WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2023
PISA, 2022: As we noted yesterday, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is one of two (2) high-profile international public school testing programs.
Here's the overview offered by the leading authority on the PISA:
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the OECD in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. It was first performed in 2000 and then repeated every three years. Its aim is to provide comparable data with a view to enabling countries to improve their education policies and outcomes. It measures problem solving and cognition.
The results of the 2022 data collection were released in December 2023.
The other such program is the TIMSS. At the risk of sounding extremely jaundiced, the PISA became the international program of choice in this country because of the fact that, for whatever reason, Americans kids score extremely poorly on its math component.
The fact that American kids scored poorly in math on the PISA made the PISA a popular press corps choice. This was back in the day when everyone had bought into a certain, somewhat selective program for public school "reform."
Our journalists are still strongly inclined to adopt the gloomiest possible posture concerning our public schools. In the next few days, we're going to show you results from the 2022 administration of the PISA—results which were released at the start of this month.
Today, we'll start with reading. We're going to start with some good news, and with some news that's not so good.
For starters, riddle us this! In the face of persistent claims about the failure of our public schools, here's the way U.S. pupils scored on last year's PISA reading test. We're including nations of substantial size. You can see a complete listing here:
Average scores, Reading Literacy, 2022 PISA:
Japan: 516
Korea: 515
Taiwan: 515
Canada: 507
United States: 504
Australia: 498
U.K.: 494
Germany: 480
France: 474
Spain: 474
American students outscored their counterparts from the U.K., Germany and France. They scored three points below Canada. (We can't offer you a rule of thumb by which to assess the size of those score gaps.)
You're right! Our public school kids weren't the basketcase of the world on the PISA reading test. They even outscored miraculous Finland, the perennial press corps darling, as you'll see in the data below.
Now we're going to bring introduce "the eternal note of sadness." Here's a slightly larger list of reading scores, including the average scores recorded by the four major American demographic groups:
Average scores, Reading Literacy, 2022 PISA:
U.S. Asian-American kids: 579
Singapore: 543
U.S. white kids: 537
Ireland: 516
Japan: 516
Korea: 515
Taiwan: 515
Canada: 507
United States: 504
Hong Kong: 500
Australia: 498
U.K.: 494
Finland: 490
U.S. Hispanic kids: 481
Germany: 480
France: 474
Spain: 474
U.S. black kids: 459
There are certain kinds of problems involved in comparing scores this way. That said, American white kids scored at what would generally be regarded as a very high level. Asian-American kids basically scored off the planet's charts.
Having said that, alas! In those data, you see the enormous "achievement gaps" which obtain between our four largest student groups. As we'll see in the next few days, our major newspapers continue to work extremely hard to keep their readers from ever having to think about those very large gaps.
(To verify those subgroup scores, you can just click this, though you'll have to click again.)
Our Asian-American kids scored off the charts. Our black kids scored much less well. What explains those giant gaps? Also, what explains the mediocre score recorded by Finland, the former press corps darling?
We'll offer some possible answers in the next few days. Before the week is done, we'll also look at the PISA scores in science and math—and we'll show you how test scores like these get reported (and get disappeared) in our nation's major newspapers.
Simple story! For reasons at which we're forced to guess, the Washington Post and the New York Times never expose us the people to basic data like these.
Simply put, it isn't done! As you'll see in the next few days, it wasn't done when these new PISA scores were released at the start of the month.
TIMMS and PISA measure different things. PISA wasn’t selected because our kids do poorly in math. Somerby is now inventing conspiracies.
ReplyDeleteSomerby is upset by headlines not data.
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IIRC Bob has pointed out that a 10 point difference equals roughly one year of education. These figures seem to imply that Asian Americans are around 12 years ahead of black Americans in reading! Did I do something wrong?
ReplyDeleteYeah, it doesn’t really extrapolate to ten years.
DeleteYes,@4:54, the difference may not extrapolate to exactly 12 years. but it extrapolates to an enormous difference. You can see why equal opportunity is a good idea whereas a policy of equal outcome (confusingly called "equity") is disastrous. With equal opportunity, Harvard's student body, faculty and administration would contain fewer blacks, but the blacks would be competent. With "equity", there are a lot more blacks, but most of them are less competent than those around them.
DeleteThis situation has several bad consequences. One is that standards get reduced for everyone, even standards of morality and integrity. the treatment
of Dr. Gay is a glaring example. A second bad consequence is that racism is actually encouraged by seeing all the less competent blacks. A third consequence is that it's unfair for a less competent black to get a position over a more competent Asian. And, the difference in competence is often huge.
