Tag: international education

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3 Ways to Improve U.S. Students Standing Worldwide

The latest international report on student knowledge and success worldwide once again paints U.S. pupils in a bad light. This is not the first time American students have lagged behind their peers on the OECD PISA global education survey that tests and compares student outcomes in areas like math, science and reading. The results are really just more of the same.

While I take issue with particular parts of the test (leader China reportedly only tested students in elite schools in Shanghai), it is a wake-up call nonetheless. When it comes to American K-12 student achievement, it is not enough to be a big fish in a little pond. To really make a splash and gain international footing, a few things need to change in U.S. K-12 education. Here are just a few:

Teacher support. This starts from administration in individual schools and extends into the community at large. Parents must also respect the role of teachers in order for kids to follow suit. Unfortunately many times teachers are pitted as servants, and not put on the pedestal they deserve. Perhaps I’m biased but what is more important than imparting knowledge to our next generation? Today’s best teachers are not simply reciting facts and expecting their students to regurgitate them; the teachers in contemporary classrooms are “showing their work” so to speak by imparting the life skills necessary for students to find answers on their own and be successful citizens in other ways.

Teachers need backup from the other people in their students’ lives and from their own colleagues and superiors. Traditionally high-performing PISA countries like Sweden, Australia and Japan all have one thing in common – high levels of community support for teachers and involvement from teachers in the course of instruction and curriculum. When new initiatives are handed down in the U.S., like the Common Core standards, teachers should have access to resources to help them reach goals. Teachers need more input in decisions, more access to continuing education resources and more faith from the administrators and families impacted by their classrooms.

STEM emphasis. There seems to be a general societal consensus that science, technology, engineering and math subjects are somehow boring, or uncool. A lot of attention has been placed lately on young women and finding ways to encourage them in male-dominated STEM fields, but I’d argue that young men need the same opportunities. Overall, more American students need to take an interest in STEM topics if we want to be able to compete on a global scale. The rapidly changing field of technology makes this part of U.S. K-12 education even more pressing. As the digital age continues to modify life as we know it, the students in today’s classrooms must have the tools to lead the country in discoveries, inventions and communication technology the coming decades.

Equal opportunities. In country that claims to be based on equality for all, there are still too many achievement gaps in our classrooms. While it should be a non-issue, the color of a student’s skin does seem to impact his or her academic achievement. It is not a direct effect, of course, but still something that needs even more focus to overcome. The best work on closing the achievement gap is in individual schools and I think that makes the most sense. No blanket national program will be able to answer all of the intricacies of why an achievement gap exists in a particular place or school. From a federal standpoint, however, schools should be encouraged to develop programs for eliminating achievement gaps and reaching individual students where it is most effective – their own classrooms.

Why do you think American students lag the rest of the world? What would you add to my list?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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5 Steps America’s Schools Must Take to Reclaim its Spot on the World Stage

The United States entered the 21st century as the world’s sole superpower. Our diplomatic strength, military might, financial resources, and technological innovation were, and continue to be, the envy of the world.

However, in the crucial area of education, the U.S. lags behind many other developed countries. Although the U.S. spends more per student than almost any other country in the world, international exams have demonstrated that we consistently perform well behind countries such as South Korea, China, Japan, and Finland in the areas of reading and math.

Why is it happening and what do we, as Americans, need to do to rise to the top again? Here are a few thoughts on that.

  1. Consider what’s really important: more respect for education and teachers. China, Japan, and South Korea understand that well-educated workers are crucial for survival in the competitive global economy.

Thus, they place enormous emphasis on education, ensuring that their students are given not only foundational reading and math skills, but also that they are able to think creatively and solve problems. Their youth are poised to take on and conquer the world. Educating, hiring, and retaining high-quality teachers are key to lasting reform.

On the other hand, the teaching profession in America is undervalued, certainly in comparison with countries like Finland and South Korea.

  1. Recognize that money doesn’t solve everything. School systems are using more money but have less to show for it. Test results, especially among the children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, are dismal. America has extraordinary natural resources, a solid, functioning democracy, and an excellent infrastructure, but unless we can reform our educational system to produce students who are able to take advantage of new technologies and compete in the global economy, we will cede our position as world leader.
  2. Weigh the various factors that make or break a student’s education, especially community involvement. The educational system involves seven major players: the federal government, district authorities, the community, parents and family, the school administration, teachers, and the students themselves. In order to reform our schools, we must look at each of these players, investigating the interactions among them, and offering suggestions for bolstering involvement and efficacy between them.

In areas where schools are successful, community involvement is a critical element. In low socioeconomic communities, there is often a sense that schools are separate entities, run by elite elements that have little connection to the community. Perhaps the starkest difference between students from low socioeconomic environments and those from wealthier environments is the amount of parental involvement in students’ education.

