes a sophisticated (i.e., Sailerian) case for the new conventional wisdom in National Review:
The End of the Wave  
The northward surge of Mexicans into the United States may never resume. 
By Michael Barone

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? 
... There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I’ve found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.
Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end. 
For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.  

I would take from this history of elite failure to predict the future of immigration a precautionary principle: There are a lot of different peoples in this world, and we don't know what any one of them might get up to, so we need to be prudent and protect ourselves. Instead, the failures of elite forecasting have led elites to double down on the idea that policy should be based upon a philosophy of Hope for the Best, Come What May.
Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castañeda notes in his recent book, Mañana Forever? Its economy is growing faster than ours.

I reviewed Castaneda's book and he emphasizes how much Mexican material desires outrun any possible fulfillment for most Mexicans within the borders of Mexico. In some other Latin American countries, middle class people are content to live in apartments and take public transportation. Mexicans, in contrast, hate sharing a wall or a subway car with other Mexicans. The Mexican Dream is a single family house with a V8 vehicle or two or three parked out front. Mexicans love sprawl.
And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered. 
You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four “sand states” — California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida — and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.  
These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards. 
These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares. 

I call this Convergence. Letting in tens of millions of Mexicans has made the U.S. more like Mexico economically, which is what Mexicans have been trying to get away from. They don't come to American because they love the Declaration of Independence's propositions, they come to live the Exurban Dream, to emit a lot of greenhouse gases. A decade ago, the Bush Administration announced at the 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership a war on racist old downpayments to facilitate that. Now, we are out of money, but how much of a reckoning has there been? Barone has largely adopted my analysis of What Went Wrong, but how many others in the press are completely clueless?
We can see further evidence in last month’s Pew research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.  

The most extreme fertility is among newly arrived immigrant women, who have been saving up their babies to have them on American soil. Less immigration knocks hell out of fertility among illegal immigrants. But, that means there are a lot of women in Mexico who have been doing a lot of saving up of babies over the last 4 years. An upturn in the American economy could bring them and their future anchor babies back in a hurry. The notion that Mexican women can't delay fertility for a few years, the way women in more advanced countries have done since the 1970s, seems naive.

Keep in mind also that the Drug War in northern Mexico since 2007 has made the traditional overland routes less attractive, especially for Central Americans (e.g., the large massacres in Mexico of Central Americans heading for the U.S.). The Drug War won't last forever.
Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 — one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 — one generation.  

The 1965 terminus for black migration reflects two changes: improvements for blacks in the South and the beginning of the black destruction of their own Northern neighborhoods through rioting and crime.

Similarly, Hispanic illegal immigration contributed hugely to the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, so maybe Mexicans won't find it in their interest to move to Mexico Norte anymore.
The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don’t think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are other countries out there in this big world gearing up to send vast numbers into our land, and would find Amnesty II a big encouragement.

Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing, have made disastrous immigration decisions in the past, and that they are loathe to admit their mistakes on the grounds that talking about what they did wrong could offend the busboys.

All this history suggests prudence, but the conventional wisdom is that we should make another Bet the Country decision based on tea leaf readings.