If States Were Countries
Unfortunately, this graph is pretty illegible, but it’s interesting:
So what is that? It’s something Gary Phillips put together that breaks out different American states and inserts them into the TIMSS international comparison of school performance:
Turns out that a few of our states are on par with the world’s highest performing countries when it comes to educational achievement. Massachusetts in particular stands out, and four other states–Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kansas–received grades of “B,” up there with the likes of Japan. On the flip side, there were a bunch of C’s and one D+ in, of course, Washington, DC, where fourth graders learn math at the same level as Ukraine.
As Kevin Carey says, one thing about this is that it gets around the fact that it typically seems illegitimate to compare the United States to other countries that are often much smaller:
But New Jersey isn’t an autocratic city-state on the tip of the Malay peninsula or a Nordic socialist paradise or anything like that. Nor is Massachusetts (well, maybe the socialist part) or Minnesota or New Hampshire or Kansas. They’re all medium-sized states in America, subject to American laws, filled with lots of Americans in all the diversity that makes this nation great. Massachusetts in particular, the highest performing state, is full of people from all manner of racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. It has relatively high business taxes and relatively good social services compared to other American states but it’s far from France or Finland or Japan.
To be fair, I’m not sure I would say that New Hampshire features “all the diversity that makes this nation great.” But I think the point holds. If New Jersey can have schools that are as good as Japan’s, and Massachusetts can have schools that are better, then there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you.
37 Responses to “If States Were Countries”
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June 19th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Has math education in Ukraine really gone down that much since the end of the Soviet Union? In much of Russia (and not just Moscow), even still, even though the schools have really gone to hell and teachers are massively under-paid, math education is much better than in most of the US. A good friend and former colleague of mine adopted two young teenage Russian orphans a few years ago. Orphans in Russia usually get the worst education. When they came to the US they spoke hardly any English so were behind in most subjects but even still they were 2-3 years ahead of their classmates in math. If this is right I wonder why Ukraine has fallen so much.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
New Hampshire is the only state without an income or sales tax.
I think you are still ignoring New Jersey’s only claim to fame,proximity to New York. You and Krugman like to continually cite it as a place of obscene wealth brought upon by excessive tax rates and government programs, when in reality it’s a leech of one of the economic capitals of the world.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
So many of our America’s problems fit this pattern. You know, at its best our healthcare system is the world’s best, even at traditionally “un-American” things like preventative medicine. No one in the world can compare to our medical centers, and in some instances those centers even deliver the care at a lower cost (Mayo is getting a lot of publicity for that reason these days). The issue is getting that same high standard to everybody.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
If Japan gets a B, who gets an A?
June 19th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
The problem with this post is that it suggests that education in Japan (and other countries) is uniform. I bet if you took the best-educated prefecture of Japan, it would show up with better numbers than Massachusetts. Our best is equal to their average. Their best, I suspect, has no equivalent here.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I think you have it backwards. New York state benefits from having New Jersey’s biggest city within its borders.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
No surprises here.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Satya: good point, but our spread is so much wider than their spread. We’re a bigger country, education is handled locally, etc. They’re a smaller country, education is handled federally (I believe, correct me if wrong). It wouldn’t change the conclusions one draws significantly.
And, you can’t say the same thing about Singapore, which consistently has the world’s best rankings. If Mass. can compete with the, Mass. can compete with anybody.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s Marshagarshja.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I think you are still ignoring New Jersey’s only claim to fame,proximity to New York. You and Krugman like to continually cite it as a place of obscene wealth brought upon by excessive tax rates and government programs, when in reality it’s a leech of one of the economic capitals of the world.
Not completely, at least. A huge part of the boom in New Jersey was due to the decision of the Port Authority to make the ports of Newark and (a bit later) Elizabeth into the major container shipping hubs for the East Coast. Companies moved big offices nearby to take advantage of that as much as to be close to New York City. New York City’s shipping, on the other hand, couldn’t well accommadate container shipping and refused to try (on the grounds that it would cost jobs) and this lead to shipping basically stopping in New York. That in turn lead to the end of most real industry in the city, which in turn played a big role in the decay of the city and rising crime during the 70’s and 80’s while the city tried to re-make itself. New Jersey, on the other hand, thrived for the most part.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you…
Actually, there *is* such a reason. Paging Steve Sailer…
June 19th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Kansas? The place where they are continually banning the teaching of evolution?
