DEAD LAST in TIMSS

Seventeen reasons to ban public education

Our 8th graders performed poorly in TIMSS math, with only thirteen countries out of forty scoring lower--Scotland, Latvia, Iceland, Spain, Greece, Romania, Lithuania, Cyprus, Portugal, Iran, Kuwait, Colombia, and South Africa.  But our 12th graders scored dead last in 17 of 34 subject categories by sex because those countries whose 12th graders participated in TIMSS scored significantly higher than their 8th graders, while ours scored significantly lower.

Had our 12th graders performance improved as much as Lithuania's, they would have scored 108 points higher in advanced math, 42 points higher in general math, 12 points higher in general science, and 128 points higher in geometry.  The following table shows how much higher our 12th graders would have scored in each subject had their scores increased as much as 12th graders in other countries did:

http://wwwcsteep.bc.edu/TIMSS1/TIMSSPDF/dr_alm95/cism1295.pdf contains the results of 68 TIMSS test questions.  On 11 of those test questions, no other country had a smaller percentage of their students get the correct answer than the US, on 12 of them only one country was below us, and on 11 of them only 2 countries were below us.  Even when we were third from last, it was almost always the same two countries, while many other countries had a much higher percentage of correct answers.  For example:

1. 6.4% of American girls answered it correctly, but 68% of Lithuania's boys answered it correctly "Solution of real values of a quadratic equation", Page 66.
2. 7.4% of our girls got it right but 50% of Russia's boys got it right, "Triangle ABC/Rotation", page 28 .
3. 1.4% of our girls got it right, but 86% of the girls in Greece got it right "Steps for Mathematical Induction", page 30.
4. 8.5% of our girls got it right, but 33% of Czech boys got it right", Angle inscribed by figures inside a triangle" page 41.
5. 1% of our girls got it right, but 26% of Swiss boys got it right, "Length of string around a rod", page 45.
6. 0.8% of our girls got it right, but 57% of French boys got it right, "Complex number solution of equation" page 46.
7. 11.2% of our girls got it right, but 54% of Greek boys got it right, "Angle betwee two vectors" page 62.

Could the quality of our education system can go any lower than that?  If so, how much lower would scores drop if we, say, banned public education and put that 7% of GDP which public education currently costs into savings accounts for private education?

Read "The Case For Father Custody", by Dr. Daniel Amneus, now on-line at cfc.htm