Reply to HGC demographics

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "HGC demographics"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Specifically, India was 73rd out of 74 countries in the 2009 PISA.  They did beat Kyrgyztan, so that's something I guess.  Please tell us more about this wondrous educational system they have there where everybody works hard and achieves.[/quote]

You may be right. Education is not accessible to many poor children in India, and many more children only get a rudimentary education that enables them to read and write.  However, if you compare any child being educated in major metropolitan cities of India - the standard is extremely high.

But why talk about all the kids in India? Let's talk about the Indian kids who are here...they are doing exceedingly well. They come from intact families, their parents are successful and engaged with them, their college will be paid for (in most cases) and they will excel in school.

When given the same opportunities in MCPS that is available to all students in MoCo (including children of your race) - Indians (and Asians) are doing better.

Maybe it is their genes and superior brains because as you pointed out India is low down in PISA.

[/quote]

Asians in the US outscore Asians in every county in the world on international tests.
Whites in the US are very near the top when compared to white kids in europe/canada etc. on international tests.
Hispanics in the US outscore every majority Hispanic country in the world on international tests.

Clearly the educational system here sucks and is grossly inferior to the educational system in the rest of the world.

WRT the performance of Indians and Asians in MoCo (who I agree are doing very well), do you believe that they're a representative sampling of the countries they're from?  We both know the answer to that. [b] I work in IT, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the Asian and Indian kids in MoCo are significantly smarter than average; I know their parents are.  [/b] But that wasn't really my point; my point is that the [b]educational system in the US isn't nearly as bad [/b]as most people want to make it out to be.

[/quote]

[b]So you are suggesting that the significantly higher than normal representation of Asian (including Indians) in HGC is because they are significantly smarter than average[/b]?

OK - I agree.  And  because these kids are significantly smarter it is not unreasonable to think that they need a more challenging curriculum and they are more focused in academics.

In fact here is something you should think about - many people feel that the Asian kids must be hating all the enrichment, Kumon, tutoring that they get, because their own average kids hate to study.  Maybe - since the Asians are significantly smarter than average, they like the mental stimulation that academics offer. Wow! That is a radical concept! Who would think that there are kids who like to be "straight A" kids and like to study.

I will also agree that the education system in the US isn't as nearly as bad. It could be a lot worse. How much worse? Well - we have 2.0 now, and we will see the real impact in a few years.  But if this world power wants to lag behind other countries in education there is nothing Asian-Americans can do, can we? The only thing we can do is work hard and try and be competitive by our own efforts. Someone has to work hard so that our great nation does not become a complete idiotocracy!

[/quote]
 
Partly, the other part is that their parents have drilled/trained/pushed them from a very young age.   FWIW, I don't think that merely pushing kids ahead in a curriculum is necessarily the best way to get kids to learn a subject well.  Do I think all Asian kids hate the extra enrichment?  Don't know.  I do know that one of my daughters' friends at the HGC (an Indian girl by the way) tells her all the time how much she hates math. She wouldn't dare tell her parents this.  My daughter loves math.  Guess who gets drilled in math all the time at home and in the summer?  And yet they're in the same class and get very similar grades.  Obviously one anecdote isn't data, but I think a lot of these kids being pushed along at a frantic pace early on aren't going to be any further along later in life and may very well be pushed into a field in which they're not happy.

I do agree with you on one of your points though; I support providing a more challenging curriculum for the children that are ready for it.  All kids should should be challenged to the best of their abilities. I think the magnet and HGC programs should be expanded to make them more geographically accessible for a larger number of children.  Keeping it at the 2-3% level leaves a lot of really bright kids at a level where they're not getting pushed enough.  Conversely, I also think that the level of instruction at the top HS's in MoCo outside of the magnets is very good, and the kids coming out of them are IMO competitive with kids anywhere in the world.  Perhaps I'm just being naive, but having worked with a lot of these kids through internships, I've been extremely impressed.

With respect to the US educational system not being competitive, as I pointed out before, when (very roughly) controlling for demographics the US isn't lagging behind other countries in education; similar groups in the US outperform the same groups in other countries.   If you took South Korea or Japan and replaced 40% of the school age population with poor black and Hispanic kids I don't think there would be many articles extolling the brilliance of their educational systems.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics