Ever since his State of the Union speech, President Bush has been pushing increased government funding to improve science education, with better mathematics preparation as its foundation. While his claims that there is a shortage of workers in those fields and that more government is necessary to fix the problem are hardly convincing (See Lew Rockwell’s article yesterday), the long line of international comparisons that have found Americans’ mathematics mastery woefully inadequate would seem to establish our general innumeracy as a fact.
However, less clear than our innumeracy is whether we really want to overcome it. The fact that we frequently use mathematics to intentionally fool ourselves and others argues against that conclusion. When we systematically abuse numbers to distort reality, it is no surprise that we handle mathematics poorly.
One of today’s most obvious misleading number games is grade inflation.
Teachers have accommodated student desires for higher grades to the point that the median GPA of graduating seniors has risen about a full grade point since it was about 2.2 in 1965. At some elite schools almost everyone gets As and Bs today, and who is valedictorian has become how many 4.0 students will share that title.
High schools have gone even further, making it possible to get better than a 4.0. Many make advanced placement or community college courses worth an extra grade point. These and other policies (e.g., statewide comparisons crafted to show that, as in Lake Woebegone, all children are above normal) have, however, thrown away much of the useful information grades once contained.
Price inflation is another form of ego-building by manipulating comparison numbers. If I want to brag that I make more than my father ever did, the effects of inflation can overwhelm every other difference and make it so. On the other hand, older Americans use it to prove how much better things used to be. (“I remember when bread was a nickel…”) Politicians are also handy at such abuse when it suits their purposes.
Competitive inflation also occurs in other dimensions. We regularly cheat on the new in “new and improved.” For example, books and new car models come out well before the year starts (e.g., the 2007 model introduced during this year’s Super Bowl), while magazines arrive with dates two weeks into the future.
Statistics and percentages are subject to the same abuse. “Giving it 100%” was once going all out, but that has been replaced with giving it 150%, 200%, and even 1000%. I’m 1000000% sure there is something wrong with this inflated hyperbole. Similarly, statistics are routinely manipulated to make insignificant changes look significant. Instead of saying some drug increases the probability of some cancer from one in ten million to two in ten million, reports scream that it doubles your risk.
We cheat on clothing sizes. Adults want to feel be thinner, so what was a given size dress years ago is now a smaller size. Parents, however, want their children to be “ahead of the curve,” so some companies cut infant sizes smaller, so everybody can have children that are ahead of their peers.
Everywhere you turn, people “cheat” to make today’s results look better than yesterday’s. This is particularly true in competitive sports, where we often judge quality by numbers (e.g., baseball statistics). We have changed rules to favor the offense in sports, so that more points get scored. We have tuned track surfaces with steel springs to make sprinters faster and have designed more flexible poles so pole-vaulters go higher. It is also prevalent in politics, where so many numbers are essentially made up (especially when governments suppress markets and the information they generate) and comparisons are generated to mislead rather than honestly inform.
It is time we were honest with ourselves about our innumeracy. While we understand that better mathematics skills are important and that we would like to handle numbers more deftly, most of us are unwilling to put in the time and effort to do so. And in many cases we simply do not want to “do it right,” because that would force us to trade in some of the self-delusions we want to keep for the reality we are often desperate to deny. Besides, even if we were serious about getting a better handle on the use of mathematics, as in so many other areas, history hardly points to the government as the agency we would rely on to get the desired results.
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As a whole, Americans score around the European average in math and science. Broken down by ethnicity, every single ethnic group in America is at or near the top in comparison to their co-ethnics in other countries.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Or to put it another way, do you have the numbers to back up that claim?
Newsweek did an article on a little discrepency in education. America tends to test horribly compared to most of Europe and Asia, but we are still EXTREMELY competitive. Here’s a quote in some ways explaining it from the head of the ministry of education of Singapore – which has tested out at #1 for a number of years:
“We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.”
The TIMSS and PISA data are available online. A quick google search should get you the PDFs but you’ll have to search through those to find the relevant data.
Definitely, US high schools are at least one year behind German Gymnasiums. This is due to international tests that compared high school advanced levels with German Gymnasiums (and NOT with German Hauptschule, which is some sort of last resort for those unruly kids that don’t want to learn. Those schools are compared in PISA and give German drop down in graddes).
