U.S. Education Assessment Shows Modest but Steady Gains in Math Scores(scientificamerican.com)
scientificamerican.com
U.S. Education Assessment Shows Modest but Steady Gains in Math Scores
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=american-math-scores
2 comments
One thing most people never get with this topic is the enormous variation between groups, whether regional, socio-economic, ethno-cultural, etc. Fareed Zakaria has said something to the effect that America could be cleanly split into two nations, where the children of one perform at or better than the level of European and even some East Asian nations, whereas the children of the other perform abysmally, on par with the poorest of the developing world. In America, aggregate measurements are meaningless.
I was trying to test the same hypothesis too and the fact that there was only 1% increase in students with math proficiency told me that perhaps the gap between the two groups is not closing. Otherwise, you would see a much higher number of students with math proficiency today compared to a decade ago.
It's like managing programmers by rewarding high LOC / day. There's pros and cons to this approach. The pro is you control the system, and don't just let brain-dead practices remain. For example, you sack the programmers who don't actually program, or encourage the teachers who don't actually teach to lift their game. Welcome back to the 1920s.
The con is that people start gaming the system.
It's like putting a patient in an iron lung. It keeps them above a certain minimum level, but it's also a sign that things were well and truly screwed before hand.