Blog: The purported failure of America’s schools, and ways to make them better by David C. Berliner For many years I have been writing about the lies told about the poor performance of our students and the failure of our schools and teachers. Journalists and politicians are often our nations’ most irritating commentators about the state of American education because they have access to the same facts that I have. They all can easily learn that the international tests (e. g. PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS), the national tests (e. g. NAEP), the college entrance tests (e. g. SAT, ACT), and each of the individual state tests follow an identical pattern. It is this: As income increases per family from our poorest families (under the 25th percentile in wealth), to working class (26th-50th percentile in family wealth), to middle class (51st to 75th percentile in family wealth), to wealthy (the highest quartile in family wealth), mean scores go up quite substantially. In every standardized achievement test whose scores we use to judge the quality of the education received by our children, family income strongly and significantly influences the mean scores obtained. Similarly, as the families served by a school increase in wealth from the lowest quartile in family wealth to the highest quartile in family wealth, the mean scores of all the students at those schools goes up quite substantially. Thus, characteristics of the cohort attending a school strongly influence the scores obtained by the students at that school. For example, on the mathematics portion of the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to test, poor students (among those from lowest quartile in family income), who attended schools that served the poorest families (a school in the highest quartile of those receiving free and reduced lunch), attained a mean score of 425. But wealthy students (in the highest quartile of family income), who attended schools that served the wealthiest families (schools in the lowest quartile of students receiving free and reduced lunch), scored a mean of 528. That’s a one-hundred point difference! Since US scores on PISA were stable from 2012 to 2015, we can also use these scores from 2012 to approximate where wealthy and poor American students rank on the latest administration of PISA. On the 2015 mathematics scale, the difference between scores of 528 and 425 is the difference between our nation being ranked about 7th in the world, or being ranked about 50th! So what does this teach us? We learn that in the US, wealthy children attending public schools that serve the wealthy are competitive with any nation in the world. Since that is the case why would anyone think our public schools are failing? When compared to other nations some of our students and some of our public schools are not doing well. But having “some” failures is quite a different claim than one indicting our entire public school system. Furthermore, in the schools in which low-income students do not achieve well, we find the common correlates of poverty: low birth weight in the neighborhood, higher than average rates of teen and single parenthood, residential mobility, absenteeism, crime, and students in need of special education or English language instruction. These problems of poverty influence education and are magnified by housing policies that foster segregation. Over the years, in many communities, wealthier citizens and government policies have managed to consign low-income students to something akin to a lower caste. The wealthy have cordoned off their wealth. They hide behind school district boundaries that they often draw themselves, and when they do so, they proudly use a phrase we all applaud, “Local Control!” The result, by design, is schools segregated by social class, and that also means segregation by race and ethnicity. We have created an apartheid-lite, separate and unequal, system of education. So “fixing” the schools, about which so many of our editorialists and political leaders talk, needs deeper thinking than a knee-jerk reaction to our mean score on any international test. That mean score hides the diversity of our scores by social class and housing tract, and easily misleads us about what solutions might exist. When our leaders say teachers are not good, we need to point out to them how well some of our students are doing, and that a recent Mathematica report for the U.S. Department of Education states that the quality of teachers working in low-income schools is about the same as the quality of teachers working in high income schools. So blaming teachers won’t fix schools that need fixing! Likewise, some think our terrible curriculum was to blame for the low mean performance of our students. Thus, in recent years, those critics created the “rigorous” Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Yet with that allegedly lousy curriculum, wealthy children in public schools that serve wealthy families were easily competitive with the highest scoring nations in the world. In each state, higher income students use essentially the same curriculum as lower income students. But the higher income students succeeded admirably. So how then can the curriculum be bad? Blaming the curriculum for our purported failures is as illogical as blaming the teachers. What might work to produce higher achievement for low-income children attending schools that serve low-income families? High quality early childhood experiences; summer school to address summer loss; parent education programs to build skills needed in school; parent