U.S. Students Are Really Bad at Geography

[Heather Duval]

Your kid has no idea where Saudi Arabia – or maybe even South Carolina

It's no secret that U.S. students are horrible at geography and have been for some time.

Nearly three-quarters of eighth-graders tested below proficient in geography on the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation's Report Card – and that's almost exactly the same result as in 1994.


It's a similar case when looking at prior NAEP assessments of fourth- and 12th-graders, approximately 80 percent of whom tested below proficient in 2010.

But now there's a better understanding for why that might be.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that more than half of social studies teachers spend 10 percent or less of their time on geography. Social studies is the umbrella subject under which geography is taught, along with things like history, civics and economics.

What's more, a majority of states do not require geography courses in middle school or high school. As of 2013, only 17 states required a geography course in middle school and 10 states required a geography course for students to graduate from high school.

[ READ: U.S. Faces Shortage of Bilingual Teachers ]

"A key challenge to providing geography education is the increased focus on other subjects," said Jacqueline Nowicki, the GAO's director for education, workforce and income security issues and the lead author of the report.

State education officials and K-12 teachers interviewed as part of the investigation told the GAO researchers that spending time and resources on geography education is difficult due to the heavy emphasis placed at both the national and state levels on reading, math, and science. Federal law, for example, requires students to be tested in all three areas.

"One state official told us how the state had eliminated geography from the curriculum for over a decade, and only recently added geography courses back amid concerns from the community that students were lacking essential geography skills," Nowicki said.

New Common Core Curricula May Not Work

The growing use of geographic information and location-based technology across multiple sectors of the economy, the GAO researchers explained, has prompted questions about whether K-12 students have the adequate skills and exposure to geography they'll need to fill workforce needs later in life.

Those concerns are valid: According to the Department of Labor, the employment of geography specialists is projected to grow 29 percent from 2012 to 2022 – much faster than the average 11 percent growth for all occupations.

Some of those positions require skills and knowledge in areas like maintaining roads and other types of transportation infrastructure; quickly responding to natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, and fires; and tracking endangered species.

The report noted that many geography teachers do not have an educational background in the subject and took few, if any, geography courses in college.

The GAO researchers also identified other challenges to educators being able to adequately teach geography and students being able to grasp it, including a lack of teacher preparation and professional development in the subject, poor quality of geography instructional materials, and limited use of geographic technology in the classroom.

[ ALSO Education Reforms Are Here to Stay ]

Half of teachers interviewed for the report described difficulties accessing resources for geography education – meaning everything from getting quality classroom materials to being able to take field trips. Seventy percent reported frustrations – such as outdated software, lack of technical support at their school and poor Internet connections – with using technology to teach the subject.

Strapped for federal dollars as it is, the U.S. Department of Education has a limited role in geography achievement rates. It's behind the NAEP exam, but even that doesn't annually test students on the subject. Since 1994, the geography NAEP has been administered just four times. Officials expect to administer it next in 2018.

"K-12 education is critically important for learning the fundamentals of geography," Nowicki said. "However, throughout the country, states and local school districts are striving to balance limited resources against requirements to ensure students are proficient in reading, math and science."

Source:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles...e-at-geography

[Heather Duval]

[Heather Duval]

[Heather Duval]

IS Britney Spears still thinking Japan is in Africa?

[KMack]

I like geography! Get out of my barrio and off of the Beach!
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-...-was-startling
A Brazilian student mapped out Rio's racial segregation. What he found was startling

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Hugo Nicolau Barbosa de Gusmão, a 29-year-old geography student from Sao Paulo, got fired up watching the news from Rio de Janeiro.

Following reports that young black men were being effectively barred from accessing Rio’s fanciest beaches, Barbosa went online to find out more about the racial makeup of Brazil’s second-largest city.

Barbosa said he had seen richly detailed maps showing the racial segregation in Chicago and other cities in the United States, but he said he could find no such maps of Brazilian cities online.

So he decided to make his own.

After tabulating 2010 census data from Brazil’s federal statistics agency, the most recent available, Barbosa created a series of maps using free open-source software. What he found both confirmed what he suspected and surprised him.

The Zona Sul [South Zone] of Rio is about 80 percent white — 80 percent!” Barbosa said. “I knew it would be high, but I didn’t think it would be that stark.”

