People attribute America's low standing on the education scale to many things. Poor study habits, a lack of the good educators that other countries have, low test scores. The list goes on and on. One factor that hasn't really been discussed, is the effect of the distribution of social class on our education system.
In this report, we see how the distribution of social classes in America affects our educational ranking. There were many different findings that I found very interesting in this article.
- In every country, students at the bottom of the social class scale tend to perform worse than students higher on the social class scale. The U.S. average seems to be very low, partly because we have a lot of test takers/students from the lower class, more so than other nations. This made me think of the fact that, in America poor, low-income, lower class children can still attend public school. Regardless of how good or bad that education is, it's still an education. I thought of the poor children in other countries that can't afford to go to school at all, not even public school.
- A sampling error in the U.S. test scores reported. It seems that a large portion of the disadvantages, lower-class American students are represented in America's test taker samples. Other countries wouldn't dream of publishing the low test scores of these students, they only publish the good grades of higher class students. The large representation of disadvantaged students' scores makes America's grades seem even worse.
- Our scores would be better if they were compared to countries similar to us. The article says that if our test scores were placed next to those of similar, post-industrial countries (France, England, Germany), our reading scores would be much higher, and our math scores would be about the same. However, since we're compared to the whole world, many of the countries we are behind are vastly different than America, so our scores seem lower.