  1. Consider that it’s not just about the tests. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), while admirable, has also proven fundamentally flawed. It is not producing the anticipated results, and has had the effect of forcing schools to teach to the exam, rather than fostering a love of learning among students.
  2. Use authority wisely. There is mounting evidence that the U. S. education system is failing our students. Appropriate engagement and direction by district authorities is crucial to creating a quality learning environment. Too often, cronyism, corruption, and misuse of resources diminish the influence of the district-level administration.

Society in general needs to understand that the lack of quality teachers, effective administration, and parental involvement are all factors that contribute to the current state of our educational system. The country must unite and work together to carry the responsibility of enriching and continuing America’s future via educational excellence. We must become supermen and superwomen.

What are your thoughts on how the American education system can reach elite status globally? Please leave a comment below.

 

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Here’s why immigrant students perform poorly

Molly McManus, University of Texas at Austin

Immigrant students in the United States consistently perform worse academically than nonimmigrant students. This achievement gap is evident as early as preschool and only grows as immigrant students advance through high school.

But, what causes the achievement gap?

One notion that fuels anti-immigrant attitudes is the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because of their immigrant backgrounds.

This is misguided.

As a former teacher and now researcher of immigrant families, I am familiar with concerns about low academic achievement among immigrant students. However, as my work shows, immigrant students face barriers beyond their immigrant backgrounds, including restrictive learning environments in their classrooms.

A multitude of barriers

Research has also shown that immigrant students tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, speak a language other than English at home and enter school later than nonimmigrant students.

Immigrant kids tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods.
michael_swan, CC BY-ND

We know that poverty, language barriers and low levels of preschool enrollment contribute to poor academic performance.

There is also another, lesser known, factor at work here: school and teacher attitudes toward immigrant students. Immigrant students have been shown to perform worse when their schools or teachers harbor negative attitudes about their presence and abilities.

Poverty

A recent report on immigration and education from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows the extent of the immigrant achievement gap.

According to the report, in 2012, students in the U.S. with an immigrant background performed worse than nonimmigrant students on the Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA), a test administered to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, including the U.S. Immigrant students in the U.S. scored about 20 points lower in reading and 15 points lower in math.

Many people are also concerned that immigrant students negatively impact the education systems that they enter.

Current research, however, shows the opposite.

The presence of immigrant students does not negatively affect overall school performance. Rather, schools that serve poor families tend to underperform and immigrant families are often poor.

Poverty affects over half of immigrant families. In 2013, 54 percent of immigrant families in the US qualified as low-income.

In fact, when family income is taken into account, the difference between scores from immigrant students and nonimmigrant students on the PISA disappears.

Language and preschool

Immigrant students also struggle when they do not have mastery of the dominant language in their new country.

In 2015, nearly 10 percent of students in K-12 in the U.S. were classified as English Language Learners. These language barriers explain a larger portion of the achievement gap than immigrant backgrounds.

Also, low levels of enrollment in early childhood programs have a huge impact. Early entrance into the school system increases students chances for success in later grades. However, many immigrant families do not enroll their children in preschool programs because of families’ legal status, language barriers and cultural sensitivities.

Discrimination and racism

There is actually more evidence to show that schools in the U.S. are negatively impacting immigrant students and their families, not the other way around.

Many immigrant students face discrimination and racism in the form of segregation and hostile attitudes at their schools. Also, many schools don’t offer essential resources, like family liaisons or other social services, that would support immigrant families as well as the larger school community.

Immigrant students are also affected by a rarely acknowledged but equally important factor: the receptiveness of their host country’s education system, also known as the “context of reception.”

Teachers’ views of immigrant kids leave a big impact.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/presidioofmonterey/6947110047/in/photolist-bzTKMr-cTmUAU-dvakxJ-8PCwt2-cTmE1d-8CutqV-bVACx8-eg5hzD-8SMZsm-cTmKxb-qrtqd2-9qr8c3-HJCf-am1wbA-2FMQZN-cTmM5q-9bTe76-d2kArd-5NpaP-pLViJs-dXkbDh-cTmU2f-6oG67K-dXeDxK-dXeeZ4-dXefeB-dXe, CC BY-NC

When teachers and staff have negative views of immigrant children and their families, it has a negative impact on the academic performance of immigrant students.

Negative views are particularly harmful when they involve deficit thinking, or the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because their families have less or know less.

Alternatively, immigrant students who enter a welcoming environment benefit from positive school outcomes. Research in education shows that students who enter positive contexts of reception are more motivated, better adjusted and more engaged in curriculum.

