Fancy steppin'

Math education. That's it. That's the real problem. Math education. That's the real threat to the standard of living of Americans.

Not shifts of wealth to the rich, not globalization, not the undermining of labor unions and the concomitant strengthening of corporations, not capital flight and greedy profit-mongering by a relative handful of powerful elites, not "outsourcing" (what a classic weasel word) of jobs, none of that matters.

The problem is math education.

Over the next 15 years, 3.3 million U.S. service-industry jobs and $136 billion in annual wages will move to India, the Philippines, China and Malaysia, among other countries, according to Forrester Research, a consulting company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And why? I already told you. Math education.

Who says so? Why, that well-known educator and sociologist Alan Greenspan, of course. Greenspan

has added a new twist to the ongoing debate on jobs outsourcing. Last week, the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman told the Senate Banking Committee that the real threat to the standard of living in the United States came not from jobs leaving for cheaper Asian locations. The bigger worry, he said, was a drop in U.S. educational standards. ...

"What will ultimately determine" the "standard of living of this country is the skill of the people," Greenspan told the Senate committee. "We do something wrong, which obviously people in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan do far better. Teaching in these strange, exotic places seems for some reason to be far better than we can do it."

So says Andy Mukherjee in a Bloomberg News commentary reported in the International Herald-Tribune for February 17. Greenspan, he says, added "a 'math gap' spin" to the debate about vanishing jobs. "After all," he summarizes Greenspan as saying, "if American students underperform their Asian rivals in acquiring intellectual capital, why should corporate America pay them premium wages?"

Educators, involved with the nuts-and-bolts of academic issues, explain just how "strange, exotic" Asian countries may be stealing a march over the United States. ...

"The American education system," [Sumit] Gupta [a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the University of California, Irvine] notes, "is designed so as not to hurt the self-esteem of any student in class. So, nearly everyone can pass the high-school level." This leads to inadequately trained high-school graduates....

[But if] American education places too much importance on preserving students' self-esteem, the Indian system, which "completely ignores students' feelings, opinions and ambitions," can easily break their spirit, Gupta says. ...

Bear in mind that Singapore's attainment of rigorous standards comes at a price. The city's education system pushes students hard and doesn't leave any scope for late bloomers. Students who don't perform well on exams are weeded out at age 12 and told they won't be attending university.

Would U.S. education be any better off, trading its inbuilt flexibility for such rigidity?

Greenspan ought to use his own example as a test case. In any Asian nation, it would have been rather difficult for a teenager to select a musical career, tour with a professional band, give that up, go back to college, study economics and surface at the helm of the country's central bank half a century later.

In other words, if Greenspan were Asian-born, he might still be playing the clarinet in jazz concerts. And not by choice.

Footnote: Greenspan's comments were based on a 1999 study of mathematical ability among 8th-graders in 38 countries. US students came in 19th. Four years earlier, as 4th-graders, the same students ranked seventh.

When you hear about any tests like this, you have to keep a few things in mind. First, what did the test cover? I think we can safely assume that the same test was given to all the students. But, for example, did the 8th-grade test cover algebra? That's something that many American students are not exposed to until the 9th grade. If other nations introduced it earlier, their students would have a leg up in scoring.

Second, who is being tested? As Mukherjee notes, by age 12 students in Singapore are being weeded out of a university track. So are 8th-grade US students (ages 13-14) competing against all Singapore students, or only those who have already shown superior academic ability?

Third, what do the results actually mean? Saying US students came in 19th tells you very little unless you know the range of both scoring and results. For example, suppose the maximum score on the test was 100 and national averages were computed to the nearest tenth of a point. Even disallowing for ties, the top 20 scores could be within two points of each other. Is that a significant difference? If the averages were computed to the nearest hundredth of a point, the top 20 scores could be within less than a half-point of each other.

As a science-minded person with an appreciation of physics, far be it from me to denigrate the importance of math or to approve of approaches that say "there are no right or wrong answers in mathematics." (Actually, that is true in some of the farther reaches of number theory, where there are theorems that literally can't be proved or disproved - but that's hardly relevant here.) But on exactly that same basis, far be it from me likewise to gasp in horror at the isolated statement that US 8th-grade students ranked in the middle of a group of nations on mathematics skills - especially when that statement is being used to justify the surging economic greed of transnational Big Business.