Educational Dreams?

Much has been written recently  about the fact that the USA is falling behind other nations in student performance, i.e. lower total test results.  Well, bare with me, no matter what is to be done in the future, the US will remain in such a position.  And, it will get worse.  (Don't call me unpatriotic, just deal with the reality below.)

In comparing the USA and China, our students don't have a chance, based upon statistics.  So, stop blaming the education system and the teachers.  Currently, we have a population of about 311,000,000 people with some 62,000,000 student in the high school or lower grades.  That is about 20% of the population.  If we are comparing the best of our students to those in the rest of the world we will be looking at the top three Standard Deviations or about 16% of the student population and for the USA this is about 10,000,000 students.

Now, consider China with a total population of some 1,400,000,000 people. Using the same math as above, at 20%, China will have 285,000,000 students in high school or lower grades.  China will therefore have in the top three Standard Deviations some 45,000,000 students.

Recognizing that there is an obvious problem with the comparison due to: 1) a smaller percentage of students attending schools and 2)  the likelihood that people do not live as long in China thus making the percentage of people less than 20 years old increase, we need to expand and adjust the numbers.

So, let's adjust the figures with the following assumptions (pick your own and try it):  1) the percentage of people below the age of 20 is 23%, and 2) of those, only 80% actually are in school.  Now, we have the following results: there are 327,520,000 students of which 262,016,000 go to school.  Of those, there are 41,398,500 students (16%) in the top three Standard Deviations.  These are the A and A+ students.

Even with these downward slanted assumptions, it is obvious that there are now almost five times as many students in the top three Standard Deviations in China than are in the USA.  Or, to put another way, the number of China's top students is about 66% of our entire student population, i.e.  41,398,500 vs. 62,000,000

Now add India to the mix.  With a population of 1,184,728,000, and applying the last set of assumptions used above, we have 272,487,000 students (23%) of which 217,990,000 (80%) are in school, resulting in a total of 34,443,000 students in the top three Standard Deviations.

Together, China and India have 75,841,000 superior students while the USA has a COMPLETE, TOTAL STUDENT POPULATION of 62,200,000 students.  That is to say, that they have 15,000,000 more A and A+ students that we have STUDENTS!

We might be able to raise the comparative percentage of top students but in actuality that is really not the issue.  Simply put, the new "norm" is a "world-wide norm" and the USA is no longer Lake Wobegon.  Now, we must deal with THIS PROBLEM REALITY.

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