On 2/4/2011 11:42 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, SA wrote:
>
>> But the U.S. stands out for its younger cohorts experiencing by far
>> the smallest gains. In fact, while US scores for the older group are
>> ranked among the top countries, by the time you get to the younger
>> group they're clearly below the average. (These cohorts essentially
>> represent people born in the 1930's versus those born in the 1960's,
>> all of whom were tested in the 1990's.)
>
> I'm coming to this late, and please excuse me if you're all beat on
> this, but this paragraph baffles me. In the first place it's got
> nothing to do with kids today -- the "younger" cohort is people who
> are now 40-50, i.e., us oldsters. In the second place, the 1960s were
> a kind of educational golden age -- high in money spent and enthusiasm
> and respect -- while the 1930s were of course the depression when most
> people didn't even finish high school. In between comes the GI bill
> and massive expansion in the funds available for education and the
> peak years of the state university systems. And yet the people who
> were educated in the fat years are much less literate than the people
> educated when there was virtually no public spending on higher
> education and much less on high schools? This makes no sense to me at
> all. What am I missing?
These numbers are for people who were born in the 30's and 60's, not educated in the 30's and 60's. Both cohorts are post-GI bill. So the educational attainment of the older cohort was high, while that of the younger cohort was even higher. (The share of the younger cohort with a BA is about 10 points higher.) So it's not surprising that the younger cohort has higher literacy scores than the older cohort - a pattern that exists in every country in the OECD study. What's surprising is how limited the increase was from one generation to the next. The increase is much greater in every other OECD country. In the US, the younger cohort's scores are +20 points lower than they would have been if the (very regular) pan-OECD pattern had played out in the US.
SA