American 15-Year-Olds Fall Further Back in Math

The New York Tims and the Wall Street Journal both reported the results of the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/education/american-15-year-olds-lag-mainly-in-math-on-international-standardized-tests.html?ref=us&_r=0

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304579404579234511824563116)

I commented on wsj.com and I wll follow up with a post that contains another personal story.  Here is my comment.

“I am a former math professor who taught at an “elite” university. I wish this test data was hard to explain, but, from my experience, the major problem is obvious. It starts in college, actually graduate school. Of course, this is not obvious to people outside academics, so let me clarify. Start with what Robert Maynard Hutchins, the famous President of the U. of Chicago, wrote decades ago,

“when an institution determines to do something … to get money it must lose its soul … I do not mean…that universities do not need money … I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it…”

By the 1980’s Clark Kerr saw that, “…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American higher education…”

When universities develop marketing policies (not educational policies) to attract students (customers), we get a culture of “doing whatever it takes” to get money and prestige.

These are all words. What are the actions? I have blog to fill n the picture, www.inside-higher-ed.com. There I describe how a clearly unqualified person was granted a PhD based on a “national need” grant an individual brought to our school. (See my post “No Jobs for PhD’s? Depends on what you mean by PhD”). I describe how this effects the education of high school teachers in “Professor Alfred Doesn’t Know What is wrong with the Homework”. And I describe how departments and schools compete to keep consumers happy and paying in my post “How Competition Leads to “Content Deflation” in One Anecdote”.

I hope WSJ readers will read these posts so that they can see for themselves what happens when goods (an education) are marketed to uneducated consumers. This culture will not change from the inside. Only transparency and citizen concern will change it.”