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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"American Education Isn't Mediocre, It's Deeply Unequal"
American Education Isn't Mediocre, It's Deeply Unequalby Julia Ryan at the Atlantic Cities
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/10/american-education-isnt-mediocre-its-deeply-unequal/7354/
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It's so common to see studies about the United States's lackluster academic performance compared to other countries, it's barely newsworthy anymore. The American education system, the story goes, is mediocre. A new report from the National Center for Educational Statistics complicates that picture a bit. It attempts to rank how individual states compare internationally, and shows a wide gap between the highest-performing states and the lowest: Massachusetts does quite well against other countries, while Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia do poorly.
The report evaluates 2011 math and science scores from two sources: the National Assessment of Educational Process, which was administered to eighth graders in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Department of Defense schools; and from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which evaluated eighth graders in 38 different countries and 9 "subnational entities" (for example, Quebec and Dubai).
Only some states took the TIMMS to create the U.S. score, so for the U.S. states that did not take the TIMSS in 2011, the report used NAEP scores to predict the what the states TIMSS scores would have been. The researchers then used these predictions to rank the states against the other educational systems tested by TIMSS.
The average TIMSS score is a 500, and the test uses four benchmarkslow, intermediate, high, and advancedto describe student scores. In math, two-thirds of U.S. states scored above the TIMSS average.
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applegrove
(118,716 posts)SharonAnn
(13,777 posts)It seems that school performance relates to poverty levels more than anything else.
applegrove
(118,716 posts)and you could immigrate somewhere else in the USA that was growing if you were in a place that was 'spinning its' wheels' so to speak. Now there is nowhere to go where you could find a job within a few months. How are you supposed to get out of the cycle of poverty if your education sucks and you can't move?
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)which includes the District of Columbia, which is reliably Democratic. It's not just "red states". There are social and economic factors underlying it that go beyond partisan politics (although they intersect).
Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)It continually blows my mind that Washington doesn't come to Mass to study what we're doing and send it to other states, instead concocting untested stuff like Common Core.
charmay
(525 posts)Instead the U.S. Has to waste money on the next new education pundit who pushes the next new program.