housing vouchers to reduce mobility; after school programs such as sports, chess clubs, and robotics; a full array of AP courses; school counselors and school nurses at the ratios their professions recommend; professional development for teachers and establishment of school cultures of professionalism; pay for teachers at parity with what others at similar educational levels receive; and so forth. Of course, this will all cost money. But most of what is expended by the state will be returned in the form of taxes paid by a higher-skilled work force, lower rates of special education and incarceration, lower health care costs, and other positive economic outcomes associated with the programs I just listed. What I have suggested for ameliorating the low performance of low-income children, on all our assessments, are characteristics of child-rearing and schooling now present in wealthier communities. Perhaps, then, we should rely on John Dewey to help low-income students succeed, instead of putting our faith in vouchers, charters, test preparation, teacher accountability and the like. To paraphrase just a little, Dewey said: “What the best and wisest (among the wealthiest) parents want for their children, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” Author Biography DAVID C. BERLINER, Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University, has also taught at many other universities at home and abroad. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, and a past president of both the American Educational Research Association and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He has won numerous awards for his work on behalf of the education profession, and authored or co-authored over 400 articles, chapters and books. Among his best known works are the six editions of the text Educational Psychology, co-authored with N. L. Gage; The Manufactured Crisis, co-authored with B. J. Biddle; Collateral Damage: How high-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education, co-authored with Sharon Nichols; and 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools, co-authored with Gene V Glass. He co-edited the first Handbook of Educational Psychology and the books Talks to Teachers, Perspectives on Instructional Time, and Putting Research to Work in Your School. He has interest in the study of teaching, teacher education, and educational policy.
Open AI 正式上书美国政府，要求川普政府在全世界范围禁Deep Seek In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations. The proposal, a submission for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” initiative, claims that DeepSeek’s models, including its R1 “reasoning” model, are insecure because DeepSeek faces requirements under Chinese law to comply with demands for user data. Banning the use of “PRC-produced” models in all countries considered “Tier 1” under the Biden administration’s export rules would prevent privacy and “security risks,” OpenAI says, including the “risk of IP theft.” https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-state-contr
https://equityalliance.stanford.edu/content/blog-purported-failure-america%E2%80%99s-schools-and-ways-make-them-better-david-c-berliner
Blog: The purported failure of America’s schools, and ways to make them better by David C. Berliner For many years I have been writing about the lies told about the poor performance of our students and the failure of our schools and teachers. Journalists and politicians are often our nations’ most irritating commentators about the state of American education because they have access to the same facts that I have. They all can easily learn that the international tests (e. g. PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS), the national tests (e. g. NAEP), the college entrance tests (e. g. SAT, ACT), and each of the individual state tests follow an identical pattern. It is this: As income increases per family from our poorest families (under the 25th percentile in wealth), to working class (26th-50th percentile in family wealth), to middle class (51st to 75th percentile in family wealth), to wealthy (the highest quartile in family wealth), mean scores go up quite substantially. In every standardized achievement test whose scores we use to judge the quality of the education received by our children, family income strongly and significantly influences the mean scores obtained. Similarly, as the families served by a school increase in wealth from the lowest quartile in family wealth to the highest quartile in family wealth, the mean scores of all the students at those schools goes up quite substantially. Thus, characteristics of the cohort attending a school strongly influence the scores obtained by the students at that school. For example, on the mathematics portion of the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to test, poor students (among those from lowest quartile in family income), who attended schools that served the poorest families (a school in the highest quartile of those receiving free and reduced lunch), attained a mean score of 425. But wealthy students (in the highest quartile of family income), who attended schools that served the wealthiest families (schools in the lowest quartile of students receiving free and reduced lunch), scored a mean of 528. That’s a one-hundred point difference! Since US scores on PISA were stable from 2012 to 2015, we can also use these scores from 2012 to approximate where wealthy and poor American students rank on the latest administration of PISA. On the 2015 mathematics scale, the difference between scores of 528 