Not content to have already won four Education Olympics medals, Taiwan (Chinese Taipei according to the Chinese government) is calling for an overhaul of its secondary education system! The Taipei Times reports that Premier Liu Chao-shiuan wants to see a plan in the next four weeks on how to improve exit exam scores of graduating students.

No, I’m not kidding.

Or so the post-graduate cram schools in South Korea have been accused. No make-up, no fraternizing with the opposite sex, no iPods, no fun—and classes and studying from 7:30 am to midnight. Sounds a bit extreme, but the ultimate motivation is sound: Korea won’t let these students enter college without being prepared. A look at results from the Education Olympics show that Korea is kicking American tuchus. Maybe we should be taking notes.

The Japanese score well on international exams, but perhaps the pressure is getting to them?

From the Associated Press’s description, it’s hard to believe that the “paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare” would have supported a school choice program 16 years ago, and have seen it be so successful. But believe it we must—and embarrassed we should be.

There are differences, of course, between the Swedish system and the American one, most notably that private or “independent” schools in Sweden really are free since all schools are state-funded, whether they are run by the state or a private company. And there are some problems, of course, such as the offer of laptops and iPods as incentives—a practice we have mixed feelings about. We know it’s not a perfect solution. But that’s not the point. The point is that even the Lärarförbundet teachers’ union is on board, reports the BBC. The union.

Maybe our own unions can take a page out of Sweden’s book. It’s not a matter of politics anymore, it’s a matter of good policy that works.

Japan’s famously demanding education system figures significantly in Natsuo Kirino’s new novel Real World, reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times books section:

“Real World” begins with a matricide. No longer willing to cooperate with the expectations of the “total idiot” who forced him to attend a prestigious high school even though he lacked the aptitude to succeed in such an environment, Worm bludgeoned his mother to death in what Terauchi, whose worldview allows no possibility of forgiveness or salvation, dismisses as a mindless, infantile response to frustration....

Welcome to present-day Tokyo, where “air pollution advisories” announce the arrival of summer vacation and where vacation isn’t a holiday from the 11-month academic year, but a break to be spent in cram schools taught by brainwashed college students who advocate studying hard enough to “spit up blood” as the avenue to a “tremendous confidence ... you can build on for the rest of your life.”

“We Need Someone Like Michelle Rhee” proclaims an editorial headline in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo. Apparently, the D.C. Chancellor of Schools is playing an inspirational role in the upcoming election for Seoul’s superintendent of education. Particularly noteworthy: her innovative merit pay scheme, her consolidation of schools, her shake up of school leaders, and, of course, rising test scores.

While the editorial does not support one candidate in particular, it does take the time to speak out against the candidate on the “leftwing” (their word, not mine) Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union ticket. Specifically, this candidate argues against school choice and publishing academic achievement levels. The editors explain:

But in order to save our schools from being carried away by efforts to make all schools uniform and face lowered education standards in the process, we must let students and parents choose which high schools they want to attend and promote competition among teachers by letting everyone know which schools excel and which lag behind.

Absolutely.

Chosun Ilbo covered Rhee’s reforms in more depth yesterday.

The newest issue of The Economist has a piece on international comparisons that offers a couple interesting lessons. The first is to be wary of them. In a recent analysis of Finland’s PISA scores, which routinely top those of all other comers, Jarkko Hautamäki and his colleagues at Helsinki University found

only one big policy element that could easily be replicated elsewhere: early and energetic intervention for struggling pupils. Many of the other ingredients for success that they identify—orthography, geography and history—have nothing to do with how schools are run, or what happens in classrooms.

In Finnish, exceptionally, each letter makes a single logical sound and there are no irregular words. That makes learning to read easy. An economy until recently dependent on peasant farming in harsh latitudes has shaped a stoic national character and an appetite for self-improvement. Centuries of foreign rule (first Swedes, then Russians) further entrenched education as the centrepiece of national identity. So hard work and good behaviour are the norm; teaching tempts the best graduates (nearly nine out of ten would-be teachers are turned down).

