Underachieving in America: Researchers Document International Gaps, a Journalist Seeks the Cause
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Endangering Prosperity, with three distinguished authors and an eminent introducer, is devoted to one major point: United States is truly falling behind not only East Asian countries that for some time have scored best in international comparisons of educational achievement, but also a good part of developed world, including its neighbor, Canada. The book eschews difficult effort of determining just why United States, undoubtedly a leader in educational attainment and possibly educational achievement 40 or 50 years ago, now trails other nations in both. Nor does it discuss what specific measures might enable us to catch up. Rather, through international comparative analysis, volume demonstrates that educational achievement, particularly in mathematics and science, is closely related to and probably a prime mover in economic advancement, leading to conclusion that if we do not improve our educational achievement, our economic predominance is also threatened. The book's distinctive contribution to discussion of comparative educational achievement is its ability to slot various states of United States into charts of international achievement by linking statistically scoring system of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which measures achievement by individual state, to that of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tracks achievement around globe. And so we discover that Massachusetts, faring best among American states, stands far up scale, between Switzerland and Japan (but still behind Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Finland, and Taiwan); that northeastern and upper midwestern states score at top in United States; and that United States as a whole is way back in rankings, between Portugal and Ireland. Endangering Prosperity is meticulous in considering alternative explanations of differences in economic development. Although volume does not attempt to analyze causes of our relative decline or how it might be overcome, it shows a preference for some explanations and solutions: book asserts, for example, that the school work force--teachers, principals, superintendents, other administrators, and ancillary personnel--too often favor only those changes to status quo that enhance their income and lighten their workload. Simple solutions proposed by vested interests, such as higher expenditures, smaller classes ... added support and administrative personnel will not do. Structural reform is needed: authors are not specific, but their approval of legislative actions to alter teachers' evaluations, teachers' tenure, teachers' layoff rules, bargaining issues, and more, in a range of states, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado gives a strong hint as to what they favor. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Does experience of countries that have gone far beyond us in educational achievement support this preference? In The Smartest Kids in World, we have a fascinating book to help us ponder just what has driven educational achievement in countries of East Asia and, surprisingly, Finland, which stands at top in achievement in Europe. It was intriguing idea of Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, to track experiences of three American highschool students who, dissatisfied with offerings in their home schools, decided to go abroad for a year and attend school in two countries that surpass us in educational achievement--Korea and Finland--and in Poland, which has shown remarkably rapid improvement in PISA tests. Three more diverse education systems and environments could hardly be imagined, and chances of their teaching same lesson are unlikely. Kim, a teenager in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, high school, tried to fit in as a cheerleader and marching band flutist, failing at both, and by way of unexpected high test scores took advantage of opportunity to go abroad for a year through AFS. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".