I’d guess that the standards for the education comparison are screwed up.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I think you have it backwards. New York state benefits from having New Jersey’s biggest city within its borders.
Maryland, Conneticut, and New Jersey, the three wealthiest states, I think, on a per capita basis, all share the common feature of collecting [some] tax wealth from a large economic engine (Washington and New York, respectively) while leaving inner city poverty to the city proper. Probably says more about the importance of creating new polities by economic region though than it does about education policy.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I think that’s the whole point of breaking our system out by state to compare it to these countries. North Carolina probably ranks around the same as Myanmar, while Massachusetts is up with Japan.
I’ve long thought that the U.S. could benefit from a less devolved education system. If we implement whatever system they’re using in Massachusetts on the federal level, ostensibly it should help at least a little bit with our overall average, right?
Makes sense to me, but then I was educated in North Carolina…
June 19th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Raising his Soros[TM]-brand shock collar to its highest setting, MattY writes: there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you.
Is MattY sure about that? Isn’t it true that education is a lower priority among certain groups than others, and won’t that play a role? If MattY says he has a magical plan to change culture, what happens if things don’t work out? Does MattY have a backup plan? Could MattY use one of those shock collar hacks you can find online to block the charge for a few minutes and try to be intellectually honest with his readers for once?
June 19th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
“If New Jersey can have schools that are as good as Japan’s, and Massachusetts can have schools that are better, then there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you.”
I would say that there are some important IF factors that aren’t being addressed here.
First, income. Our states vary wildly in terms of income, which affects both school revenue from taxes, and the socio-economic status of students. Hence, you’re likely to find that Massachusetts has both more money for schools and a higher percentage of middle-class students with college-educated parents than would be the case in poorer states.
Second, state “regimes.” Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Minnesota (I’m somewhat guessing here) have substantial tax bases and probably a larger government presence overall (including not just spending on education, but administrative capacity more broadly conceived), and more investments in areas like health care that affect student achievement, and a large, unionized public sector, including teachers. My guess is that Kansas and New Hampshire have a different model, but it interesting that both work.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Lol, some capitalist you are. “NJ is only wealthy because it’s next to NY!” Next you’re going to tell me that Bill Gates is only wealthy because his parents were. And in any case, how do you explain why NY is so wealthy, what with it being so liberal and all? Cuz it’s next to Connecticut? I think you’re going to be disappointed with this line of reasoning…
Here’s a clue dude: wealth begets education quality. If most of your state is well-to-do (New Hampshire), you will have a good education system throughout regardless of how it’s paid for. If parts of your state are significantly poorer than others (most states in the union, red or blue), how you pay for education determines the overall education outcome. If funding is based on local property taxes alone, poorer areas will do worse than richer ones, and your state will do middling overall. If funding is relatively equalized throughout the state, everyone gets a decent education.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Yglesias — “If New Jersey can have schools that are as good as Japan’s, and Massachusetts can have schools that are better, there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you…”
bbartlog — “Actually, there *is* such a reason. Paging Steve Sailer…”
Yes, indeed. If Steve Sailer were to run a demographic comparison of New Jersey and Oregon, he would… weep bitter tears of shame and recant everything he’s ever written about race and IQ. Or more likely he’ll ignore this result and cherry-pick a different one that’s more to his liking. Regardless, I’ll highlight the 2005 census estimates just to make you and Sailer cry.
New Jersey: 77.68% White
7.70% Asian
15.19% Black
15.51% Hispanic (all races)
Oregon: 92.95% White
4.25% Asian
2.38% Black
10.14% Hispanic (all races)
June 19th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I am shocked NJ did so well. I actually am not so sure about how NJ education is in general. It seems to me that my education in Cali was far better than the HS education my students seem to have gotten.