and 425 is the difference between our nation being ranked about 7th in the world, or being ranked about 50th! So what does this teach us? We learn that in the US, wealthy children attending public schools that serve the wealthy are competitive with any nation in the world. Since that is the case why would anyone think our public schools are failing? When compared to other nations some of our students and some of our public schools are not doing well. But having “some” failures is quite a different claim than one indicting our entire public school system. Furthermore, in the schools in which low-income students do not achieve well, we find the common correlates of poverty: low birth weight in the neighborhood, higher than average rates of teen and single parenthood, residential mobility, absenteeism, crime, and students in need of special education or English language instruction. These problems of poverty influence education and are magnified by housing policies that foster segregation. Over the years, in many communities, wealthier citizens and government policies have managed to consign low-income students to something akin to a lower caste. The wealthy have cordoned off their wealth. They hide behind school district boundaries that they often draw themselves, and when they do so, they proudly use a phrase we all applaud, “Local Control!” The result, by design, is schools segregated by social class, and that also means segregation by race and ethnicity. We have created an apartheid-lite, separate and unequal, system of education. So “fixing” the schools, about which so many of our editorialists and political leaders talk, needs deeper thinking than a knee-jerk reaction to our mean score on any international test. That mean score hides the diversity of our scores by social class and housing tract, and easily misleads us about what solutions might exist. When our leaders say teachers are not good, we need to point out to them how well some of our students are doing, and that a recent Mathematica report for the U.S. Department of Education states that the quality of teachers working in low-income schools is about the same as the quality of teachers working in high income schools. So blaming teachers won’t fix schools that need fixing! Likewise, some think our terrible curriculum was to blame for the low mean performance of our students. Thus, in recent years, those critics created the “rigorous” Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Yet with that allegedly lousy curriculum, wealthy children in public schools that serve wealthy families were easily competitive with the highest scoring nations in the world. In each state, higher income students use essentially the same curriculum as lower income students. But the higher income students succeeded admirably. So how then can the curriculum be bad? Blaming the curriculum for our purported failures is as illogical as blaming the teachers. What might work to produce higher achievement for low-income children attending schools that serve low-income families? High quality early childhood experiences; summer school to address summer loss; parent education programs to build skills needed in school; parent housing vouchers to reduce mobility; after school programs such as sports, chess clubs, and robotics; a full array of AP courses; school counselors and school nurses at the ratios their professions recommend; professional development for teachers and establishment of school cultures of professionalism; pay for teachers at parity with what others at similar educational levels receive; and so forth. Of course, this will all cost money. But most of what is expended by the state will be returned in the form of taxes paid by a higher-skilled work force, lower rates of special education and incarceration, lower health care costs, and other positive economic outcomes associated with the programs I just listed. What I have suggested for ameliorating the low performance of low-income children, on all our assessments, are characteristics of child-rearing and schooling now present in wealthier communities. Perhaps, then, we should rely on John Dewey to help low-income students succeed, instead of putting our faith in vouchers, charters, test preparation, teacher accountability and the like. To paraphrase just a little, Dewey said: “What the best and wisest (among the wealthiest) parents want for their children, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” Author Biography DAVID C. BERLINER, Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University, has also taught at many other universities at home and abroad. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, and a past president of both the American Educational Research Association and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He has won numerous awards for his work on behalf of the education profession, and authored or co-authored over 400 articles, chapters and books. Among his best known works are the six editions of the text Educational Psychology, co-authored with N. L. Gage; The Manufactured Crisis, co-authored with B. J. Biddle; Collateral Damage: How high-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education, co-authored with Sharon Nichols; and 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools, co-authored with Gene V Glass. He co-edited the first Handbook of Educational Psychology and the books Talks to Teachers, Perspectives on Instructional Time, and Putting Research to Work in Your School. He has interest in the study of teaching, teacher education, and educational policy.
