>> An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore.
Looking at the US-flattering 4th grade scores, it appears that the Singapore average is 599, whereas the US Asian average is a pitiful 582. 8th grade sees the US suffer: Singapore declines to 593, and US Asians to 549. I don't know how to get a breakdown of US distributional information by race, but your language is, at best, highly misleading. The US 8th grade average all-included is 508, far below Singapore, but I think Singapore (and Taiwan!) are a little closer to 100% Asian.
I've heard nothing but great things about Singapore math, and on a gut level I'm shocked too that US 8th graders were barely able to approximate "almost one plus almost one", but in the big picture it's hard to conclude that our education is failing.
I don't know how to get a breakdown of US distributional information by race, but your language is, at best, highly misleading.
The last time I saw a comment of this nature in a thread on the subject of mathematics education in the United States and east Asia (both places I have lived), someone advised me not to feed the troll. But that was a different troll, and taking your comment, even where you incorrectly say "highly misleading" about my comment, as an attempt to advance the discussion, I'll invite onlookers to look at the evidence.
and anyone who takes a look at Exhibit 1.1 of that link (on pages 34 and 35 of the .PDF document), which is a good example of a comparative data distribution display, can see how the national median level of performance in the United States compares to the bottom quartile level for Singapore, and on the other hand where the top quartile line for the United States appears compared to the median line for Singapore. Q.E.D.
Unfortunately, once upon a time a blogger ignorant of the large body of research on textbook content and classroom practice in different countries for elementary mathematics in different countries of the world
took the lazy way out and said that if "race" is taken into account, then the United States is second to none in provision of public education, which is simply a lie. That meme has spread through some politically tendentious blog networks, but every serious professional researcher on comparative education policy can, and does, point to more meaningful differences between the United States and other countries. It would have helped that blogger also to be more familiar with the huge literature on "race" issues in countries all over the world,
but let me just disagree with the suggestion in your comment by pointing that nobody who makes the suggestion made by the blogger has actually gathered the data to show all the steps to prove that "race" as such makes any difference at all in educational attainment. Meanwhile I have taken care, in links already shown in my first comment above to document both the known inferiority of provision of primary education to some "race"-defined groups in the United States
and the degree to which other countries outperform the United States in providing primary education to the most disadvantaged groups in each of those countries.
the United States is conspicuous in how little it meets the educational needs of its strongest students in mathematics.
in the big picture it's hard to conclude that our education is failing
There is certainly room for semantic disagreement about how bad performance has to be before it is regarded as "failing" performance, but I note for the record that the United States has abundant resources devoted to K-12 schooling
but underperforms compared to what other countries do with less abundant resources. I didn't use the word "fail" or "failing" or "failure" in my comment, but I did suggest, and I think I suggested this with warrant, that United States schools could do a better job of teaching fraction arithmetic to the young people in their care.
...took the lazy way out and said that if "race" is taken into account, then the United States is second to none in provision of public education, which is simply a lie.
As is his norm, tokenadult ignores the data and vaguely appeals to authorities while attacking straw men.
Thaumasiotes didn't claim the US was #1, he merely pointed out that most of the gap Tokenadult cited is caused by student quality, not education policy. Nothing tokenadult has cited (here or elsewhere) addresses this point.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
Looking at the US-flattering 4th grade scores, it appears that the Singapore average is 599, whereas the US Asian average is a pitiful 582. 8th grade sees the US suffer: Singapore declines to 593, and US Asians to 549. I don't know how to get a breakdown of US distributional information by race, but your language is, at best, highly misleading. The US 8th grade average all-included is 508, far below Singapore, but I think Singapore (and Taiwan!) are a little closer to 100% Asian.
On the 2009 PISA, US students tended to outscore students of the same race in "native" countries. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...
I've heard nothing but great things about Singapore math, and on a gut level I'm shocked too that US 8th graders were barely able to approximate "almost one plus almost one", but in the big picture it's hard to conclude that our education is failing.