The score difference that would equate to on the NAEP would not be the same as the amount that would be 1 year on the PISA unless they were scored the same way (using the same scale). They aren't. The way to compare scores across different tests is to be compute each test's scores to z-scores and then compare the size of a one year difference on the NAEP with that on the PISA. This is basic statistics but perhaps Somerby doesn't know how to do it.
DeleteThe formula is:
z = (x - mean)/S where x is a given score (such as a score that equates to a one-year improvement for an average child), and the mean is the mean of the distribution of all of the kids' scores, divided by the standard deviation for the distribution. Do this for the NAEP and then calculate the z-score for a score that is 10 pts higher than the mean on the PISA and then compare the two numbers. Or you can work it backwards and find the z-score that corresponds to the higher NAEP score (representing a one-year advantage over the mean) and then find the same z-score on the PISA and plug that into the formula as z and solve for X using the mean and standard deviation for the PISA test. That will give you the score on the PISA that corresponds to a one-year improvement (assuming kids would improve at the same rate on both tests if they were learning well).
But statistics are too hard for Somerby to fool with, apparently.
But one of the problems with PISA is that the same math topics are not part of the curriculum in different countries. That means our kids didn't have the chance to learn things that are routinely taught elsewhere (the metric system for example). So David's speculations are ungrounded and he has piled a shitload of racist conclusions on a tottering structure of assumptions.
No standards are being reduced at Harvard. At the college level, the amount of learning rests with the student, not the teachers anyway. Teaching students to be inflexible about trivialities is hardly educational. I am absolutely certain that Dr. Gay brought strengths to her job that have outweighed a quibble over a gotcha attack that DOES NOT amount to plagiarisim as academic conceive it. I know this because I worked as a researcher in academia for decades. Calling any Asian person more competent over this issue is a huge joke (or it would be if it weren't an example of animosity dressing itself up in nitpicking in order remove someone being targeted). If this is the worst thing they can come up with, Gay's enemies are empty-handed. And this had absolutely nothing to do with morality or values. It is an ugly attack that David has now made racist by calling her unqualified due to affirmative action.
Somerby is no better. His use of nitpicking to attack his special targets is the same approach David is using. Academic courtesies such as giving fair credit to others for their creative efforts are not in Somerby's repertoire. David thinks "creative" applies to phrases that have no creative content at all, but are common to many works. As Drum notes, it is bogus to call that plagiarism.
You're not fit to sharpen Dr. Gay's pencils, David. Go fuck yourself you glaringly racist prick.
DeleteDr Gay is not fit to sharpen David's pencils.
DeleteThat isn’t her job.
DeleteNor is it David’s job to sharpen hers.
DeleteMy niece got Ph.D. with honors in History from UCLA. She never was able to get tenure, because, among other things, she didn't write a book. Gay never wrote a book. Her number of papers was small at 11 or so. By comparison, my wife published over 100. These are objective facts.
DeleteSubjectively, Gay's papers were not particularly outstanding. She has been accused of several dozen instances of plagiarism.
She also stands accused of using incorrect data and withholding the data to avoid proving the accusation. Well, it's a fact that she is withholding the data. Internal inconsistency makes the data appear false. She could clear it up by releasing her data. As an academic in search of truth, I think she should release her data.
IMO all this make her a terrible choice to be President of our most prestigious university.
Have you seen the garbage Ivy League business schools have been graduating?
DeletePrestigious, my ass. They should be shutdown, until we know what the hell is going on over there.
Harvard is a private university, not govt funded like state universities. There is no basis for investigating what is going on at Harvard. They can do what they want, much as Liberty U and the other conservative private universities do.
DeleteGay's relative lack of research papers is likely due to becoming an administrator. Professors tend to separate out into those that are research oriented and those who primarily teach, with a smaller number pursuing promotion to Dept Chair, Dean, Provost and then President, or other administrative positions. No one is expected to do everything, teach well and also do a lot of research (to generate publications) and also join the administration. Gay took the administrative track. There is nothing wrong with that and it doesn't make her an inferior researcher, merely someone with different interests, just as those who emphasize teaching do not do much research either.
Nothing depends on her data or her research. This call is to embarrass her by giving opponents fodder for raising specious criticisms that the public will be unable to evaluate (lacking expertise in her field). The attacks are politically motivated. If she were falling down in her administrative position (as President of the university) the board would remove her.
