Posted on 09/10/2001 1:02:04 PM PDT by NativeNewYorker
WASHINGTON - An overwhelming majority - 85 percent - of
foreign-exchange students find their courses in U.S. high schools
easier than back home, according to a survey released Monday.
In addition, 56 percent of foreign teens said American students
spent less time on schoolwork than their foreign counterparts. The
findings also highlight sharp cultural differences: A whopping 67.2
percent of the exchange students said success in sports is more
important at American high schools than at their home schools,
according to the survey by the Brown Center on Educational Policy at
The Brookings Institution.
And, in sharp contrast to many American teens, 73 percent of the
foreign students said they did not have jobs while in school.
``These responses may help explain why high school students in many
Asian and European countries always do well on tests of academic
knowledge,'' said Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center. ``In a
nutshell, they work harder and care more.''
The results come a few months after a federal report described the
senior year of high school as a ``lost opportunity'' for American
kids, and an international survey showed the math and science scores
of American eighth-graders lag behind their counterparts in developed
countries.
``This reflects the fact that we do not challenge our students
sufficiently,'' Christopher Cross, president of the Council for Basic
Education, said of the survey results. ``We don't have high
expectations for students, and we don't hold them to standards.''
William Schmidt, a Michigan State University expert on math and
science curricula, said a ``shopping-mall mentality'' prevails in U.S.
high schools. ``There are very few required courses, and you have a
lot of kids not taking the very same things that children are required
to study in other countries.''
The lack of rigor in high school coursework, he said, can be traced
to middle schools - where too much time is spent repeating subjects
like arithmetic, while many students in Asia and Europe have moved on
to more challenging subjects like algebra.
``Middle school is an intellectual wasteland,'' Schmidt said. ``By
the time our students enter high school, they can be two years
behind'' their foreign counterparts who will be their competitors in
an increasingly technical world.
Other key findings:
- Nearly 52 percent of foreign students said learning key academic
subjects - math, science, literature and history - is ``very
important'' to students in their home country. But only about 22
percent believe that kind of intellectual development is ``very
important'' to the American students they encountered.
- More than 68 percent of the foreign teens said students in their
countries used high school to prepare for a job, and about 45 percent
believe job preparation is important to American teens. Loveless said
that may reflect a belief among U.S. teens that they will get their
job training in college.
- Math homework is assigned with the same frequency in the United
States and abroad. About 47 percent of exchange students said they got
math homework every day in their U.S. schools, and about 42 percent
reported daily take-home assignments in math in their own countries.
The survey of 368 students, conducted in April and May, marks the
first effort to examine how exchange students view their schooling,
Loveless said. The mean age of the students surveyed was 17.3. The
Brown Center also is polling American high-schoolers who have studied
abroad to get their views of foreign schooling.
The margin of error on most questions in the Brookings poll was
plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Loveless cautioned that the students surveyed may not represent
their countries' student populations. Most foreign-exchange students
are high achievers fluent in English, and probably come from more
affluent households than other students in their home country.
Still, most of the foreign-exchange students attended above-average
schools in the United States, he said.
Loveless said U.S. teens are not to blame for the lack of rigor in
their coursework or their preoccupation with sports. Japan is as
baseball-crazed as the United States, he said, but ``the adults don't
allow athletics to seep into the high school campus.''
``Teen culture is really in the hands of adults. Adults structure
high schools in such a way that sports are emphasized. American
employers hire (teens) for part-time jobs,'' Loveless said. ``We need
to think about holding adults responsible for fixing this situation.''
On the Web:
www.brookings.edu, a link to the Brown Center report on American
education.
Not true. It starts in Elementary school and the gap doesn't become noticed until middle school.
Some Asian math topics will be taught later, some earlier, the emphasis is more on mathematic reasoning at an earlier age, less on breadth of subjects at an earlier age.
Probability, negative numbers, coordinate graphing is not taught until the secondary level, Roman Numerals are not taught at all. It does not have the breadth of US math classes, but it has more depth, i.e. it is not "an inch deep and a mile wide". So I guess it depends on what you consider necessary for a "complete" math program.
I don't know about the nuances of curriculum structure, but my sense is that the US system has been slowly lowering its signal-to-noise ratio since WW II, and the slippage becomes apparent when seen by folks coming in from the outside.
I can also share this anecdote: A friend who works at a VERY BIG textbook publishing house told me that one year they just renamed the junior high school history text as the high school text...just like that.
Generalities but they seem to be universal among the schools.
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