Is Dobbs Right About Education Crisis?
Is Dobbs Right About Education Crisis?
Date: Friday, August 19, 2005 1:26 AM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
August 19, 2005 No. 1318
A new article has appeared that debunks all the hysteria about our educational system that seems to be the norm in the U.S. press. Lately even Lou Dobbs has joined a growing bandwagon that warns of a national crisis because we have inferior math and science education.
The two tests cited most frequently in press reports are the
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
PISA, undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD), most recently spanned 41 countries and
tested 15-year-olds on mathematical word-problems.
Both tests have repeatedly been invoked by sensationalists
seeking to cast the United States as unprepared for the
high-tech, global economy.
This paper has a glaring omission because it ignores one of the biggest problems with the TIMSS test - China and India don't participate! Everything Lou Dobbs and his guests say about how these countries are producing better educated kids and college graduates is nothing but conjecture. There is absolutely no factual basis for this myth and yet we see it repeated so often it has become accepted as an indisputable fact.
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Please read the following because even if our educational system has flaws, there is one issue that everyone seems to ignore. Fortunately this paper tackles the issue that seems to get lost in the debate:
Amid this deluge of confounding factors, the inference that
the U.S. education system is going down the tubes is an
unjustified logical leap. The United States is still pumping
out tremendous numbers of new Ph.D.s in the sciences - more,
in fact, than our economy can presently absorb, as there is
a well-reported dearth of jobs for newly-minted science
Ph.D.s. The same is true in engineering: According to a recent
National Science Foundation report, the number of engineers
graduating from U.S. schools will continue to grow into
the foreseeable future, outstripping the number of available jobs.
I asked activists to email Lou Dobbs and demand that Dr. Norm Matloff be on the show to give some balance to the hysteria that we have seen about the state of our educational system. I assumed everyone knew who Matloff is, but that may have been a bad assumption because I got several emails asking who he is.
For those that don't know about Matloff, visit his website immediately. His Debunking paper is so important it should be required reading FOR ALL LABOR ACTIVISTS. It would behoove all programmers and high-tech workers to read the entire paper if for any reason to find out more about what the future holds for their career. Yes, I know it's long, but it's not boring and you will see that Matloff has been writing for years about the education issue. He is very qualified to debunk the myths that Lou Dobbs seems to have bought from the shortage-shouters and shills.
By the time you read the article below and Matloff's Debunking paper you will know why we don't have a shortage of highly educated people in this country, and furthermore you will know why our kids aren't doing as bad in math and science as everyone seems to believe.
Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage by Norm Matloff:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
If you need a little more convincing about Matloff's ability to take on the shills, here are a few excerpts from his Debunking paper that are very similar to the article below:
Much has been made in the press (and by the industry lobbyists)
about the results of the 1999 Third International Mathematics
and Science Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R).
The U.S. has plenty of kids who do well in math, and in fact
the U.S. has far more engineers per capita than do the nations
which the industry lobbyists say have superior school math
scores: South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Singapore and so on.
Lobbyists also decry the fact that about 40% of U.S. PhD's
granted in computer science go to foreign students, with
the implication being that there is ``something wrong''
with American students.
It is true that a substantial percentage of computer science
PhD and Master's degrees in the U.S. are awarded to foreign
students. But that is irrelevant because one does not need a
graduate degree to do the work in this field. Bill Gates,
founder of Microsoft, does not even have a Bachelor's degree,
and similar statements hold for Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle,
and Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar.
This short story by Matloff is a classic!
Those who are plied by the industry's feigned interest in PhDs
would be baffled by the following incident. On October 13, 1999,
a team of Intel engineers recruiting for new graduates visited
my department at UC Davis. I mentioned that I had a couple of
PhDs in electrical engineering I could refer to them, one a new
graduate and the other a 1992 graduate. In reply one of the
Intel recruiters blurted out, ``No, Intel is not very interested
in PhDs.'' The other added that she did not think a PhD would
have enough to challenge him or her at Intel, except in the case
of very highly specialized research areas.
This is shameless hypocrisy, given that Intel lobbyists in
Washington have claimed to need to hire H-1Bs because so few
domestic students pursue a PhD.
Personally I think Lou Dobbs is hopelessly brainwashed on the education issue so I'm not convinced he can be changed. I have had email communications with some of his staff that lead me to believe they are equally close-minded when it comes to the education issue. Above all else though Dobbs is a journalist, and good journalists allow opposing viewpoints. As an example, Dobbs doesn't agree with the open-borders crowd from La Raza or MEcha and yet he allows them on his show.
In the interest of balanced reporting Dobbs should allow someone like Matloff to present the other side of the education controversy. If you know someone else that is equally qualified to debunk the shills then by all means recommend them to Dobbs. The important thing is that we need the hysteria to be challenged with facts and intellect.