But the thing is that, even within states there are huge educational disparities. Pace the “paying good money to live in a good school district doesn’t makes sense as there aren’t good school districts” crowd, the education I received in Los Al Unified School District simply is worlds above the education one would get in many other places in Cali (or even in, statewide, higher ranked NJ). I imagine, for example, that if you compare how students even in NYC are doing to certain parts of NJ, you’d see that NYC is actually doing fairly well whilst the rest of NY is dragging it down, but I may be a downstate chauvanist here.
I wonder what happens if you control in these rankings for state size (and hence variation in district quality) as well as wealth?
*
Not completely, at least. A huge part of the boom in New Jersey was due to the decision of the Port Authority to make the ports of Newark and (a bit later) Elizabeth into the major container shipping hubs for the East Coast.
According to the ads around here on the radio, this source of prosperity will end soon unless the states of NY and NJ cough up some serious money to replace the Bayonne Bridge.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
BTW, Kansas has had top notch public education for a very, very long time.
When my dad was a kid (back when people looked to Cali to set the standards in public education as in so much else) he went to a middling California school. He spent some summers with family in Kansas (Kansas ‘burbs of KC), and would arrive after his school ended but before the Kansas schools called it quits for the summer. Evidently his cousins, in the same grade as he, were far ahead of what he was doing in his classes and always knew more than he did.
And my dad is a pretty smart feller.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
LaFollette Progressive:
Hear, hear. This is class not race (although differential impact of race on class, etc.).
June 19th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and now live in the LA suburbs.
The richest schools around our largest cities will compete with the best schools in the world. The poorest will compete with the poorest. Even comparing states to other countries is too broad-brush a comparison, especially when comparing to countries with much more centralized educational plans than we have in the US.
As long as we tie local school funding to local property taxes, this will continue. (Though California’s woes are tied largely to its lack of property tax revenue due to Prop13.)
June 19th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
DAS, it’s worth noting that New Jersey is unusual amongst states in its efforts to minimize education disparities within the state, at least in terms of funding, with the state providing substantial aid to poorer municipalities. It’s possible this is relevant to NJ’s rank.
Overall, though, I think the simplest explanation for their relative success in education is the best. NJ spends more money per student K-12 than any other state in the nation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey#Education
Of course, Jersey is a comparatively wealthy state, and Nathan, it doesn’t all come from NYC (where tax rates are also ‘excessive’, I might add). A big factor in Jersey’s wealth is the fact that it houses pretty much the entire US pharmaceutical industry. (Fun Fact! NJ has more scientists and engineers per square mile than anywhere else in the world! I love wikipedia.)
June 19th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
La Follette Progressive is an idiot.
He purposely chooses to compare the TIMSS scores taken at 4th grade, in his comparison of New Jersey to Oregon, instead of making an alternate choice comparing NJ to OR at 8th grade, when the achievement gap widens and NJ falls as OR rises (3rd to 6th, 37th to 22nd). The report makes it a big point to mention that achievement levels universally fall from 4th grade to 8th grade, a vindication of Sailer’s theories and the IQ data, which show that the racial gap WIDENS as one proceeds towards adulthood from near-parity in childhood. Moreover, I went searching and actually looked up the 1996 NAEP mathematics data, to see the differential achievement levels in New Jersey: 48%, 36%, 5%, 3% of Asians, Whites, Hispanics, Blacks tested at the proficient level in 4th grade that year (21st overall). For Oregon, it was (23%, 23%, 6%, N/A). NJ does relatively well for its demographics because of its relatively higher East-Asian population . You can also infer one more thing from the data, since one aspect the catch-all “White” category hides is the significant number of high-IQ Ashkenazi Jews (+1 sigma above Whites) bundled within that population in NJ, but who are also demographically rather lacking in Oregon. Moreover, Oregon has alot of largely blue-collar workers working in the logging, fishing, and farming industries that don’t exactly come to mind when liberal yuppies think of “Portland” as representative; their children do not compare at the same level to those of White Episcopalians, who compare favorably to even Jews as they radiate from the North-East corridor.
