According to a report by the American Electronics Association, high-tech companies blame second-rate math and science education in the U.S. for the offshoring of high-tech jobs. From Wired:

The American school system, which AeA researchers charge is failing to provide strong science and math education to students, is largely to blame for lost jobs, according to the AeA’s report, “Offshore Outsourcing in an Increasingly Competitive and Rapidly Changing World.”

“Companies aren’t outsourcing only in order to obtain cheap labor; they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can’t find in the U.S.,” said Matthew Kazmierczak, senior manager of research at AeA, and one of the authors of the report.

On Assorted Stuff, Tim writes:

While this report sounds like another industry lobbying group trying to scare Congress into giving their companies lots of money, they do make one good point. We don’t do a good job of math and science instruction in this country. Part of the blame for that goes to society in general which gives lots of lip service to learning those subjects but then has an adult population which is largely (and often proudly) ignorant of even the most basic math and science concepts. How many people actually understand the odds behind the lottery or what the theory of evolution actually says?

I’ll probably get blasted for this, but I also blame the tsunami of standardized tests we spend a large part of the year preparing for. The math on these exams hardly gets up to the “high tech” level that the AEA report is referring to and most exams barely touch science at all since it’s not one of the indicators that NCLB requires. When the test becomes the target of instruction, learning settles for the lowest common denominator of the test.

Reform K12 — which is celebrating its 10,000th visitor — responds

The argument seems to be this: first standardized tests are criticized because schools must spend “most of the year” on test prep, which leads us to believe that they’re really, really hard. Then the tests are criticized because apparently the math and science on the test is not high tech (which we read as “easy”).

I’m not convinced by the AeA’s argument: If Indian programmers and engineers demanded U.S. wages, they’d be out of work. They’re highly educated and relatively cheap.

I also think testing has nothing to do with the problems of math and science education in the U.S. Many students flunk those very easy tests because they don’t know the basics. They’re not prevented from learning higher math because too much time is spent on test prep. The problem is they don’t know the basics.

I sat in on a charter school faculty meeting a few days ago that focused on test prep. The English, math, science and history teachers are making sure they teach the relevant state standards before students take the state test; they’re also discussing how to measure whether students know what they’ve been taught. This is not a waste of time, it seems to me.

A college president with a “life experience” doctorate sits on a committee that accredits colleges.

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) – A college president who serves on a national accreditation board is among several Georgia educators who received questionable degrees from an online school in Liberia.

Michael Davis, president of Gwinnett College of Business in Lilburn, received a doctorate from St. Regis University, which grants master’s degrees and doctorates largely based on “life experience.”

Davis is a commissioner for the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

At F.D. Moon Academy in Oklahoma City, there are 147 sixth graders. Wednesday, 136 were suspended for slamming tables in the cafeteria, talking back to teachers and disrupting classrooms.

(Elaine) Ford, in her first year as the school’s principal, said teachers can’t improve test scores until disciplinary issues are resolved. She estimated teachers spend 85 percent of their time reprimanding students.

A majority of suspended students’ parents showed up for a meeting to discuss the problem. But some came to yell at the principal.

Inspired by Brian’s post on plagiarized essays, Natalie Solent describes faking physics experiments, using reports from the previous year’s students.

My practical partner and I would work quite hard until the bloody thing started to go wrong. Even then we’d pummel the apparatus about for a while, hoping to convince it to yield the result in the book. But usually in the end we’d give up and go back to college to get to work producing a convincing fake.

A forgery is often true art. Sometimes I almost thought I learned more about physics in the process of constructing a plausible account of an experiment I had not completed than I would have learned in doing it. You had to ensure that the answer was off, but not too much off. You had to be ready to answer questions.

There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over. Then all the results for everyone were collected together and would, it was hoped, combine to display a nice bell curve. A rumour I heard said that one year the bell curve had a little subsidiary peak to one side of it. The authorities were very shocked. They thought the subsidiary peak represented all those who’d copied results from earlier years.

Wrong-o. The big peak showed that. The little peak belonged to the honest students.

One day, they carelessly turned in the exact results of the previous year’s students.

The demonstrator talked amiably about the experiment for a while then got out a big lined record book and wrote down our names and result at the foot a column of earlier results.

I forget which of us spotted our peril first, or by what desperate telepathy she communicated it to the other — but within half a second we were wordlessly conveying to each other that we were finished. Doomed. Dead meat. The only question was when the axe would fall.

Our result was only two lines below the one we’d copied it from. The two were identical to three decimal places, a physical impossiblity or damn nearly so.

Our demonstrator hadn’t spotted it yet but eventually somebody would. There would be only one possible explanation.

So they waited for the demonstrator to go to lunch, stole the book and changed the previous results, which had been written in pencil. They got away with it.

Anyway, I started really doing the experiments right through to the end. Most of the time I still couldn’t make them work but the long post-mortems no longer seemed so bad.

One experiment I remember well (perhaps because it actually worked eventually) was intended to demonstrate the Hanle Effect. When I got past the initial stages of this one I found some crucial components were missing. I had to go to a lot of trouble to get what I needed and re-fit them in the bowels of apparatus. The interior was very dusty. It was clear to me that no one had done the latter part of the experiment for years — yet people were on the books as having done it.

David Gillies caught students copying physics reports. Nothing much happened to the cheaters.