So American education wonks are missing the point when they say, for instance, that we should emulate Finland and make teaching more tempting to college graduates.

Some argue, though, that PISA has at least been successful inasmuch as it has increased the pressure on countries to improve their education systems to avoid humiliation.

[Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research], says international comparisons teach a crucial lesson: what is possible. “In 1995, at the first meeting of OECD ministers I attended, every country boasted of its own success and its own brilliant reforms. Now international comparisons make it clear who is failing. There is no place to hide.”

This should sound familiar, of course, as most people argue that NCLB’s only clear success so far has been to shine a light on failing schools and get people worked up enough to do something about it.

Nearly missed this article from the latest Economist on Swedish private schools, probably beceause it was in the business section. A bit of background: A 1994 law made it so that

pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself-a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child’s age and the school’s location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.

Since the law was passed, the proportion of school-age Swedes attending private schools has jumped from less than 1 percent to about 10 percent, spurred more by the growth of private school networks than by mom-and-pop operators. (USA Today comments today on a similar phenomenon with charter networks in the U.S.) The article compares the biggest such operator, Kunskapsskolan (”Knowledge Schools”), to IKEA:

Like IKEA, a giant Swedish furniture-maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten (”Knowledge Portal”), a website containing the entire syllabus....

Again like IKEA, no money is wasted on fancy surroundings. Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a school for 11- to 16-year-olds in a suburb of Stockholm, is a former office block into which classrooms, open-study spaces and two small lecture-theatres have been squeezed.

Also fascinating is the way the company manages its teachers:

Teachers update and add new material to the website during school holidays and get just seven weeks off each year, roughly the same as the average Swedish office worker....

Performance monitoring is also important within the company: it tracks the performance of individual teachers to see which ones do best as personal tutors or as subject teachers. It offers bonuses to particularly successful teachers and is considering paying extra to good ones from successful schools who are willing to move to underperforming ones....

“We do not mind being compared to McDonald’s,” [company boss Per Ledin] says. “If we’re religious about anything, it’s standardisation. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.”

This last paragraph will no doubt throw many an American educator into a rage. In the United States, teachers are idealized as public servants and heroes (even if not all of them live up to that ideal). Casting them as assembly-line automatons would not go over well here. But it just might be a viable and effective education model for at least some proportion of American kids.

Nigeria’s teachers’ union threatens to unleash the “mother of all strikes.”

(Gadfly has previously commented, in op-art form, on Nigeria’s trials.)

I’m not one to beat up on teachers unions just for the sake of it, but this little news story out of Australia illustrates precisely how the interests of unions and students do not always intersect. Apparently the State School Teachers Union decided that one of the best ways to obtain their 20 percent raise was to “move to withhold report cards,” essentially forcing parents to contact teachers directly for information about the child’s academic progress. Union officials, however, maintain that “parents and students will not unfairly suffer because of the action” since teachers hold report card meetings with parents anyway. Now, that’s some justification and especially little solace when we are told that this strategy is “just one of a broad range of tactics” to catalyze pay negotiations. Hate to see what the next tactic brings—withholding instruction altogether, or lunch time perhaps?

Yesterday I attended an informal event at Education Sector where Marc Tucker from NCEE spoke about international education. Tucker has spent a lot of time studying educational assessment and practices in various other countries and said a few blog-worthy things. First, that some of the biggest differences between many other high-performing nations and the US is that other nations hold students more accountable than the teachers and utilize “instructional systems” that integrate curricular exams, as opposed to the more isolated tests that we use. He spent quite a bit of time talking up the merits of various other high-performing nations, leaving a couple of us asking what political and economic hurdles the US faces in trying to adopt some of these reforms.

