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...As a new study on education standards world-wide shows, unlike in the U.S. and much of Europe, high school students in these countries actually learn something. In this country, the study's findings grabbed headlines for how poorly American students score.... Only a generation ago, U.S. high school students ranked No. 1. Today their performance has fallen below the OECD average -- except in reading, where Americans manage to eke out an "average."... Less publicized has been why U.S. scores are so low. The OECD researchers identified several key characteristics that most successful school systems share -- namely, decentralization, competition and...

Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math skills, ahead of only Portugal, Mexico and three other nations, according to a new international comparison that economists say is bad news for long-term economic growth. Two of the study's most unsettling findings: The percentage of top-achieving math students in the nation is about half that of other industrialized countries, and the gap between scores of whites and minority groups -- who will make up an increasing share of the labor force in coming decades -- is enormous. The U.S. ranked 24th among 29 countries that are...

American high school students have a poorer mastery of basic math concepts than their counterparts in most other leading industrialized nations, according to a major international survey released yesterday. The PISA study, conducted every three years, ranked the United States 24th out of 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world's richest countries. Students from Finland and South Korea scored best in the survey, which measured the ability of 15-year-olds to solve real-life math problems. The results suggest that, at the secondary-school level, the learning gap between the United States and...

Across the nation, schools are re-introducing Latin into their curricula. While Latin’s visibility is highest in private and homeschool settings, it is mounting a comeback in the public school system as well. This remarkable phenomenon brings to mind our often-ignored connection to the Roman and Greek civilizations of the ancient world. What Is Old Is New Again Latin’s stability makes it unique among languages still in use. Although centuries ago its grammar and vocabulary became essentially frozen (thus earning the designation “dead”), this language of the Roman Empire did not disappear — thanks largely to its status as the Roman...

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FRANKFURT, Germany - A 38-year-old with degrees in psychology, education and computer science needed only 11.8 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head, setting a new record, organizers said. Onlookers with electronic calculators needed more time to solve the problem that Gert Mittring figured on his own, with two umpires checking the time, at a math museum in the small German town of Giessen near Frankfurt in western Germany. "I first think of an elegant problem-solving algorithm and the result comes immediately," said Mittring, who beat the previous record of 13.55 seconds, set by...

A private plane crashed near Houston's Hobby Airport Monday. And it was a plane that was coming to Houston to transport former President Bush to a conference in Equador. The plane went down Monday morning near Highway 288 and Beltway 8. Former President Bush suspendeded his trip to Ecuador because of the crash. A conference organizer says the plane should have flown the ex-president from Houston. Houston District Fire Chief Jack Williams said that the twin-engine Gulfstream jet arriving from Dallas Love Field apparently clipped a tall light tower at a Beltway 8 toll plaza, shearing off a wing. He...

Thursday, November 18, 2004 Is U.S. math test a no-brainer? National measure is too easy and casts doubt on achievement gains, study concludes. Others disagree. WASHINGTON – The national test of student math skills is filled with easy questions, raising doubts about recent gains in achievement tests, a study contends.On the eighth-grade version of the test, almost 40 percent of the questions address skills taught in first or second grade, according to the report by Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The test for fourth-graders also has "false...

No wonder these guys can't win, look at how they do math. When they count how many votes Kerry needs to get out of the provisional ballots, they neglect to add those that would have gone to Bush to his total (besides, they somehow dream that they are going to get 85% of the provisionals going to Kerry). By the way, you need to replace the DOT with a "." or FreeRepublic blocks the dailyKos link. ---------------------------------------- by kos Wed Nov 3rd, 2004 at 13:53:48 GMT It's not over in Ohio. As this email notes: Bush is currently leading in...

CLEVELAND — Many different combinations of states could lift President Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. But the one scenario some insiders on both sides consider the most likely features six states, split into groups of three. These strategists and operatives agree that either candidate will be very tough to beat if he can win two of the three largest battlegrounds — Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio — and two of the three Upper Midwest states still in play — Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. In 2000, Bush carried two of...

Ever wonder where that stupid "margin of error" thingy comes from? Here's a quick primer for the curious and the masochistic: The infamous "margin" comes directly from the formula for the 95% confidence interval for a sample proportion. Before getting to that, let's define a couple of terms: P => the REAL population proportion p => the observed proportion in a random sample of the population n => the sample The margin of error arises from the fact that a limited random sample may not reflect reality. To illustrate, think about a simple experiment: Flip a fair coin (where the...