According to Barbosa’s research, one neighborhood, Lagoas, was almost 90 percent white.

Nationwide, the share of Brazilians who identified as white in the census was only 48 percent.

For further confirmation, GlobalPost showed the study to a senior demographer at Brazil’s National School of Statistical Sciences. He said it looks accurate and estimated that little has changed since that census.

Barbosa posted his maps on a new blog and Facebook, where they were shared hundreds of times.

The Brazilian census has five (broad and oft-criticized) categories for race: “branco,” Portuguese for white; “pardo,” literally brown for mixed-race with African descent; “preto,” or black; “amarelos” or yellow (yes, unbelievably) for people of Asian descent; and “indigeno” for indigenous peoples.

Approximately 50 percent of the country's population identified as either pardo or preto (both also referred to as Afro-Brazilian). About half of Rio's population did as well.

Yet, in the city's most prestigious South Zone neighborhoods, it’s clear that whites are a vast majority along the beaches, where real estate prices are highest, and that other racial groups are a minority and are clustered together in certain neighborhoods:

Barbosa also produced three maps showing each racial group individually in the South Zone.

This one shows where people who identify as preto (black) live. As you can see, the population is generally grouped in clusters inland away from the beach:

Lastly, here is just the population that identifies as white. You'll notice that 80 percent concentration in the South Zone we were talking about:

Barbosa said he spent a lot of time putting together the maps, and hopes they add to a growing conversation in Brazil about race, disparity and criminal justice issues. As GlobalPost recently reported, young black men are killed in overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers by police officers in Rio. Barbosa echoed activists who said race is seldom discussed by Brazil’s policy makers.

“I wanted these maps to be available because here in Brazil there’s a lot of talk about how there isn’t any racism,” Barbosa said. “That’s wrong, and I think these maps are a good visualization of that.”

Jose Eustaquio Alves, a demographer and professor at Brazil’s National School of Statistical Sciences, said most Brazilian cities are similarly segregated.

What’s unusual about Rio, he said, is that non-white and white neighborhoods abut each other.

There are “favelas” — poor, underdeveloped neighborhoods where residents are predominantly non-white — right alongside some of the most expensive real estate in Brazil. Typically, he said, favelas are out in the suburbs of Brazilian cities, where land is cheap and work commutes can be very long.

Alves said Barbosa’s mapping work has been done previously by other demographers, but that the accessibility of data online combined with free mapping software mean that anybody can now create sophisticated maps to illustrate demographic trends.

“We used to have to pay for that data,” he said. “Now everything’s free.”

[Heather Duval]

I like geography! Get out of my barrio and off of the Beach!
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-...-was-startling
A Brazilian student mapped out Rio's racial segregation. What he found was startling

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Hugo Nicolau Barbosa de Gusmão, a 29-year-old geography student from Sao Paulo, got fired up watching the news from Rio de Janeiro.

Following reports that young black men were being effectively barred from accessing Rio’s fanciest beaches, Barbosa went online to find out more about the racial makeup of Brazil’s second-largest city.

Barbosa said he had seen richly detailed maps showing the racial segregation in Chicago and other cities in the United States, but he said he could find no such maps of Brazilian cities online.

So he decided to make his own.

After tabulating 2010 census data from Brazil’s federal statistics agency, the most recent available, Barbosa created a series of maps using free open-source software. What he found both confirmed what he suspected and surprised him.

The Zona Sul [South Zone] of Rio is about 80 percent white — 80 percent!” Barbosa said. “I knew it would be high, but I didn’t think it would be that stark.”

According to Barbosa’s research, one neighborhood, Lagoas, was almost 90 percent white.

Nationwide, the share of Brazilians who identified as white in the census was only 48 percent.

For further confirmation, GlobalPost showed the study to a senior demographer at Brazil’s National School of Statistical Sciences. He said it looks accurate and estimated that little has changed since that census.

Barbosa posted his maps on a new blog and Facebook, where they were shared hundreds of times.

The Brazilian census has five (broad and oft-criticized) categories for race: “branco,” Portuguese for white; “pardo,” literally brown for mixed-race with African descent; “preto,” or black; “amarelos” or yellow (yes, unbelievably) for people of Asian descent; and “indigeno” for indigenous peoples.

Approximately 50 percent of the country's population identified as either pardo or preto (both also referred to as Afro-Brazilian). About half of Rio's population did as well.

