Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today in @bopinion I bust the myth that U.S. schools suck, and that money spent on education is wasted.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/The latest PISA scores have some people claiming that U.S. education "just isn't working".

This is wrong.

nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/…

3/Americans score well in reading! We beat most other countries.

4/In science we're average.

5/It's only in math that we suck.

6/BUT, PISA isn't the only inter international test!!

There's also TIMSS, where our 8th graders do pretty average in math!

7/In fact there are a bunch of international tests. The World Bank tried to combine them all into one measure, called Harmonized Learning Outcomes.

They found that the U.S. is...pretty average.

8/OK what about the idea that American efforts to improve our scores aren't paying off?

Here are the overall PISA score changes between 2015 and 2018.

Does this look like failure to you?

9/OK what about the China panic? Are China's kids "the world's smartest"? Are we being out-educated by our main rival?

fortune.com/2019/12/03/chi…

10/Well, probably not. China games the PISA pretty hard.

https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1201916043427491840?s=19

11/The World Bank estimates that China's test scores are probably well below those of the U.S.

documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/390…

12/OK, but we DO do badly at math.

Why?

It might be a cultural problem.

nytimes.com/2014/07/27/mag…

13/Americans tend to believe that math is all about inborn ability. So instead of buckling down and working hard, we view math as an IQ test. So we do badly at it.

theatlantic.com/education/arch…

14/There are approaches that work for teaching math and we should use them.

15/But on top of that, what we really should do to improve our schools' performance is to SPEND MORE MONEY, especially on under-resourced schools in poor neighborhoods.

16/Many people claim this doesn't work. That U.S. students are uneducable, and school spending is wasted.

THEY ARE WRONG.

Read this literature review by @KiraboJackson. Evidence clearly shows that school spending works.

nber.org/papers/w25368

17/The U.S. education system isn't bad, it's average.

We can make it better by A) improving math education, and B) spending more money on schools in poor neighborhoods.

So let's do it.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…