The fact that other people and the media might make the erroneous argument that the only factor in test outcomes is the system of education is misleading, if that in fact occurs.
Huh? Please reread what you wrote with fresh eyes. Is this what you really intend to argue?
I've never once seen any commentary or analysis which focused on these international comparisons address issues other than school policy. Not once did I see a commentator note that the demographics of one nation's study body has a positive or negative influence on these test scores. They don't do this because they don't want to be called Hitler.
The accounts of education policy specialists proposing fact-finding missions to Finland and Singapore, proposals to adopt the systems of successful nations are legion. Here are three such accounts.
The New Republic reports:
In comparison to the United States and many other industrialized nations, the Finns have implemented a radically different model of educational reform-based on a balanced curriculum and professionalization, not testing. Not only do Finnish educational authorities provide students with far more recess than their U.S. counterparts-75 minutes a day in Finnish elementary schools versus an average of 27 minutes in the U.S.-but they also mandate lots of arts and crafts, more learning by doing, rigorous standards for teacher certification, higher teacher pay, and attractive working conditions. This is a far cry from the U.S. concentration on testing in reading and math since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, which has led school districts across the country, according to a survey by the Center on Education Policy, to significantly narrow their curricula. And the Finns' efforts are paying off: In December, the results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam in reading, math, and science given every three years since 2000 to approximately 5,000 15-year-olds per nation around the world, revealed that, for the fourth consecutive time, Finnish students posted stellar scores. The United States, meanwhile, lagged in the middle of the pack.
You see, it was the SYSTEM which is responsible for the outcomes.
Here is an Australian report from
The Conversation:
It was fun while it lasted Finland, but we're going cold on you. We thought your schools had the secret but our new infatuation is with Asian school systems.
The Prime Minister seems to agree. The government has set a new goal that would see Australia get into the top five schools systems in the world, currently dominated by East Asian "sites". The recent OECD report Education at a Glance 2012 provides yet another international comparative leaderboard over which to agonise.
Aiming high and copying "what works" intuitively seems like a good idea . . .
Again a focus on the SYSTEM - just copy what works "over there" and apply it "here" and presto-chango our students will soar.
And here from the education "specialists" the
National Education Association:
One wonders what we might accomplish as a nation if we could finally set aside what appears to be our de facto commitment to inequality, so profoundly at odds with our rhetoric of equity, and put the millions of dollars spent continually arguing and litigating into building a high-quality education system for all children. To imagine how that might be done, one can look at nations that started with very little and purposefully built highly productive and equitable systems, sometimes almost from scratch, in the space of only two to three decades.
You see, it's the system of education which is entirely the factor which is responsible for the outcomes.
However if the data is not available and you only include one variable then it may not give a more accurate measure of how the system performs, therefore the comparison has little use.
If you control for race and observe educational outcomes and you notice a disparity you're already better off than you were before when the disparity was hidden in the average.
Now you can't argue that the US education SYSTEM is producing bad outcomes because you have to explain why US white students do so well against many European white students. Secondly you have to explain why in an integrated school system white students outperform minority students when there is equal access to the curricula.
What you're doing is tossing out a word salad but you're not putting, to mix my metaphors here, any meat on them bones. You've just asserted that there is no use to a comparison which doesn't give you an accurate assessment of the state of the system when you control for only one variable, in this case race. This statement implies that you believe that you actually get a more accurate assessment of the system when no variable are controlled - just a straight across comparison of international results with no controls applied. That's a nonsensical position -
less clarity leads to clearer results. Huh?
By excluding all races other than whites in the U.S for instance, many factors will also be affected, income level being the most obvious but others can also be very important. If, for instance minorities are overly represented among lower level jobs and that leads to lower test scores the results will be skewed because this lower income level will be excluded from U.S data but not other countries.
Bad example. Family income and educational outcomes are not independent of each other. Lower family income doesn't lead to lower test scores:
This phenomenon was at the core of the recent Supreme Court case Univ. of Texas vs. Fisher - the Univ. of Texas found that there weren't enough upper class Hispanic and black students being admitted because they scored lower than their white peers and thus couldn't be admitted via the Top 10% plan and so had to compete for open admission and were getting skunked by poor white students who outperformed them.
In the graph above, the white students from the poorest families were outperforming black students from wealthy families.
I am not "skeptical" of Asian students performance on the test I was merely pointing out that you do not have the data required to make that argument.
You mean like you don't have the authority to write that gasoline is detonated within an engine and thus creates the power that drives a car unless you append voluminous reports and videos of how gasoline is burned and how an engine works?
Look in the mirror and you'll see pedantism staring back at you.
Look, if you're ignorant about Asian academic performance, that's fine, but your ignorance about the topic doesn't put a burden onto me wherein I have to surmount the hurdles you put in place anymore than someone else's ignorance about how the internal combustion engine works puts a burden on you to validate the basic physics of the process and which is well understood by everyone who talks intelligently about how IC engines work.
I doubt getting past even the first step with hard facts is possible at this point. So people can use this bad comparison (without even admitting how flawed it is) or they can simply admit that the data is not there to make an appropriate comparison along these lines.
You're not the first creationist I've engaged with so your argumentative tactics are old-hat - this is merely that gambit of the ever escalating standards. There is always some piece of information which you will desire and until that information is provided you will reject the hypothesis or conclusion. Then when that information is provided you will find another nit to pick and reject the hypothesis or conclusion.
Instead of just comparing one race however it would give more insight to see how different school systems perform with all races and cultures.
This is impossible because not all nations in the PISA organization have the same population mix. Finland simply doesn't have a large Hispanic or large black population. Neither does Finland, neither does Germany, and so on. Why even Canada has a fairly miniscule black and Hispanic population, so the sample size for the comparison becomes an issue. On the other hand, most of the nations in the sample had overwhelmingly large white populations being that they are predominantly European nations.
There is no reason to only make the comparison with whites, it can also be done with immigrants and other races.
Sure it can be done with any race. I recall tales told to me by some of my elders about how Canadian students would arrive at US universities crowing about how they were less racist than Americans and that their culture was superior and so they opened the doors to multicultural immigration and they were going to eradicate the racial achievement gap. I can't speak to how frequently my mentors ran across this phenomenon but I never saw it amongst my students or colleagues, but then again those most recent generation Canadians may have been chastised by reality,
to wit:
Back-to-school had a new twist for more than 100 students in Toronto on Tuesday as an Africentric alternative school opened its doors for the first time.
The black-focused school has sparked controversy, with opponents saying it smacks of segregation.
Supporters of the Africentric Alternative School maintain that it's important for children to understand their history and culture. They also point to a 40 per cent school dropout rate among black students.
The Canadian system and Canadian culture which were supposed to eradicate the Gap seem to have utterly failed at the mission and the outcomes for Black-Canadians mirrors what we see in America and now the Canadians are trying a radical experiment, one which our Supreme Court rejected in Brown vs. Board of Education - schools just for black students.