The OECD report also found that immigrant students who said they felt supported and cared for by their teachers scored higher on the PISA.

Value in diversity

Research shows that despite barriers, immigrant students often hold high aspirations for themselves. These high aspirations make them more likely to put in greater effort to take advantage of educational opportunities and succeed academically. This is part of a phenomenon known as the immigrant paradox.

Just consider this fact. Among low-income students who took the PISA, immigrants make up a larger share of high-performing students than nonimmigrants.

At a time when presidential candidates are threatening to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and governors are attempting to close their states to Syrian refugees, it is important to understand that immigrant students do not harm our education system or our communities. Instead, they bring valuable diversity.

The Conversation

Molly McManus, Ph.D. Student in Educational Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

 

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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3 Little-Known Facts You Should Know about Education around the World

There is lots of talk about how America compares to other countries on a global scale, especially how the US lags behind other developed nations in education quality. However, when it comes to addressing the issues of education worldwide, there is more than just the supposed mediocrity of the US public education system to consider.

Here are three little-known facts you should know about education around the world:

  1. Girls are actually doing better worldwide than boys. Girls are outperforming boys academically in many countries according to a report from Dr. Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and David C. Geary of the University of Missouri. They found that in 2009, high school girls performed considerably better on an international standardized test in 52 out of 74 participating countries. This includes countries where women face political, economic or social inequalities.

Here in the U.S., we are seeing girls outperforming boys. Thirty years after the passage of equal opportunity laws, girls are graduating from high school and college and going into professions in record numbers. The boys are now the ones who are falling behind their female counterparts.

This isn’t just an inner city problem either; it is happening in all 50 states, in all parts of society.

School psychologist Dr. Michael Thompson who writes about academic problems of boys in his books says that after decades of special attention, girls are soaring while boys are stagnating.

“Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school,” Thompson said.

Geary said he worries about the study’s implications for a complex labor market, especially in non-developed countries. He said there’s going to be “a lot of boys who are going to become young adults with few employable skills.”

He continues, “If you have countries with a large percentage of these types of men, crime rates go up.”

In a country where boys and girls are considered equals, it surprises me that there is less urgency surrounding the growing gap between genders. I hope that through bringing these findings to our attention, we will begin to give boys the extra support they need to thrive. This is a very real issue in both the United States and worldwide.

  1. 62 million girls are not in school. President and First Lady Obama announced “Let Girls Learn,” a White House initiative that targets global education for young women as a road to more economic opportunity, less child marriages and less violence towards women worldwide. The Peace Corps would partner with the White House and target 11 countries for educational programs in the first year that include Ghana, Moldova, Cambodia and Uganda.

A statement on the initiative from the White House reads:

62 million girls around the world — half of whom are adolescent — are not in school. These girls have diminished economic opportunities and are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, early and forced marriage, and other forms of violence.

Yet when a girl receives a quality education, she is more likely to earn a decent living, raise a healthy, educated family, and improve the quality of life for herself, her family, and her community.

Here in the United States we tend to bicker on the details of delivering an education to our kids, but we often forget the binding belief that American children DESERVE that baseline education. Outside the U.S., that belief is not as prevalent and that is especially true when it comes to young women throughout the world.

In some cases young women are treated as second-class citizens, or worse, against their wills. In other cases, young women are not given access to education and therefore have a very narrow view of the world and what role they should play in it. In both situations the U.S. should be at the forefront of extended education as a means for change and other countries should follow suit.

  1. Developing countries are 100 years behind in education. The Brookings Institution reports that education quality and levels in developing countries are approximately 100 years behind developed countries. This global gap in education shows that in the world’s poorest nations, the average levels of attainment are at levels achieved in developed countries in the early 20th century.

The good news is that in the past 50 years, the belief that schooling is a necessity has spread across the globe (thanks in part to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and now 90 percent of primary school-aged children are enrolled.

Enrolling and progressing are very different things though, as we know just looking at American schools. Getting children into a classroom and seated at a desk is just the start. When it comes to what is actually being learned in these developing nations, the gap is wide, to put it mildly. According to the Brookings Institute, at the current rate of educational attainment, it will take 1.6 billion people more than 85 years to catch up to the current educational level in developed countries.

So then the question becomes: What will this gap look like in another 85 years? How can we successfully narrow it?

Educational attainment is not just a manifestation of what happens in the classrooms, of course. It is much more involved than that. Addressing issues like eradicating child hunger, providing clean water, and expanding access to healthcare worldwide will all help educational levels rise, along with quality of life. Developed countries should care about these issues not just because they are issues of humanity, but because they all impact the global economy too.

Where do you expect the global education gap will rest in another 50 years? 85 years? 100+ years?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.