The Lou Dobbs contact page is at:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9
Email him at: LouDobbs@cnn.com
And just so Dobbs can't hide from the CNN execs, you can send comments
to them on this page:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?35
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/soa/education.htm
Summer 2005
How We Measure Up
Is American Math and Science Education in Decline?
s if coordinated to provoke headlines, top executives at three of the nations leading technology firms recently issued bleak appraisals of the American education system, criticizing especially how American students are taught science and mathematics. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates minced no words at a summit of the nations governors: until high schools are redesigned, he declared, "we will keep limiting, even ruining, the lives of millions of Americans every year." The chief executives of Intel and Cisco Systems shortly followed suit, suggesting that Americas lackluster schools will increasingly force companies to look overseas for talent.
Of course, these concerns are hardly new. But the somber prognoses from the heights of high-tech have added high-profile urgency to recent press reports about the declining performance of U.S. students in science and math compared to other nations, and the potential rise of China as a technological and economic superpower. Leading U.S. media outlets have featured major stories on the consequences of Chinas rise for Americas future, like the recent Newsweek cover story by Fareed Zakaria appealing for a "massive new focus" on science and technology in the U.S., lest America "find itself unable to produce the core of scientists, engineers and technicians who make up the base of an advanced industrial economy." In such a media atmosphere, one could be forgiven for having concluded that the United States is drifting unawares into an educational backwater while the rest of the world paddles furiously past it.
The truth is more complex. Cross-national studies of scientific and mathematical ability, interpreted rightly, tell a complicated story, giving reason to question how well the tests measure Americas real educational standing in the world. The two tests cited most frequently in press reports are the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). PISA, undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), most recently spanned 41 countries and tested 15-year-olds on mathematical word-problems. The latest TIMSS, in 2003, comprised more traditional, textbook-style math and science problems and was administered to fourth- and eighth-graders in 25 countries by an international team of researchers based in Boston and Amsterdam. The Department of Education funded both studies in the U.S., with help from the National Science Foundation.
Both tests have repeatedly been invoked by sensationalists seeking to cast the United States as unprepared for the high-tech, global economy. When the latest PISA results were released toward the end of last year, for instance, the Christian Science Monitor ran with the headline "Math + Test = Trouble for U.S. Economy," and concluded that the studys emphasis on "real-life" math skills makes it an accurate and "sobering" predictor of students performance in "the kind of life-skills that employers care about." Federal officials expressed concern about the test results, too. "If we want to be competitive, we have some mountains to climb," said Deputy Education Secretary Eugene Hickok.
To be sure, the results of neither TIMSS nor PISA should send American educators and policymakers rushing to the champagne. In most math areas tested by PISA, the gap between the average U.S. student and the average student in the highest-scoring countries - often Finland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong - was roughly equivalent to the gap between the United States and low-scoring countries like Uruguay or Mexico. Where 44 percent of Singapores students reached the TIMSS "advanced international benchmark," only 7 percent of U.S. students did. And, in general, the longer students had remained in the U.S. school system, the worse they performed relative to their peers abroad.
The first question that must be asked of such broad results, however, is whether the tests themselves accurately represent the countries student populations. International surveys such as these are not given to every student in each participating country; the tests organizers pick out statistical samples that are supposed to represent each countrys entire student population. Even so, schools - especially in the United States - sometimes decline to participate in the tests, potentially skewing the sample. As far as accurate sampling is concerned, early incarnations of the tests were not encouraging. In the first TIMSS general achievement test, conducted in 1995, only 5 of 21 participating countries met the studys guidelines for conducting representative samples. While most countries participating in the latest studies have dramatically improved their overall sampling, the United States remains a notable exception. Only 73 percent of U.S. students chosen to be sampled were actually tested, a figure below the "minimum acceptable" rate of 75 percent. In most other countries, that number was well over 90 percent. If the omitted 27 percent of U.S. students were even slightly above or below average, their exclusion casts serious doubts on the accuracy of the U.S. sample.
The studies also inevitably confront large differences between countries school systems. "In Cyprus, students taking the advanced mathematics test were in their final year of the mathematics and science program; in France, the final year of the scientific track; in Lithuania, the final year of the mathematics and science gymnasia; in Sweden, the final year of the natural science or technology lines; and in Switzerland, the final year of the scientific track of gymnasium," Professor Iris Rotberg of George Washington University wrote in Science concerning the 1995 TIMSS assessment, which tested high-schoolers. "In contrast, students in several countries, including the United States, attended comprehensive secondary schools. The major differences in student selectivity and school specialization across countries make it virtually impossible to interpret the rankings." In TIMSS, especially, tests are conducted by grade-level rather than by age. In elementary and middle school, where topics are often covered and learned over the course of a few weeks, the risk of comparing students at incommensurate stages of their education is great.
Broad curricular differences have probably had a role in deflating U.S. scores. TIMSS and PISA use the same test in every participating country, and the material that makes it onto the test is selected through a winnowing process that leaves the tests considerably narrower than any single countrys general curriculum. Countries that include large amounts of material in their typical curricula are therefore at a disadvantage compared to those countries that focus their curricula more intensely on fewer subject areas. Regardless of its other merits or failings, the American strategy of repeated exposure to a broad range of subjects - American textbooks are the bulkiest in the world - is likely to lend itself to unduly poor performance on standardized tests, as full understanding of any single concept takes longer to develop.
