Education Matters US

I recently learned that the U.S. has quietly decided to withdraw from TIMSS. (Hat tip: Extreme Wisdom) TIMSS is the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, which is an international test designed to compare 4^th and 8^th grade students.

Americans took note when Bill Gates said last spring that American schools needed to beef up science and math standards if the country was going to maintain a competitive edge in the new century. So did Congress, which last week approved legislation called the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science) Act, which carves out a whopping $43.6 billion for science education and research.

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Conspiracy theorists suggest that the U.S. government withdrew from the study without making any announcement because it anticipated another poor showing. “Maybe they don’t want to hear more bad news,” says John Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Federal officials deny the charge. Mark S. Schneider, the commissioner for the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, says the decision was made after a number of other countries—Australia, Germany and Finland—also decided not to participate. That left Armenia, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Slovenia and Sweden in the study. “We looked at the countries who are participating, our scarce resources and our overextended staff,” says Schneider, “and we decided to give it a pass.”

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Advocates for math and science education say they’re dismayed. ‘It’s pennywise and pound foolish,” says Ewing. “It is crucial that we know what our most talented students can do and how we are serving them. I can’t think of anything more important that having data on how you are training your future mathematicians and scientists.”

Interesting how the reporter insinuates the executive director of the American Mathematical Society is a “conspiracy theorist”, apparently because he doesn’t think the results will be favorable for the U.S. students. The bad results do not seem like much of a stretch given past results and the state of our public education system. The government run school monopoly has proven that it is not capable of improving tests scores. Instead, it just dumbs down the tests to prevent accountability.

These billions of dollars will not help students. It will only go to a bloated bureaucracy that will spend it on consultants and new fad methods of teaching. Only a small fraction of this money will make it to the actual classrooms. That money will mainly be in the form of increased salaries for under qualified teachers.

Instead of spending billions more a failed government bureaucracy, why not bring competition into the system, thus forcing the best methods to the top and the worst methods onto the scrap heap. If we taught the basics now, like phonics and math fact memorization, instead of whole language and fuzzy math, there would be no need for this additional money.

Let’s put parents back in charge of how their child is educated by empowering them to choose the school of their choice. Let’s abolish the Dept. of Education and NCLB, neither does anything to educate a child.

Empowering parents brings ultimate local control. It forces schools to compete and earn the trust of parents. Public schools will be returned to their mission of educating the masses instead of their current methodology of mass educating.