The American Institutes of Research study (reviewed in Gadfly) analyzing student performance on TIMSS and PISA had some amazing findings.
The conventional wisdom, which all of us accepted and repeated, says that American 4th grade students are at the international average while U.S. 8th graders are near the bottom. Even Thomas Friedman's recent best-seller, The World Is Flat, reiterates this alleged truism.
What the AIR study shows is that 4th graders actually do no better than students in 8th grade. In fact, the performance of American students does not decline as students stay in school longer. Rather, it is persistently mediocre across the spectrum of grades.
In their analysis, the scholars explain that the country comparisons include a disparate array of participants in each assessment. So they make a list of the nations that participated in all three assessments - 4th grade TIMSS, 8th grade TIMSS, and PISA for 15-year-old students. When all the one-shot nations drop away, only twelve are left. Among them, U.S. students exhibit consistently unimpressive results: our fourth graders rank 8th of the twelve, while eighth graders rank 9th.
The AIR study also comes down conclusively on one side of one of the most important issues of the math wars. Tom Loveless, among others, has complained that the math establishment's indifference toward basic skills has made it harder for American students to master more complex skills; his adversaries say that the calculator can handle the basic skills and that students can quickly skip to complex problem-solving. According to the AIR analysis, however, American students are weak in both basic and complex skills. The authors believe that Loveless's balanced approach is validated by the evidence from the international assessments.
They also point out that U.S. math teachers spend more time on "relevant," hands-on activities than do their counterparts in higher-scoring lands. Yet every poor showing leads to a demand for more relevance. This is a useful finding.
All in all, this is a remarkable and enlightening contribution to our understanding of the problems in American education.
Diane Ravitch, research professor, New York University and trustee, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