Tucker pointed out, as have others, that the US is much larger than other high-achieving countries and has a bigger disparity in income, though he has some ideas about how to address the latter. Pressed about cultural differences, he said if a solution is found to work both in Asia and Europe, then there should be no “cultural problem” with it in the US. He mentioned the strategy of teachers following students from grade to grade, which he believes builds in teacher accountability for student progress. It seems to me, as a nation, we have historically had the attitude that we can’t learn from other nations because we are more democratic, capitalist, individually-oriented, etc.-more unique in some way that makes us immune to learning from other nations. International comparisons have again and again shown our lackluster performance. I’m wondering if our American pride has slowly given way to our American ignorance.

The Economist recently ran an article about Mexico’s attempts to fix its education system. But the country must first deal with this.

Calexico (a U.S. border town) is kicking out of its schools Mexican students, who bring down test scores.

From The Economist: Mexico is making moves to fix its broken educational system (a system that affects the U.S. in obvious ways). One wonders, though, whether Mexico’s union boss (see here and here) is really willing to give up any power over teacher-staffing decisions.

Australia’s aboriginal community is suffering from a serious epidemic of children watching pornography at home—and then simulating sex acts in the classroom. Some of these aboriginal children are as young as seven. Even more disturbing, plenty of Australian social workers and community leaders think there’s nothing wrong with it. In their twisted minds, these children are not suffering from child abuse, despite being fed an endless diet of adult porn and, in some instances, having their parents sexually molest them.

The story in the Australian should be a wake-up call to the country’s authorities to crackdown on child abuse, improper sexual behavior in the classroom, and rampant pornography. A formal investigation by a former Supreme Court judge found that communities on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands were not only inundated with porn, but that welfare workers and local aboriginal leaders—those who are supposed to be protecting children—deliberately sought to dissuade teachers from tackling the problems of child abuse.

The judge’s report is replete with disturbing examples of illicit sexual behavior by students in classrooms. In one case, a seven-year-old girl dropped her pants in class, simulated sexual intercourse, and jammed several plastic objects into her vagina. School officials suspect she is the victim of incest. In another case, a nine-year-old girl made numerous sexual gestures in class. When confronted by her teacher, she said she learned the moves from “blue movies.” It was later found out that the girl came from an abusive home and that she was physically assaulted by her parents. Repeatedly, teachers tried to intervene on behalf of the children. But they were told by social workers and community leaders that it would only “inflame the problem.” Moreover, welfare case officers stressed that sexualized behavior by seven-year-olds did not reveal “any child abuse concerns.”

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Most ed reformers are drawn to their calling by one, or sometimes both, of two considerations: civil rights and economics. The first concern addresses the achievement gap between mostly white, upper-class students and their mostly minority, low-income peers. That this gap exists—and that it’s shameful and unacceptable—is undeniable.

The claims of the economics crowd, however, are less unassailable. Landmark report after landmark report warns us that, unless we adopt the following thirty-six-point plan to fix our schools, we face a future of indentured servitude to the emerging behemoths of the East. But, in fact, there’s little evidence to support such claims, just as there wasn’t in the eighties and nineties when Japan was on its supposedly inexorable march toward world domination.

Thankfully, Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews has written an accessible and persuasive response to the economic armageddon crowd in the latest Wilson Quarterly. Choice lines:

Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative ­A-­plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate ­courses.

Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of ­low-­income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that many of those children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children are. But most ­low-­income schools in the United States are simply bad. Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our ­back.

...the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations. Both countries are going to continue to send many of their brightest young people to study at U.S. universities. Stupidly conceived and administered immigration laws give many of these foreign students little choice but to leave once they receive their degrees. Given the chance, many more are likely to stay in the United States, where the jobs pay better; creativity in all fields, including politics, is encouraged; and—another blow to education critics—the colleges their children would attend are far better and more ­accessible.

Thank you, Jay, for injecting some badly needed sanity into this discussion. This is one of those articles you want to bookmark or print out so it’s easily accessible when education or globalization comes up at your dinner party.