CONSIDER a verbal description of the effect of gravity: drop a ball, and it will fall. That is a true enough fact, but fuzzy in the way that frustrates scientists. How fast does the ball fall? Does it fall at constant rate, or accelerate? Would a heavier ball fall faster? More words, more sentences could provide details, swelling into an unwieldy yet still incomplete paragraph. The wonder of mathematics is that it captures precisely in a few symbols what can only be described clumsily with many words. Those symbols, strung together in meaningful order, make equations - which in turn...

The ancient science of Vedic mathematics may well give calculators a run for their money Does your mind wobble when confronted by a mathematical challenge more forbidding than two plus two? Do you dream of becoming the kind of person who can rattle off answers to the most complicated sums in the fraction of a second? If the answer is yes, you need Vedic mathematics. Try this for size. What's the square of 65? Simple: just multiply the first digit, 6, with its successor, 7. The answer is 42. Now find the square of the second digit, five, which is...

NEW STUDY SHOWS GOP CHEATING WORKERS John Swindle and G. Ullable, Unbelievable News Cambridge, Mass. Aug 18, 2004 -- A seminar held last week at Harvard University among the nations leading mathematicians has concluded with a stunning revelation; two plus two equals five! Dr. Fester N. Boil, chief mathematician at Berkley College in California, used his new theory of “selective fact” to prove his formula, developed along with Dr. May B. Anut of Barnard College, that when social factors are included in the computation, two plus two equates to five. “It’s a breakthrough of incredible proportion”, said Dr. Boil in...

This is kind of a stupid question as I should know math better, but the fact is, i haven't taken a math course since first semester of Sophomore year in college (Calc 2 - fall '96) Anyhow, can somebody show me how to solve this linear function: F(x) = mx + 4x Thanks.

SANTA CRUZ — A small, embarrassing gaffe by local school officials has spawned a big, controversial movement statewide. Santa Cruz City Schools officials realized this fall they’d failed to inform high school students and staff that, starting with the Class of 2004, pupils needed to pass algebra to graduate. Word of the state requirement sparked panic among the 150 students whose diplomas were in jeopardy, a raft of accelerated algebra classes and, ultimately, forgiveness from the state Board of Education, which approved a one-year reprieve in January. But the story doesn’t end there. To the chagrin of high-standards advocates throughout...

Math Lab Computer experiments are transforming mathematics Erica KlarreichMany people regard mathematics as the crown jewel of the sciences. Yet math has historically lacked one of the defining trappings of science: laboratory equipment. Physicists have their particle accelerators; biologists, their electron microscopes; and astronomers, their telescopes. Mathematics, by contrast, concerns not the physical landscape but an idealized, abstract world. For exploring that world, mathematicians have traditionally had only their intuition. Now, computers are starting to give mathematicians the lab instrument that they have been missing. Sophisticated software is enabling researchers to travel further and deeper into the mathematical universe. They're...

<p>Kids in New York's public schools might not learn very much, but here's one lesson they're sure to grasp: When the going gets tough - cheat.</p> <p>That's the message officials have been sending with growing frequency, as pressure builds for the schools to turn out kids who actually know something - or hold them back until they do.</p>

<p>Racial politics, remedial education, teacher training and K-12 school policies are all intertwined in the California State University (CSU) system, and the result is bad news for everyone - students, public schools and taxpayers alike.</p> <p>To understand this complex picture, some background is in order. A key point to start with is that Cal State colleges have both been affected by problems in state public schools and have been a cause of some of these problems. Here's how: Starting in the 1980s, colleges of education - including CSU's - aggressively promoted faddish education theories like "whole language learning" and "fuzzy math" that plunged California public school students almost to the bottom of the nation in reading and math.</p>

If I stand at the end of my street, and you speed past me at 90 miles an hour in your Ford Escort, your watch will tick off seconds slightly more slowly than mine. That, to me, is strange. But, fine, I can absorb general relativity. It's actually quite beautiful, when you think about it. Space and time are in the eye of the beholder. At least Einstein believed that an object in his kitchen could not be affected by what I do to an object in my kitchen. Physics, he believed, was local. Turns out he was wrong. Enter...