Yet, in the city's most prestigious South Zone neighborhoods, it’s clear that whites are a vast majority along the beaches, where real estate prices are highest, and that other racial groups are a minority and are clustered together in certain neighborhoods:

Barbosa also produced three maps showing each racial group individually in the South Zone.

This one shows where people who identify as preto (black) live. As you can see, the population is generally grouped in clusters inland away from the beach:

Lastly, here is just the population that identifies as white. You'll notice that 80 percent concentration in the South Zone we were talking about:

Barbosa said he spent a lot of time putting together the maps, and hopes they add to a growing conversation in Brazil about race, disparity and criminal justice issues. As GlobalPost recently reported, young black men are killed in overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers by police officers in Rio. Barbosa echoed activists who said race is seldom discussed by Brazil’s policy makers.

“I wanted these maps to be available because here in Brazil there’s a lot of talk about how there isn’t any racism,” Barbosa said. “That’s wrong, and I think these maps are a good visualization of that.”

Jose Eustaquio Alves, a demographer and professor at Brazil’s National School of Statistical Sciences, said most Brazilian cities are similarly segregated.

What’s unusual about Rio, he said, is that non-white and white neighborhoods abut each other.

There are “favelas” — poor, underdeveloped neighborhoods where residents are predominantly non-white — right alongside some of the most expensive real estate in Brazil. Typically, he said, favelas are out in the suburbs of Brazilian cities, where land is cheap and work commutes can be very long.

Alves said Barbosa’s mapping work has been done previously by other demographers, but that the accessibility of data online combined with free mapping software mean that anybody can now create sophisticated maps to illustrate demographic trends.

“We used to have to pay for that data,” he said. “Now everything’s free.”

And who does not know that a high class(South Zone), in Rio is pred "white". If they're real white, that's another story. Light pardos here are said to be white and in the upper-class schools in Rio it's fulled with them. And ive already made a thread about them
https://www.theapricity.com/forum/sh...-Latin-America

Latinus for exemple lives in the same region as I, in the North Zone of Rio. Its a middle class/ low middle class region of Rio and is very diverse.

[Latinus]

Gentleman KMack, it's a fact that richer neighborhood have a hight proportion of more Europid looking people and that working class areas is more brown/mixed. But it's not that black and white. In the South Zone there are many light skinned pardos and the in the North Zone white people are not uncommon. The only rare element in middle class Euros here in Rio are the Northern looking types. Yesterday I went to Copacabana to do an exam and I say a very fair skinned blonde girl. I don't if she is Brazilian of Northern Euro ancestry or a foreigner from Northern Europe. I kept staring at her. In my subway back home there was a super fair/freckled ginger. His phenotype also catched my attention.

Summing up:
richer areas: white and whiter looking people are the majority.
Working class areas: all races together. You find whites (mainly meds), black and mixed people (some more black and others more Euro). Northern Euros looking, at least in the Southeast region, are rare. I think white meds tend to be grouped among lighter skinned pardos and that downgrade the percentage of white people in working class neighborhoods.

[Cristiano viejo]

It is amazing how t can be people so in the most powerful country in the world, which produces a lot of smart people here and there in every field of science, arts, etc etc,

[Heather Duval]

Gentleman KMack, it's a fact that richer neighborhood have a hight proportion of more Europid looking people and that working class areas is more brown/mixed. But it's not that black and white. In the South Zone there are many light skinned pardos and the in the North Zone white people are not uncommon. The only rare element in middle class Euros here in Rio are the Northern looking types. Yesterday I went to Copacabana to do an exam and I say a very fair skinned blonde girl. I don't if she is Brazilian of Northern Euro ancestry or a foreigner from Northern Europe. I kept staring at her. In my subway back home there was a super fair/freckled ginger. His phenotype also catched my attention.

Summing up:
richer areas: white and whiter looking people are the majority.
Working class areas: all races together. You find whites (mainly meds), black and mixed people (some more black and others more Euro). Northern Euros looking, at least in the Southeast region, are rare. I think white meds tend to be grouped among lighter skinned pardos and that downgrade the percentage of white people in working class neighborhoods.

I do not know why the class differences in Rio turned into subject in this thread.

[Latinus]

I do not know why the class differences in Rio turned into subject in this thread.

Because some Gringos are childish and doesn't accept criticism of their countries.