How reliable is the data? Can we believe that every student is counted and included in the statistics? What chance is there that data is being manipulated to make certain countries look good? Are we at the bottom because American’s are stupid or perhaps because we are fudging the numbers less than everybody else?
RE: How reliable is the data? Can we believe that every student is counted and included in the statistics?
Notice that they are comparing SHANGHAI-CHINA ( a city ) with ALL of the United States ( Same also with Hongkong, Taipei and Macau ). How fair is that?
What about doing a study on ALL of China instead of simply selecting one city?
And notice when you take the PISA scores of Whites and Asians in the USA ( not including Blacks and Hispanics ), the USA compares quite favorably with Japan and Switzerland.
“Although students from 12 provinces took the test in 2009, Loveless wrote on the Brookings Institution thinktank’s website, the Chinese government only shared Shanghai’s scores.
“The OECD should be far more transparent than it has been about the agreements it has with the Chinese government concerning who is tested and which scores are released,” he wrote.”
Shanghai is not typical of China. I suspect there is a lot of apples/oranges in these results.
Ooops....a link for my quote....(a Chinese wouldn’t have screwed this up ;-) )
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/03/shanghai-china-oecd-education-ranking