Heck, we're only a little below average!

Here's an article that perhaps does more to explain why the U.S. educational system will just continue to get worse than any argument backed up by facts.  Why?  Because the article, and its commentators, are busy trying to explain how the facts don't mean anything.  Here's an example:

Every year someone conducts a geography test among America's high school students, and every year the results are the same: lots of kids can't find France on a map. Quelle horreur! And every year I have the same reaction: how about if we give this test to adults? I'll bet most of them can't find France on a map either.

 It may or may not be that most adults can't find France on a map.  I can't speak for most people.  As it happens, though, I can find France on a map.  But here's a fact about skills: if you don't use them, you lose them.  If you don't have to remember where France is on a map, then it's quite possible you'll forget where it is.  It doesn't mean you never learned it in the first place.  Just like any other skill, if you don't use it, you'll lose it.  If you're a good guitar player, but you don't practice for years, it's unlikely you'll just pick it up later as if you never stopped.  This is the very point of the television show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader."  I would hope that the fifth graders were more familiar with the subjects that they have just studied than an adult that hasn't given those subjects a thought in years.

In fact, this degradation of skills is also the big reason we should be concerned about high unemployment and underemployment of college graduates.  These people learned skills in college that they aren't using now, and those skills are gradually fading away.  But that's a whole other subject.

There's a widespread myth that America used to be the best educated country in the world and has since slipped into mediocrity, but as near as I can tell it's just a myth.

As near as you can tell?  Take a look at the history of this country, a country that started from next to nothing and over the course of about 200 years became the most powerful nation on Earth.  I have serious doubts that we accomplished that with a mediocre at best educational system.

America's kids have always been fairly middle-of-the-pack.

Yeah, I don't know about that.  But, let's say that statement is true for a moment.  Does that mean that we should be satisfied?  I can remember a time when people strove for better than mediocre, when the ultimate goal was to excel.  Of course, not everyone did.  The key to living a good life was to know and accept your limitations.  Everyone can't be the best at everything, and most can't be the best at anything other than being themselves.  You learn to accept your limitations and move on.  But to say that we've always been mediocre is no reason to not try to be better.

And yet....as you can see in the chart, the difference in literacy levels between countries is fairly small except at the very top and bottom, and the United States is sandwiched right in between Denmark, Germany, and France.

 Okay, and if we assume that these scores are normally distributed then that would make sense, as most of the scores would cluster around the mean.  But I still don't see why we should feel good about being sandwiched somewhere just below the middle simply because we're about the same as France (which we can't find on a map, but maybe they can't find us either) and Germany, et. al.  I don't care how anyone else feels about this, really, I want to be up there with Japan.  And, if you look at some of the other graphics in this report you'll see that the people who wrote the report describe the area of the charts that the U.S. is in as being "significantly below average."

But the more troubling thing about the chart than just our low placement, is the wider than normal disparity in scores here in the U.S.  That's what the longer bar means.  It means that there is a significant difference between the highest and lowest scores here.  As it is put in the original publication:

On average, 152 score points separate the highest and lowest 5% of performers in literacy. A number of countries have comparatively small variations in literacy proficiency among their adults. These include Japan (129 points), the Slovak Republic (131 points), the Czech Republic (133 points) and Korea (136 points). Countries with comparatively large variations in scores include Sweden (163 points), Canada (163 points), the United States (162 points), Finland (162 points), Spain (162 points) and Australia (161 points).

 The author of the article, in defending his apparent position that there's nothing to be alarmed about in our education system puts forth this question:

Does anyone think that Denmark and Germany are educational hellholes doomed to decline and poverty?

No, they are average, but I do think that if they look at these results with the attitude that they are about average, and what's to worry about, then they will become "educational hellholes", and the same goes for us.  If we all just sit back and say "I don't think it's really any worse than it ever was" it will get worse.

As an aside, one odd result in this study is that America does worse in numeracy than in literacy. This is odd because if you look at NAEP test scores over time, it's the math scores that have gotten substantially better. If there's an area where you'd think the United States would be in relatively better shape, it's math.

I don't really see this as odd at all.  The NAEP is a U.S. government administered test.  Unfortunately, the site is down due to the government shutdown so I can't actually link to it now.  But just because the U.S. scores have improved on these tests doesn't mean much of anything.  I know from personal experience that teachers tend to teach what is on these tests, and they teach how to take the tests.  So, I would expect scores on those tests to improve over time, but only because the students have been primed for that test.  The OECD report on the other hand shows that we have lost ground relative to other countries.  Perhaps they're not just pushing to raise test scores like we are.

In short, the reason that I think our educational system here in the U.S. will continue to get progressively worse is because no one really wants to believe that it actually is, and beyond that, people want to think that average is some kind of goal to try to attain.  As I always tell the kids here, average is NOT the goal because if that's where you aim, it's more likely you'll actually hit below average.

There were some interesting comments on the article as well.  Here's a good one:

Part of the reason the United States is average is because it is so big.

Good one!  Being that the U.S. is one of the largest countries in terms of geographic area, we have a built-in excuse to be below average.  Welp, nothing we can do about that!  And here's a reply to that comment:

Also, the diversity.

  I don't know about that.  Diversity is supposed to provide for a more rich educational experience, something that is definitely lacking in our educational system because we're too busy trying to act like we're all the same.  But, that's the subject for another post, perhaps.  But it is true that ethnic diversity seems to have a negative impact on where a country places in the OECD report.  Here's a map showing the relative ethnic diversity of countries.  Follow that link and you'll see that the higher scoring countries generally have lower diversity.  One notable exception is Canada, which placed higher in the report but is also more diverse.

I'm sure this data set is as relevant to national education as Olympic medal counts are to overall physical fitness.

Yeah, when we don't like data, we can always resort to calling it irrelevant.

At any rate, that's my take.  I've never been shy about saying that the education system here in the U.S. needs a major overhaul.  And this attitude that we're okay because we're not that far below average is the reason we'll continue to decline until we're not smart enough to know how far we've fallen.  Although, judging from this article, we may already be there.