Japan has slipped in international science rankings, so the government has announced a plan to train a special cadre of “super science teachers.” Gotta love the enthusiasm.

In Australia’s state of Victoria, teachers are about to receive a mammoth pay raise. But Kevin Donnelly, the Australian-education guru, doesn’t like it. He sees lots of other problems that need remedying.

Instead of a blanket pay increase, a real education revolution would focus on raising standards and improving learning outcomes by identifying the best way to deal with underperforming teachers and to attract and reward successful teachers.

 Donnelly also notes:

It makes sense that, instead of imposing on schools teachers who may not agree with the school’s educational philosophy, the power to hire, fire and reward staff should be at the local level, allowing those most affected by decisions to have a say.

Sounds familiar.

The Styles section features a piece about online services that let parents track their kids’ grades in real time. Not surprisingly, the author reports that in many places a new brand of parent-cum-Big Brother is causing “exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.” Here’s an idea: employ the real-time monitoring once a student shows signs of struggling, but not before.

Also, a front-page article on Turkish schools in Pakistan, which offer a milder brand of Islam and more rigorous academics than many Pakistani madrasas.

Israel’s education system faces some familiar-sounding problems:

The Dovrat recommendations included giving school principals the right to sack poor teachers and reward the better ones with higher pay, which they currently lack. But such moves have been blocked by Israel’s two teachers’ unions, one of which has paralysed secondary schools with a series of long strikes over the past few years. At the end of last year it settled for a wage rise in return for token increases in flexibility, but other reforms remain blocked.

That’s from The Economist’s special report on Israel in its sixtieth year. Israel ranked 39th out of 57 OECD countries in the 2006 PISA rankings and had the biggest gap between high- and low-achieving students.

And this isn’t helping things, says one commentator.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Matthew Forney, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time, seeks to correct what he thinks may be a popularly-held hunch that China’s growing class of educated urbanites will soon pressure the Chinese government to reform.

On the contrary, says Forney, “Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet.”

He goes on:

The most obvious explanation for this is the education system, which can accurately be described as indoctrination. Textbooks dwell on China’s humiliations at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century as if they took place yesterday, yet skim over the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s as if it were ancient history. Students learn the neat calculation that Chairman Mao’s tyranny was “30 percent wrong,” then the subject is declared closed. The uprising in Tibet in the late 1950s, and the invasion that quashed it, are discussed just long enough to lay blame on the “Dalai clique,” a pejorative reference to the circle of advisers around Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

“Of course,” he acknowledges, “the nationalism of young Chinese may soften over time. As college graduates enter the work force and experience their country’s corruption and inefficiency, they often grow more critical.”

That seems like a smart observation. One can’t imagine why young city-dwellers should be especially inclined to question textbooks that exaggerate or lie outright about the glories of their country. As they learn about the potential personal gains of free enterprise, however, they will undoubtedly try to push the government’s hand farther away from the markets—which will likely lead them to question the wisdom of other government policies.

Still, teaching bogus history in the schools can only stifle the impulse to reform. The Chinese government’s firm grip on the country may not slip for a while yet.

Check out this, from The Corner, on Mexico’s corrupt teachers’ union.

Gadfly has not ignored Mexico’s union venality: see here and here. And neither have we failed to note that if education south of the border was stronger, there would be far fewer reasons for Mexicans to attempt illegal entry into the U.S.

Surprisingly that wasn’t one of Angelina Jolie’s suggestions when she spoke yesterday at a Council on Foreign Relations panel about the impact of the war on Iraq’s children. Find out what she did recommend here.

Certainly this isn’t the country’s most pressing issue, but it’s still a big problem.

In an article from the March 31 issue of the New Yorker (the piece doesn’t seem to be available online at the moment), Peter Hessler reports on one family’s rise to (relative) affluence in the small Chinese village of Sancha:

Sancha was just beyond the Great Wall, and occasionally a weekend motorist from the city found his way to the makeshift sign. Cao Chunmei, Wei Ziqi’s wife, cooked pork and local vegetables. They charged three and a half dollars for a meal; guests could see the Great Wall from the table.