劳动人民智慧多，中国不缺创造力。以前缺的是实力，现在厚积薄发了。
而且几年前好像军队演戏方面就很科幻了。 所以当GPT出来许多人说中国AI怎么养怎么样做不出来, 其实那个时候就可以发笑了。anyway ,
当然以上都是我瞎听瞎说的。属于胡说八道系列。
当然也可以乐观表示，美国可能给我们看到的也是冰山一角啦。
口号挺响亮
象GPT这种聊天型的AI，中国更早吧？
多少年前，中国就开始喊“小爱，小爱”， 巴拉巴拉。。。
那只是初期
工会在科技创新下真的是个阻力。遥想N多年前（10几年了我去），专家来美国考察港口，要全面更新上海的港口。
现在？ 😄。 我们的港口绝对甩当时那个被考察的10几条街了。
所以 ， 不进步就会被替代！ 别小看中国在科技后面暗暗的发力。 到底虽然是个集权国家，但人家是真的在下盘大棋（下的对不对不在这里讨论）~~~
美国以前也有这样的眼界格局。像那个横空出世的research frontier 的paper , 促成NIH 前生。促进美国成为最早大学和科研挂钩的国家。使得这个国家不断享受到科研前沿，吸引人才，人才推动最新科研，吸引人才的正循环几十年之久。
现在呢？？？？ 还有这样的事业吗？ 这样超前的理念吗？
所以看样子也不是名主的锅。research frontier paper 出现并被高度重视的那时候美国也是个名主的国家啊。 所以美国到底怎么了？ 😔
低端制造有什么可比的
无人机机器人现在领先就是因为ai再如何发展，落地需要工业能力支持。美国没有工业能力，又整天对着中国的电子厂喊打喊杀。有这个下场一点儿不奇怪。
貌似中国的AI一出来，从上到下一致拥护支持啊。按照中国政府的行动力和效率，没什么疑问
1到100很重要，没有这个能力，0到1只会被逼死，美国很多商业上成功的科技公司也不是第一个做出产品的。
总结的真到位
你满地打滚也得认清现实啊。
中国有那么多基础扎实，能吃苦有韧性的小镇做题家，怎么会缺创造力。做题遏制创造力是文科生的yy。
小爱肯定是在echo, siri之后的事。。。
而且真有本事的，要给吹水烙印让路
美国有算力优势，AI技术应该还是比较强
但中国的教育体系成规模的培养海量理工科人才，比美国更适合大幅推广AI的应用。。
感觉，办公自动化和生态系统这块，未来美国会占优。 但中国会在生活生产应用和机器人上占优势。 其实不是零和游戏， 美国现在有点把这个当成零和游戏的意思，没有必要，如果要在这个赛道拼你死我活，不乐观。中国人感觉在AI 方面有先天优势。
闺蜜是国内AI从业人士 国内目前是 从上到下各行各业 都在想办法Adopt AI 说一拥而上都不为过 以国人人才数量和卷度 实现应用和迭代优化的速度 还有一点 对隐私数据的easy acess度 应该很快就会看到大量的结果 再看看美国的效率…
AI应用需要大量的人才，这方面中国天然领先，美国能搞出AI来，但是没有便宜工程师做应用，现在被中国把价格打下来，倒是一个机会，否则CS的人才太贵了
算力优势已经被deepseek弱化了啊，否则nvda跌成这样
所以美国在卡算力，中国AI的展开会遇到瓶颈。。
算力优势的弱化是暂时的。。
大规模AI应用时，对算力需求惊人 只要中国无法自产高端AI芯片，就依然在被卡脖子。。
满嘴脏话，你还是个博士，现在博士的门槛这么低了？骗子吧！
只要能把中国ai都禁掉，美国ai就会一直赢赢赢
Open AI 正式上书美国政府，要求川普政府在全世界范围禁Deep Seek
In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations.
The proposal, a submission for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” initiative, claims that DeepSeek’s models, including its R1 “reasoning” model, are insecure because DeepSeek faces requirements under Chinese law to comply with demands for user data. Banning the use of “PRC-produced” models in all countries considered “Tier 1” under the Biden administration’s export rules would prevent privacy and “security risks,” OpenAI says, including the “risk of IP theft.”
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-state-contr
全都去搞体育了
中国AI和你有毛关系？你那么憎恨中国文化，讨厌国男，你跑这个帖子里得瑟什么，我看你不是夹生了，是精神分裂了！