Demographics and culture are also thought to confound the results of cross-national comparisons. In the United States, the tested students come from every socioeconomic rung, while other countries sometimes lack some rungs because of cross-border employment. For example, much of the labor force in Hong Kong (which is treated on the tests as an independent entity) is made up of tens of thousands of low-paid Filipino household workers whose children live and are educated in the Philippines; in light of the extensive literature tying socioeconomic indicators to educational achievement, this cross-border employment surely affects both countries scores. A similar situation obtains in other places with significant immigration and cross-border commerce, as Gerald Bracey points out in a 1997 article in the journal Educational Researcher. "Each morning thousands of Malaysians enter Singapore to sweep streets, pick up garbage, and do other low-level jobs. They return to their homes at night, relieving Singapore of having to educate the children of poor laborers," Bracey writes. "If one reads the [domestic] educational research literature, one is struck by the lengths - the extreme lengths - that researchers go to to ensure that samples in their studies are comparable....The research community would never accept test results in this country that simply compared scores in an inner-city slum and an affluent suburb as if they were comparable," he writes. The opposite circumstance holds in the United States: Students from all socioeconomic rungs are educated and scored on these tests.
Amid this deluge of confounding factors, the inference that the U.S. education system is going down the tubes is an unjustified logical leap. The United States is still pumping out tremendous numbers of new Ph.D.s in the sciences - more, in fact, than our economy can presently absorb, as there is a well-reported dearth of jobs for newly-minted science Ph.D.s. The same is true in engineering: According to a recent National Science Foundation report, the number of engineers graduating from U.S. schools will continue to grow into the foreseeable future, outstripping the number of available jobs. Of these new engineers and Ph.D.s, an increasing number are foreign-born - but increasing even faster is the percentage of those who decide to stay in the United States. Federal research funding for scientific research and development has consistently risen in absolute terms and as a fraction of discretionary spending - and industry research dollars have risen dramatically on top of that, to the tune of 7 percent per year in real terms - according to calculations by the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. (Alarmist media reports often use GDP, against which research spending has fallen, as a comparative baseline.) And countries that have "outperformed" the United States in educational studies for many years - a number of European countries top this list - still fail to rival the U.S. in any measure of research productivity. When Bill Gates and others seem to appeal for school reform in the U.S., perhaps they are merely providing their companies with political cover and a post hoc justification for employing foreign engineers who, while not better educated than U.S. workers, are often significantly cheaper.
Nevertheless, there remains good reason to worry about what the global economy portends for those American students who really are badly educated. In only one other OECD country (New Zealand) are internal educational inequalities worse than in the United States, according to a recent analysis by researchers in England and Italy. Where these inequalities lie is no mystery. The gap in test scores between white and ethnically Asian students on the one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other is a well-known attribute of U.S. schools and is noted ruefully in nearly all cross-national studies. Two University of Pennsylvania researchers recently aggregated scores from a number of cross-national studies and found that white students in the United States, taken alone, consistently outperform the predominantly white student populations of several other leading industrial nations. "There is compelling evidence," they write," that the low scores of [black and Hispanic students] were major factors in reducing the comparative standing of the U.S. in international surveys of achievement. If these minority students were to perform at the same level as white students, the U.S....would lead the Western G5 nations in mathematics and science, though it would still trail Japan." In PISA, for instance, white students performed above most European countries, whereas black students performed on par with students in Thailand. So while the performance of minority groups in the U.S. does refute the alarmist assertion regarding an across-the-board decline in U.S. schools, it does so in a particularly unfortunate way - namely, it suggests that some American minority groups will be shut out of high-paying jobs as companies look for better-educated workers overseas. Although the most recent TIMSS saw the white-black score gap close slightly, it is almost certain to remain shockingly large in the near future.
None of this is to say that other countries are not catching up technologically, nor that the United States is safe from competition in even a single technological sector. China is without doubt the most aggressive challenger. In the mid-twentieth century, Japans economy grew 55-fold over the course of thirty years through stringent government control; observers of Japans rise will remember the key role of its Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which employed many of the nations brightest stars and guided the economy on a carefully directed path of technological growth. Chinas strategy has been similar, though its tremendous size has necessitated delegation of heavy-handed economic control to regional governments in what scholars have termed "local state corporatism." It has simultaneously harnessed the power of markets in a way Japan did not. Regional governments lavish tax breaks on high-tech industries (many of them funded from overseas) and pump millions into Chinas new universities - which are poised to graduate more Ph.D.s than the United States by 2010, according to some projections. Nearly all of Chinas top leaders are scientists and engineers by training: President Hu Jintao is a hydroelectric engineer, Premier Wen Jiabao is a geological engineer. Their predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, were both electrical engineers. The technocrats steering Chinas ship of state are working hard to modernize scientific education in their country.
But the United States need not worry - not yet. The U.S. is by no means in technological decline, though China and India will inevitably pose challenges in years to come. Although not a crisis, this competition should motivate the U.S. to improve its science and math education, especially for poor and minority students who might lose out in a globalized, high-tech economy. If sensationalists must take up a cause, it should be the plight of those students and not a hyped-up "threat" of China or the "impending decline" of technological innovation here at home.
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