Two things are for sure when you read the tables and graphs in the latest TIMMS report, released today:
(1) The sky is NOT falling;
(2) This report gives no evidence of a major educational crisis in math education in the USA. On the contrary.
In fact, of all the many countries listed, US students’s average scores rank among the top 20-30% of all the countries listed. If the long-term trends mean anything at all, American students are consistently improving, going back to 1995, well before the current round of top-down, billionaire-backed educational “rephorms’ began being imposed on American public schools.
If you don’t believe me, then look at these tables, copied directly from the TIMMS report, and see for yourself.
In all of them, I drew a red line around the scores of US students to make it easier to find.
This first table shows the distribution of math scores for 4th graders, ranked from high to low.
Notice first of all that the US is #11 out of about 50, which puts it at the 78th percentile, or definitely in the top quarter of all nations participating.
If you look carefully at the smeared-looking band to the right of the names of the countries, and if you read the legend, you see that EVERY SINGLE NATION has a significant gap between its best-achieving students and its lowest-achieving students. Including the USA. It does not seem like our gap is particularly wide or particularly narrow in comparison with the gaps in other countries. It looks to me like Romania’s might be the widest, and the gap in the Netherlands between the top and bottom students appears to be the narrowest. We also ‘beat’ a lot of supposedly high-achieving, wealthy countries: Germany, Australia, Austria, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand…
So, not too bad, overall. No sign of crisis here.
In this next graph, the US is #9 out of the same 50 countries in performance at various benchmarks in 4th grade math. We have 13% of our fourth graders reaching something that the TIMMS calls their ‘advanced’ benchmark; 47% of our students reaching a ‘high’ benchmark; 88% of the students reaching the ‘intermediate’ benchmark; and 96% of our students passing the ‘low’ benchmark. As you can see, while there are some countries scoring better than the US, we beat the vast majority of them.
This next graph/chart shows how 4th grade students in the USA and a few other countries are doing over time, going back to 1995. As you can see, American fourth graders’ scores have been going up as assessed by this test, modestly but significantly, during the past 16 years, but there was not much change from 1995 to 2003. BTW: Finland’s scores fell by quite a bit, and there is sure to be some head-scratching there.
The next two graphs show how 4th-grade math students in of the nations with enough prior scores have been doing over time. Note that in the US, we went from 9% of our fourth-grade students being ‘advanced’ in 1995, to only 7% ‘advanced’ in 2003, to 10% in that category in 2007, to 11% ‘advanced’ last year. The percentages of American fourth-grade math students reaching the ‘high’ benchmark went from 37% to 35% to 40% to 47% — which seems pretty decent to me.
This last graph is a continuation of the last one, but it shows what percentage of students in the various countries reached or exceeded the ‘Intermediate’ and ‘low’ benchmarks.
Again: The sky is not falling, and if we look at these results, there is no sign of a crisis in US elementary math education.
[Let me know (via comments) if you need more explication of what these graphs imply.]