The Weis’ income increases sixfold in seven years. Their son, Wei Jia, attends boarding school. Here’s how Hessler describes Wei Jia’s education:

...his father travelled to Shayu for parent-teacher conferences. These were group affairs: all adults met the teacher at once. If a child was doing poorly, everybody heard, and the shame provided additional motivation.

That was the second rule listed on Wei Jia’s semester report cards: “Cherish the honor of the group.” (The first rule involved loving the nation.) These reports were more than thirty pages long, and they evaluated the boy from every possible perspective. There were physical measurements: height, weight, eyesight, hearing, chest circumference, and lung capacity (for Wei Jia, fourteen hundred millilitres in the first semester of fourth grade). Each of these statistics was compared with the national average. (According to the report, the lung capacity of a fourth-grade male should be 2,123 millilitres.) The teacher gave most grades, but parents also offered assessments. So did peers: every term, a classmate identified some prominent weakness of Wei Jia’s. (In fourth grade, a boy named Zhao told him to improve his handwriting.) Another section featured blank faces where Wei Jia drew mouths—smiley, straight, or frowning—depending on how he judged his own performance. On one report card, he gave himself straight smileys for “takes care of himself” and “capable use of common tools.” He drew a tensely straight mouth for “participates in labor for the collective welfare.” And for “cherishes the fruits of physical labor,” he drew a big fat frown...

I was amazed at the stuff Wei Jia learned—the most incredible assortment of de-systematized knowledge that had ever been crammed into a child with a lung capacity of fourteen hundred millilitres. In English, he memorized odd vocabulary lists: “spaceship,” “pizza,” “astronaut.” A textbook called “Environmental and Sustainable Development” must have been spawned from some collaboration with a foreign N.G.O. It taught “the five ‘R’s”—Reduce, Reëvaluate, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue wildlife-which made no sense when translated into a language that has no alphabet. Fifth graders memorized pages of instructions for Microsoft FrontPage XP. One Friday, Wei Jia told me they had just learned about Google. “A brother and sister in America started it,” he explained. (In the village, it all came down to family values.)

Obviously, this story alone doesn’t dispel the popular notion that China and India are hot on our heels. But it’s a pretty interesting depiction of what school is like for a kid in today’s rural China. (Memorizing the instructions for Microsoft FrontPage XP? Sheesh.)

Not funny.

Britain’s largest teachers’ union will vote, at its upcoming annual conference, to determine how many students the ideal class should enroll. What bosh! Perhaps I should take an office poll about the appropriate number of employees at an education-policy think tank? One may argue that teachers manage their own classrooms and therefore have a darn good idea about how many students they can adequately teach, but that’s at best an unsettled claim. It is settled, however, that taxpayers, not teachers, are footing the bill for public education, and scant are the data showing that pupils in smaller classes learn more.Therefore, it seems a poor investment of the public’s money to lower class sizes when little to no educational improvement will result. Furthermore, Checker Finn has written:

Over the past half-century, the number of pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent while the number of teachers nearly tripled. Spending per student rose threefold, too. If the teaching force had simply kept pace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, and nothing else changed, today’s average teacher would earn nearly $100,000, plus generous benefits. We’d have a radically different view of the job and it would attract different sorts of people. Yes, classes would be larger-about what they were when I was in school.

The obsession with lowering class sizes has kept teacher salaries stagnant—not a good thing for teachers but a wonderful thing for their unions, which have rapidly added to their membership ranks.

UPDATE: 20 seems to be about right.

Iran’s students are being taught the virtues of Islamic world supremacy and jihadism. This is the conclusion of a major new study on Iranian textbooks by Freedom House (read the full story here). The study, entitled “Discrimination and Intolerance in Iran’s Textbooks,” is a somber reminder that Iran’s theocratic regime is teaching its children to embrace anti-Americanism and prepare for a holy war against the West.

