Dec. 10, 2000

NO MEDALS FOR U.S. MATH, SCIENCE

The United States has a long way to go before it has to worry that all its children are above average.

The latest survey by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study measured the performance of eighth-graders in 38 countries, following up on a 1995 survey of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders.

U.S. results range from bad, to worse, to abysmal.

Bad, because the most charitable thing that can be said about U.S. performance is that it's average. And that's in a field that excludes most of Europe, as well as China and India (http://www.nces.ed.gov/timss/timss-r).

Fourteen of the 38 countries are significantly above the United States statistically in math, with the top five spots held by Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Seventeen are significantly lower, mostly places it's no great honor to be ahead of, like Cyprus and Iran. Our peers -- that is, countries whose scores are not significantly different -- are the Czech Republic, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Latvia (only Latvian-speaking students were tested), England and New Zealand.

In science, Hungary replaces Hong Kong in the top five, but the results are otherwise similar.

The problem cannot be lack of resources; the United States spends vastly more than most of the countries on the list, including the ones that are way ahead of us. For instance, 91 percent of American students attend schools linked to the Internet, compared with 41 percent in the other countries. More than twice as many (12 percent) say they use computers regularly in math classes, perhaps suggesting that is not entirely a good thing.

One striking difference is that American math teachers were much less likely than the teachers in other countries to report that they had majored in math (41 percent to 71 percent) and much more likely to say they had majored in education (54 percent to 32 percent). Percentages can add to more than 100 because people often have more than one degree.

Information beyond just the scores might help to answer some of the obvious questions.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study is a massive effort -- it tested 9,300 American students in 222 schools -- and it also includes extensive questionnaires for students and teachers and a program of videotaped classes with an archives of textbooks, worksheets and other teaching materials. In addition, there's a detailed "benchmarking study" of 13 states and 14 school districts or consortia of districts.

Results on the benchmarking study will be available next spring.

The second TIMSS comparison is between eighth-graders now and eighth-graders four years earlier. And what's worse than just being average now is that there has been no significant change in U.S. math and science performance in over four years.

It's true that black American children showed statistically significant improvement, and that's encouraging. But they are still dismayingly far behind white children (the study did not break out Asian Americans as a separate category). And children whose parents are college-educated also improved significantly, which rather discouragingly suggests that recent reforms have primarily benefited those who were doing well already.

The proportion of U.S. students scoring in the top 10 percent internationally rose from 6 percent to 9 percent, which wouldn't be so bad except that the top performer, Singapore, had 46 percent of its students in that range both times.

The third TIMSS comparison is the worst of all. It's between fourth-graders in 1995 and eighth-graders now -- not the same individual students, but the same cohort. Seventeen countries participated in both surveys, and in that group, where averages were higher, American children got worse the longer they stayed in school.

In math, the U.S. scores were dead average in 1995, and significantly below average in 1999. In science, they were comfortably above average in 1995, but just barely in the average group by 1999.

In other words, American children managed to be as high as average in the whole sample of 38 countries only because 14 countries joining the survey for the first time in 1999 did even worse. They include, for example, Romania, Moldova, Macedonia, Jordan, Morocco and South Africa.

Bad, worse, abysmal. This is not Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.

(698 words)