I have been to a High school in Texas and at least three of my friends have taken their A-levels in the US and in Germany. They hadn’t even learned more than a few days to get best scores in all those test (were it maths or english literature).
It might be that I know only the smart kids, but I don’t think so. They were pretty average, but the US high schools don’t seem to be built for excellence (unlike your universities), instead they are built for social excellence, which is not the same.
of course, this is only an opinion and not a research paper per se, but it definitely was the impression of many German pupils venturing into the US high school system.
Max
I’ve noticed the same trend. The US does a bad job at educating its most gifted students but a good job at educating the average student. Other countries are better at getting their best students a great education but tend to let the others fall behind.
And here’s some inflation for you. My new car makes 608 bhp. An equivalent model from the same maker a decade ago had but 405 bhp. Perhaps the numbers are true but it makes me wonder about the size of German ponies these days…
BTW who cares about school anyway? State schooling does what it’s designed to do- socialise the students and pacify them. You may as well lobotimise the kids. There is some wisdom in the quote from Singapore (above) though. Fact is, the Singers DoE will never sort the issue out so long as they stay with a socialist education system.
“Now that they’ve freed Nelson, what about the rest of us.” -Wiremu Makare (aged 8yrs at the time).
Sione
If the Bush Administration succeeds at creating policy that produces tens of thousands of new math teachers, the pay for a math teacher will decline. What little differential now exists for math teachers will disappear, and with it, any market driven incentive for producing those math teachers in the first place.
Secondly, what will we do with the future generation of math literate citizens? I don’t see a very rosey U.S. employment picture for math and engineering students. These jobs either pay well due to scarcity of talent and are therefore susceptible to outsourcing or they will pay poorly because of oversupply and therefore will not justify the large training investment.
What I see as a better solution is for the government to create demand for engineering talent instead of supply. Oil is an example. The current administration tries to create supply by appeasing Saudia Arabia and freeing Iraq. In these and other ways it subsidizes crude oil. The government should be creating demand for alternate energy sources. One way to do this would be to increase taxes on crude oil. The tax would create demand for alternate energy solutions. The tax would also create demand for the math and engineering talent necessary to produce those solutions.
But will this demand create jobs for U.S. citizens? I don’t know. I suspect that research and development of alternate energy solutions could as easily leak from the U.S. as any other high tech job. In addition to creating demand, the government must return to an easy immigration policy. It certainly would be the case that salaries for U.S. workers would relax somewhat. But then outsourcing never really works if there is no talent pool left in the lower cost countries.
Bill states:
Are you aware of the implications of your statement? Are we clay to be molded by your elected agents? You are advocating the initiation of violence in order to create a world more to your liking. The seeming innocence of having government “create demand” obscures the fact that that means forcing individuals to dispose of their property in a way they otherwise would not choose to. Is this what you really desire? I guess it is:
Bill elaborates:
So the way to “create demand” for crude oil alternatives to steal from all crude oil users? Is the right to property only valid as long as you agree with its use? Can you see that civilization will be undermined as long as people claim a right to initiate force to control the use of the property of others? The Mises Institute has recently made Bastiat’s The Law available online… you won’t have to read very far into it to see the repercussions of this sort of use of law.
How about removing the subsidization of crude oil and letting the market – the individual stakeholders – decide how to best utilize their property? You may find that the price of crude rises & people decide to fund alternate enery research. Or maybe you won’t – which would only mean that property owners would rather, for the time being, continue their crude consumption rather than invest in alternatives. Is this so terrible? Then use your own savings to invest in this kind of research. If you are correct, you stand to make a tidy profit for correctly predicting future demand. While I may, personally share your outlook, I would rather not have my savings stolen from me to fund this research.
Anyone here familiar with Charlotte Iserbyt and her writings?
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/author.htm
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/book.htm
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.pdf
I have a hard copy. Very impressive, huge. She lives ust 20 minutes down the road in Camden Maine.
Also check out,
http://www.americandeception.com/Home.html
Download these (very large) pdf files. . . . and more
Cox Committee Hearings 1952–Full Report 818 Pages
Reece Committee Hearings 1953-1954–Full Report—Pages 1-2086
Reece Committee Hearings 1953-1954 Part 1—Pages 1-1000
Reece Committee Hearings 1953-1954 Part 2—Pages 1001-2086
Don Bell Reports-1972-1993
etc. etc. .
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