It’s also well known that many of those parents who live in New Jersey, especially in cities like Camden and Bergen, host to the famous Academies (search AAST and see how many Intel STS winners they have and how many people they they send to MOP), are actually commuters to Manhattan who prefer to live in the less-expensive and less dangerous suburbs. Many of those parents are working at some of the most strenuous and demanding jobs in the country, and they are surely at the 3-sigma level of IQ.
Finally, is that how you fucking do science? Comparison by anecdote and outlier? Why don’t you take the data yourself, and see how even these “softened” threshold scores correlate to the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in each state.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Going back to your Bill Gates argument. How much did government funded schools and Harvard educations help Bill Gates?
If your life has opportunities beyond collecting a welfare check or giving up 50% of your income to the government, you will be far more likely to achieve.
The amount spent on education is trivial. Washington DC spends double what NH schools spend. What did they get? Inner city schools with Olympic size swimming pools and 30% graduation rates.
What did the voucher programs get in 3 years? Irrefutable improvement, parent satisfaction, at 1/3 the cost.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
From the same report,
Now the comparison that made La Fellating Progressive was comparing the achievement scores on the mathematics subsection of the TIMSS taken at fourth grade. If that previous paragraph wasn’t already a hint, East Asians (from East Asian countries) do relatively well on the spatial intelligence domain of g, which is required for mathematical ability, than expected from their baseline IQ scores (an aggregate of domains), which could further explain the facially anomalous data we are supposed to be detecting between New Jersey and Oregon.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2008/03/theory-ii-teachers-salaries.html
There is a link showing the correlation with spending on teacher salaries vs. the achievement of low-SES students. R squared = 0.0003, which means that salaries explain 0.03% of the variation in their achievement, and that R must be…1.712? (off the dome) * 10^{-5}, in effect nothing.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Maryland, Conneticut, and New Jersey, the three wealthiest states, I think, on a per capita basis, all share the common feature of collecting [some] tax wealth from a large economic engine (Washington and New York, respectively) while leaving inner city poverty to the city proper.
Thank God New Jersey doesn’t have to take care of those starving Manhattanites.
June 20th, 2009 at 8:52 am
I bet if you took the best-educated prefecture of Japan, it would show up with better numbers than Massachusetts. Our best is equal to their average. Their best, I suspect, has no equivalent here.
It’s the other way round, Satya. Japan has no high schools (or even universities arguably) that would be the equivalent of St. Pauls or Phillip Exeter in New Hampshire – or even high schools as good as what you’d find in Scarsdale, NY or Brookline, MA. Actually for the most part Japanese schools really aren’t very good at all – what pushes Japanese test scores up is the culture of testing and after school jukus. Japanese parents don’t expect the school system alone to educate their kids – every ambitious Japanese mother works like hell to make sure her kid gets an edge. American parents often seem to think educating their kids is their town’s problem. It doesn’t matter what you spend on schools, if the parents aren’t committed, the kids won’t learn.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Re: Maryland, Conneticut, and New Jersey, the three wealthiest states, I think, on a per capita basis, all share the common feature of collecting [some] tax wealth from a large economic engine (Washington and New York, respectively) while leaving inner city poverty to the city proper.
I’m none too familiar with Connecticutt, but New Jersey and Maryland have their own inner city poverty. I live almost within walking distance of the infamous West Baltimore slums.
June 20th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
The best high school in the world in terms of producing results is the Bronx School of Science, to wit, 7 Nobel Prize winners in physics.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:48 am
A 2005 report called “Is the United States Really Losing the International Horse Race in Academic Achievement?” by Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin of the University of Pennsylvania Education School gave a plausible answer to its title question:
“…when compared with students in other industrialized nations, U.S. students do not perform poorly on international achievement surveys. Instead, they perform better than average overall across six international surveys, three grade levels, and four subjects.”
Boe and Shin bravely focus on the crucial fact to be kept in mind when comparing U.S. performance to that of other countries:
“Not only does the U.S. have the largest gross domestic product among the G7 nations [Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, USA], but it also has by far the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse population and the largest number of partially autonomous states.”