Saeed Paivandi, a sociologist at Paris-8 University and one of the West’s few experts on Iran’s post-revolutionary education system, looked at 95 compulsory textbooks taught in grades one to eleven. His conclusion: Iranian students are repeatedly told that humans don’t all enjoy the same rights; rather, we are classified into a distinct hierarchy—with Muslim men at the top, and women and non-Muslims occupying the lower rungs of the social ladder.

The textbooks assert that “some individuals are born first-class citizens, due to their identity, gender, and way of thinking, while others become second- and third-class citizens. Those who are excluded from the inside are victims of this discriminatory system.”

In fact, following the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullah thugs to power, Iran has systematically imposed a series of discriminatory laws that deny non-Muslims access to senior government posts, sanction the murder of homosexuals, enforce a strict quota system for Christians and Jews in universities, and insist that all Jewish- or Christian-owned businesses be publicly designated as non-Muslim.

Iran is one of the world’s most dangerous rogue states. It seeks to acquire nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, vows to “wipe Israel off the map” and create “a world without America.” Tehran supports al Qaeda and Shiite terrorists in Iraq; through its proxy, Syria, orders political assassinations against democratically elected, pro-Western members of Lebanon’s parliament; and sponsors radical Islamist terror groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

In other words, Iran is on the march, and it is using its classrooms to indoctrinate students in hate and jihad. For example, the study reveals that the Islamic culture religious studies textbook for eighth-graders has this to say about jihad: “Defensive jihad is incumbent upon every one, the young and the old, men and women, everyone, absolutely everyone, must take part in this sacred battle, fight to the best of his or her abilities or assist our fighters.”

Another textbook, this one for seventh-graders, says this about the glories of holy war: “By taking note of the guidance and instructions provided by Islam, every Muslim youth must strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of God and their people through combat-readiness and skillful target shooting.”

These kinds of textbooks obviously disgust many practicing, devout Muslims all over the world, who rightly see them as profound distortions of their faith and a twisted perversion of the educational mission of Iran’s schools. Yet the Freedom House study also shows that Iranian classrooms are becoming breeding grounds for future Islamist terrorists.

This is just one more reason why the United States, as well as all civilized countries, needs to keep the pressure on Tehran’s oppressive regime. Education should be about opening minds in the pursuit of truth and beauty, not closing them in the service of moral darkness and human destruction.

The Wall Street Journal examines why Finland’s laid-back education system leads the world. Long story short, nobody knows. Students in Finland have smaller classes, don’t do a lot of homework, don’t start school until age seven, and don’t move on to new academic material until everyone in their class has mastered the current lesson (therefore, the country has a tiny gap between its highest- and lowest-performing youngsters). The Finns are also a rather racially and economically homogeneous group and Finnish teaching positions are incredibly competitive—two facts that contrast sharply with the United States.

Funny thing is, a lot of what occurs in Finnish schools seems to undermine the prevailing educational wisdom. The country has self-guided student learning, starts students at a relatively late age, doesn’t focus energy on high-performing kids, has little standardized testing, and separates high-schoolers into different tracks (vocational and academic). Kids can even walk around in their socks during class. Perplexing.

It may not be simply that they study harder (though anecdotal evidence suggests they do). In this week’s New Yorker, Jim Holt profiles Stanislas Dehaene, a young French neuroscientist investigating how our brains handle numbers. According to Deheane’s research, we think about numbers in three distinct ways, each of which developed at a different point in human evolution.

The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

This last way of thinking about numbers poses problems for English-speakers:

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19, and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.” French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (“four twenty ten nine”) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

The lesson? Skip the STEM bills and pass instead the Mastering Asian Tongues at Home (MATH) Act. Then watch the Asian Advantage disappear.