Last year, the Texas GOP made it part of their official party platform that they [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html]oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills[/url]. While everyone else got a chuckle at their expense, it may seem the Texas GOP got what they wanted anyway. [url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=critical-thinking-best-taught-outside-classroom]US schools do not teach critical thinking skills.[/url] Not surprising, considering our how far [url=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-in-science-reading.html]we are falling behind Asian and some European countries.[/url] But, one neat thing about these tests is that detailed data is kept about participants, allowing people reviewing the score to pinpoint where problems lie. There are a few conclusions everyone seems to be making: [b]Segregation hurts US schools:[/b] Predominantly white schools in wealthy neighborhoods are more competitive with leading nations, but the rest aren't. Schools in poorer areas don't get equal resources. China has been testing a program in Shanghai where rich and poor are no longer segregated, and scores across the board shot through the roof. [url=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-in-science-reading.html]Bloomberg[/url] [quote]China’s success in Shanghai results from the government’s abandonment of a system of “key schools” for elites and the institution of “a more inclusive system in which all students are expected to perform at high levels,” the OECD said in the report. [/quote] [url=http://www.tbp.org/pubs/Features/W07Brown.pdf]Engineering Honor Society[/url] [quote]Students in affluent suburban U.S. school districts score nearly as well as students in Singapore, the runaway leader on TIMSS math scores.[/quote] [url=http://www.tbp.org/pubs/Features/W07Brown.pdf]Engineering Honor Society[/url] [quote]Not that Gonzales is sanguine. What really worries him is the wide performance gap within the U.S. “When you break students into standard sociological groups— parents with college education, minorities—the gap between the top and bottom is greater within the United States than between U.S. and top-performing Dutch students. “There are significant differences between boys and girls in math and science in fourth grade,” Gonzales acknowledges. “But they pale in comparison with the differences between white and black or poor and wealthy.”.[/quote] [b]US might be trying too hard:[/b] The US hasn't been idle about falling behind in math and science. However, our solution might be a big part of the growing problem, and it seems likely to me it is the reason our kids lack critical thinking skills. We keep throwing more standards at kids. More tests, more subjects, more objectives for teachers. Some areas have nearly as many subject objectives as they do days of school in a year. It's like teaching ADHD where only enough time is spent on each subject to memorize a test answer. There is a big difference between memorization and knowing something. [url=http://www.tbp.org/pubs/Features/W07Brown.pdf]Engineering Honor Society[/url] [quote]“The countries that we compete with, like Japan, teach six or seven major ideas per grade,” Bybee explains. “We teach something like 75. For our kids, it is like sitting in front of a television when somebody who has the clicker is changing channels one after the other.[/quote] [url=http://www.tbp.org/pubs/Features/W07Brown.pdf]Engineering Honor Society[/url] [quote]“In my job, I get to hear the frustration of elementary classroom teachers around the country,” he says. “In 49 of 50 states, there are state curriculum frameworks, and their requirements are all over the place. They have 20 to 30— and sometime hundreds—of objectives. How is a teacher going to achieve 100 objectives in 181 days of school?[/quote] [url=http://www.aps.org/units/fed/newsletters/aug98/timss2.html]American Physics Society[/url] [quote]In conversations with Dr. Senta Raizen of NCISE, who is one of the authors of the data analysis team for the TIMSS project, several important points came up that are not fully emphasized in the study reports. The major characteristic of the U.S. curricula is that they cover a very large number of topics and are primarily focused on vocabulary. Current U.S. students have been exposed to a very large number of topics, but do not have experience in depth on many. The various measures of student interest seem to continually drop with grade level in the U.S. Many other countries exhibit an increase in interest in science around the eighth grade where students go into some depth with various subjects. In the U.S. there is a more or less steady decrease in interest as the number of topics covered continues to increase. [/quote] [url=http://www.microsoftmathpartnership.org/assests/midmathreform.pdf]Microsoft Math Partnership[/url] [quote]The U.S. intends teachers to teach--and students to learn--more mathematics topics every year in first through eighth grade than do the vast majority of other TIMSS countries. In the grades 5-8, the U.S. expects between 27 and 32 topic to be taught each year. This far exceeds the international median for each of these grades (21-23 topic per year) and contrasts sharply with the 20-21 topics intended by the highest achieving TIMSS countries. ,P When specific topics are introduced to students also differs. In the top achieving countries, students are introduced to an average of seven topics during the first three grades d about 15 during grades four to six. U.S. students are introduced to nearly three times as many topics in the first three grades (20) and a few less during grades four to six (12). In seventh and eighth grade, top-achieving countries introduce almost twice as many topics as does the U.S. (10 vs. 6). Thus the overall pattern for the U.S. appears to be to introduce students to many mathematics topics in the early grades, to continue to teach these every year, to move on to other topics before students achieve mastery, and to introduce few new topics to students in the last two years of middle school.[/quote] Seems to me, the biggest two problems facing US students are the socioeconomic divide in school quality, and the ridiculousness of standards, both how varied they are by state, and by how overly ambitious they are. While I think our hearts may be in the right place on standards, they appear to be doing much more harm than good.