American students are performing at much lower levels than students in other industrialized nations. This has led to our current effort to create world-class standards that will be as good and as tough as those of other countries. However, most of our efforts involve locking a bunch of people in a room and asking them to develop standards. Rarely, if ever, do we consider what the rest of the world is doing.
A good way to do this is to look at the textbooks used by students in other countries. They give a clear picture of the level of work expected of youngsters in France or Germany or Russia or Japan, and they tell us what American students could do if they were similarly challenged.
Izaak Wirszup, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Chicago, has been a pioneer in this work for years. He has written about the math programs in other countries--especially Russia-- developed curriculum materials and trained teachers in the U.S. And in 1983 he founded the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, which is translating Japanese and Russian math textbooks. So far, the Japanese math textbooks for grades seven, eight and nine and the Russian math textbooks for grades one through three have been published in English. Since these are nationally mandated textbooks, they are used by every student in Japan or Russia except for those who are mentally retarded.
Foreigners who put their kids in American schools say that their children are taught in U.S. seventh and eighth grades what they have already learned overseas in second or third grade. A few minutes of skimming these books will convince American readers that these people are telling the truth. Here are a couple of problems from the Japanese seventh-grade math text, one dealing with figures in space and the other with functions and proportions. They would probably stump the majority of American 17-year-olds.
The diagram at the right shows a geometric solid formed by cutting a corner of a cube with a plane. Find the volume of this solid.
A certain quantity of fuel will last 30 hours ifwe use it at a rate of 0.2 liters per hour. If we let x liters represent the amount consumed every hour and y hours the time, express y in terms of x. Further, when the value ofx ranges from 0.5 x 2, find the range of values of y.
And here are two representative problems from the Russian second-grade text. Eight-year-olds throughout the former USSR, with all its diversity, used this text for 20 years.
A rectangular lot is enclosed by a fence of wooden panels. How many panels are needed if the lot is 6 m long and 4 m wide and the length of a panel is 2 m? Write an expression based on the problem and solve it.
Draw on a sheet of graph paper two quadrilaterals like the one at the right and cut them out. Use them to construct a square and a pentagon. What other figures can you create?
The people supporting vouchers say that our school failure is due to government bureaucracy and public school monopoly. Only market competition will bring success. But the Japanese and Russian and all other foreign systems are government-run and monopolies. Unlike our locally run schools, they are tightly controlled, centralized systems. These foreign examples show that government schools can and do work. On the other hand, there is no national system of vouchers and market schools anywhere. Maybe the answer to our problems is more centralization not less.
Adopting "real" world-class standards will allow teachers and parents in the U.S. to put pressure on kids the way they can in Japan and Russia. Teachers and parents will be able to say, "Yes, this work is tough, but it's what kids in your grade are doing all over the country and what they did last year. We know you can do it, too." And our kids will, just like kids in other systems do.