When Pedro Tepoz-Leon applied to be a teacher’s aide in Long Beach, California, he admitted a conviction for beating up a former girlfriend. He was hired. After all, it was only a misdemeanor, though he’d broken his girlfriend’s jaw and eye socket and detached her retina. When he was graduated from college and applied to be a teacher, he admitted the conviction again. He was hired as a Spanish teacher and coach. One of his students, Mayra Mora-Lopez, became his new girlfriend and moved in with him as a 19-year-old senior. Then he beat her up.

(Principal Sandy) Blazer called Mora-Lopez out of summer classes, saw the injuries for herself and coaxed the truth out of her: She and Tepoz-Leon were a couple, and during a fight at their apartment, he had slammed her head into a wall and left her limbs marbled with bruises and her forehead visibly injured, according to Patterson. Mora-Lopez could not be persuaded to turn him in.

Like most states, with the exception of Nevada and a few others, it is not against the law in California for a teacher to have sex with a student. It is against the law for an adult to have sex with a minor. Mora-Lopez was not under 18.

There seems wide agreement that Blazer knew nothing of the teacher’s criminal record. She testified in a deposition that she formally urged the district to fire Tepoz-Leon, Patterson said, but that someone at the district opted against it.

Instead, Patterson said, Blazer wrote a letter instructing the teacher to never be alone with a student, and Tepoz-Leon signed it on July 26, 2002.

A few months later, Tepoz-Leon murdered Mora-Lopez. After his conviction, he committed suicide in prison.

Chicago schools are easing their ban on social promotion of students in key grades. But a study shows generally positive effects, says Education Gadfly.

In brief, they found that the advent of high-stakes testing led to low-performing students receiving more support from teachers and parents and to teachers focusing their instruction more on reading and math. However, they also found that a key concern of testing opponents has merit: teachers spent more time teaching test prep skills — simply explaining techniques for successfully taking a test. (One teacher claimed to have devoted 240 hours to such tasks in 1999.) In addition, the researchers worry that added training may be needed for teachers to actually improve their instruction (rather than just refocusing it), and they note that the long-term effects of grade retention are unclear. Still, most teachers supported the policy . . .

Chicago schools will focus on teaching reading; students won’t be held back if they fall far behind in math and other subjects.

Smart women now have lots of career opportunities, which has lowered the quality of the teaching force. That’s the conventional wisdom, but is it true? Writing in the New York Times, Virginia Postrel analyzes a study of teachers’ aptitude scores (used as a measure of teacher quality). From 1964 to 2000, there was little change in teachers’ scores.

But averages hide the real story. The best female students — those whose test scores put them in the top 10 percent of their high school classes — are much less likely to become teachers today.

“Whereas close to 20 percent of females in the top decile in 1964 chose teaching as a profession,” making it their top choice, the economists write, “only 3.7 percent of top decile females were teaching in 1992,” making teachers about as common as lawyers in this group.

So the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially. In 1964, more than one out of five young female teachers came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes. By 2000, that number had dropped to just over one in 10.

The average has stayed about the same because schools aren’t hiring as many teachers whose scores ranked at the very bottom of their high school classes. Teachers aren’t exactly getting worse. They’re getting more consistently mediocre.

Another study looks at the effect of unionization on compressing the range of teacher pay: All teachers earn about the same, regardless of their abilities.

Are women from top colleges leaving teaching because of the “pull” of better pay elsewhere or the “push” of reduced earnings at the top of teaching?

To their surprise, they find that wage compression explains a huge 80 percent of the change. If women from top colleges still earned a premium as teachers, a lot more would go into teaching.

“Women who went to a top 5 percent college earned about a 50 percent pay premium in the 1960′s and earn about the same as other teachers today,” Mr. Leigh said. “By comparison, somebody who went to a bottom 25 percent college earned about 28 percent below the average teacher in the 1960′s, and they have the earnings of about the average teacher today.”

In hiring teachers, we get what we pay for: average quality at average wages.

Interesting.

Philadelphia’s middle school teachers are having trouble showing they’re qualified to teach their subjects. Many are former elementary teachers who aren’t subject-matter specialists. Half of the “district’s 690 middle school teachers who took exams in math, English, social studies and science in September and November failed,” reports the Inquirer. Nearly two-thirds of middle school math teachers failed the exam.

The district will offer test prep classes to teachers who have to retake the exams, and will try to hire people who know math to teach math.

Not everyone kills their buy-a-college-degree spam. In Georgia, six teachers will have to pay back $30,000 in pay raises they received for earning advanced degrees from an online outfit based in Liberia that sells “life experience” degrees.

U.S. students are turning off to computer science degrees, fearing new technology jobs will be in India. The San Jose Merc reports on a new survey:

Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering amid widespread worries about the accelerating pace of offshoring by high-technology employers.

A new study, to be published in May, shows there was a dramatic drop-off of enrollment in those fields last year — 19 percent — and some educators warn about the potential consequences for America’s global competitiveness.

Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science courses continued to grow after the collapse of the dot-com bubble until the sharp decline in the 2002-03 academic year, according to the Washington-based Computing Research Association. The number of newly declared majors in computer science also showed a sudden 23 percent plunge last year.

San Francisco State is trying to create programming internships for students to lure them back to information technology.