David implies that his niece worked at UCLA instead of graduating from it's doctoral program. These are two very different things. The standard in my field at places like UCLA would be 3 papers PER YEAR or a monograph per year or a book in 5 years. Less selective universities want you to have published your dissertation research as a book or monograph in order to be hired tenure-track (less than 25% of those with doctorates get such a job). Thus 11 papers is not bad but that rate would not continue after tenure if she were promoted to an administrative role. Only the most famous researchers working with grad students (whose work they will be a coauthor on) or full-time researchers who do not teach will have over 100 papers. David doesn't say where his wife works (i.e., at an R01 university or a community college) or under what circumstances in what field (short scientific papers are easier to generate than books). Textbooks and encyclopedia articles also count but are not as much work or as respected, so it matters what kind of paper was published too.
The enemies of Dr. Gay are not taking any of this into account when they claim her output is inferior. That makes it clearer that they are just going after her for political reasons.
Higher education started as a common good, became a business, and devolved into a racket.
DeleteAll three exist today: common good (public universities); business (private and non-profit universities); racket (profit making and partisan).
DeleteExamples: UCLA (public), Stanford (private non-profit), Trump University and for-profit trade & tech institute, some religious colleges.
Didn't you tell your niece a degree in history is worthless? Your party of primitive neanderthals have no need for history. It just makes their little Christian racists sad.
DeleteLooks like Finland’s PISA scores have been heading south for years.
ReplyDeleteWhat would cause that?
My guess is that one factor is a growing proportion of immigrants in the population
DeleteWhen there are two possible explanations for an observed result, an observed decrease in performance is confounded. You do not know which influence on scores produced the change. It is fine for David to say this is his guess, but the problem is that too many people start believing their guesses instead of remembering that they are not truth until someone has untangled those influences and tested his hypothesis about those immigrants.
DeleteSomerby has always complained that Finland does well because it is so homogeneous in population. But he doesn't know that is why America has done worse. Does Somerby/David imagine that the Finnish increase in diversity is large enough to have produced the change in scores observed? It seems to me that the US still has much more diversity than Finland with its 2% increase in immigrants, and yet the US is now doing better than Finland. You have to wonder what accounts for the rest of the change (or perhaps abandon a hypothesis that may not result in any difference at all because it never did give Finland any advantage).
Kevin looks at the Hunter Biden investigation:
ReplyDeletehttps://jabberwocking.com/its-just-endless-lying-from-the-hunter-biden-fanatics/
hunter-biden fanatics = Republicans
DeleteKevin is sharp and smart. In this case, he's smart enough to try to defend Hunter and Joe Biden by focusing on a particular incorrect statement made by an unnamed lawyer.
DeleteThis is supposed to make us forget or ignore that our country's Ukraine policy, as set by VP Biden, was affected by a large amount of money paid to Hunter Biden. It's supposed to make us forget or ignore the favorable treatment Hunter received from our investigative agencies. And, to forget the other significant crimes likely committed by Hunter. And to ignore the fortunes paid to other Biden relatives by foreign sources, which look like bribes. And, to ignore evidence that a substantial portion of the money paid to Joe Biden's relatives was then paid to Joe.
This stuff is not true. Stop spreading disinfo.
DeleteDrum presents a letter from Hunter's lawyer and claims it says they "wouldn't attend a closed hearing" but that is false. They letter does not say that. Instead, the letter proposes an alternative to the Committee's approach, suggesting that Hunter Biden is willing to appear at a public Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.
DeleteHe then provides a letter from the House and claims they "acknowledged" that Hunter "wouldn't attend a closed hearing" but this is also false. They letter explicitly asserts the younger Biden's attempt to avoid sitting for a deposition by offering to testify at a public hearing is seen as a demand for special treatment and will not be accepted.
Sadly, Drum is the one spreading disinfo. :(
Drum is fucking up right and left. What's up?
Deleteour country's Ukraine policy, as set by VP Biden, was affected by a large amount of money paid to Hunter Biden.
DeleteHow, David. Explain.
Drum is not fucking up anything. Drum is a DNC bot.
DeleteDrum is a moderate, slightly left of center.
DeleteHis post on Hunter Biden and the House committee trying to prosecute him is absolutely pathetic, partisan garbage.
DeleteThe attack on Hunter is pathetic, partisan garbage.
DeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteYou guys are getting so close to putting the Bidens away. All you need now is someone willing to make these charges under oath in a court of law. I wish you all the luck in the world. You're going to need it.
It would help if they could show physical evidence, too.
DeleteThey'll do neither, because Republican politicians are afraid of perjury almost as much as they are afraid of people who aren't white.
DeleteNikki Haley on the Civil War:
ReplyDeletehttps://apnews.com/article/haley-election-civil-war-slavery-a509ff9d7cc5e271c42592276b75735c
Trying to get politicians to understand the history of a state they were governor of is woke.
Delete