The large black and Hispanic minorities drag down the U.S. scores. Boe and Shin sum up:
“… achievement scores of white students in the U.S. were consistently higher than those of students in the Western G5 nations, even though these nations were predominantly white. By comparison, the scores of U.S. black and Hispanic students were very low and well below those of the other nations. This is compelling evidence that the low scores of these two groups of minority students were major factors in reducing the comparative standing of the U.S. in international surveys of achievement. If these minority students were to perform at the same level as white students, the U.S. would lead all the other G7 nations (including Japan) in reading and would lead the Western G5 nations in mathematics and science, though it would still trail Japan in these subjects.”
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=gse_pubs
June 21st, 2009 at 3:50 am
Massachusetts has been the most academically-oriented state since more than a century before Massachusetts changed from a colony to a state. It’s large number of elite colleges attract top students from around the country, some of whom wind up staying in Massachusetts. That state always comes out very close to the top in all measures related to intelligence.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:20 am
a vindication of Sailer’s theories and the IQ data, which show that the racial gap WIDENS as one proceeds towards adulthood from near-parity in childhood.
I’m confused. While certainly some genetically determined traits become more marked with age, what would be the mechanism for some sort of inate IQ to have more of an effect later on in development?
I would expect that inate IQ would be less rather than more of a factor as one proceeds towards adulthood as environment and SES would have more time to exert their effects.
Also, people move to NJ to avoid unsafe Manhattan? There are many reasons to move to NJ (more space for the kids to run around in, high cost of living in NYC, the constant competition for any resources — including parking spaces and washing machines — in NYC), but to avoid unsafe Manhattan? Even before Giuliani took credit for Dinkins’ police reforms and the economic upswing lowering Manhattan crime rates, Manhattan was never the Gotham used to sell superhero comics.
SLC has a point (although I’m sure Sailer will flatter me by crediting this to Ashkenazi intelligence): not only Bronx Science but many NYC high schools have remarkable levels of alumni achievement. My wife’s school, Bayside High, produced the person who measured all the standard circular dichroism curves still used in determining protein secondary structure percentages. Even Forest Hills High, right down the street, is no slouch.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:27 am
Sailer’s sources may be correct here:
By comparison, the scores of U.S. black and Hispanic students were very low and well below those of the other nations. This is compelling evidence that the low scores of these two groups of minority students were major factors in reducing the comparative standing of the U.S. in international surveys of achievement.
Remember what anonymous said about “wealth begats education”. Perhaps the history of slavery and Jim Crow (my wife is old enough to have experienced residual Jim Crow laws, so the latter was not at all “long ago”) has something to do with the low SES of African-Americans. And perhaps their importation as cheap labor (from being the peasantry of quasi-feudalist countries) has something to do with the low SES of Hispanics?
Maybe if you compared high SES Yurpeans to high SES ‘murkins and low SES to low SES, things would even out more? Or maybe the issue is that SES has more variance in America than in Europe and Japan and this brings us down? I wonder if maybe our low test scores have anything to do with the ‘Murkin rejection of “Yurpean style socialism” or some such?
June 21st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I’m none too familiar with Connecticutt, but New Jersey and Maryland have their own inner city poverty. I live almost within walking distance of the infamous West Baltimore slums.
Quite right. And even Hartford has relatively poor areas. The point is simply that these states have very wealthy surburbs from cities in which the corrsponding poor areas do not fall within their jurisdiction. This is, in part only, how one arrives at high per capita income figures states. Simple point about state wealth figures, it had been brought up earlier in the thread, the sometimes misleading picture from statistics, and the sometimes arbitrary lines by which we measure jurisdictions. In the Baltimore example by contrast, Maryland captures both the generated wealth and poverty of the city.
This is all really an aside from the main thrust of the conversation though, only touching on the issue of school funding (And even then worth noting that Maryland doesn’t school highly in the report’s 4th grade sample).
June 21st, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Thank God New Jersey doesn’t have to take care of those starving Manhattanites.
Exactly the point. NYC has four other boroughs which constitute 80% of the city’s population. Wealthy suburbs are, like Manhattan, pockets of concentrated wealth , just without the countervailing 80% (although there are always some working class suburbs). Anyway, small point.