NIT – A global education survey released Tuesday says that Shanghai, China teens are tops in the world in math, science and reading.
The findings are from a survey called the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), organized and compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which looked at some of the biggest economies in the world.
According to the survey, among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th. Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, and 21 in science. There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency – a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn’t changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.
Children from other countries are taught the way out of poverty is through education. American children are taught the government will take care of you so why bother.
Judging by the caliber of commentary on this topic, our education system has obviously failed the majority of NIT readers.
Seen a show about chneeeze education system- kids go to school about 8 hours and go home and eat and go back to school another 4 to 6 hours – Chineeez also has the highest sucicide rate in the world –
Wow that’s bad grammar. Did you intend to prove that US schools are the worst?
None of you really knows what this really means and you go back to your old standby- we put too much money into education with little positive results. I have said it before and I will say it again. Statistics don’t mean squat unless you know what is being measured. In China, students are filtered out of the educational system as they grow up. By the time they get to what we would call high school, the lower-performing students are no longer in their school system and they, therefore, aren’t included in the testing. So, only their best and brightest are tested. If we did the same thing in the United States, we would probably get those same kind of test scores. But we don’t do things that way here. We educate ALL students, regardless of ability. And, when tests are given, ALL students, regardless of ability, are tested. Our average scores will therefore be lower.
In many other cultures, education is restricted to the those who come from affluent or influential families. Students with learning disabilities aren’t given the opportunities in other countries. We strive to educate all children. That is the problem not test scores.
I also question the statistics about cost per student. I have never seen any report that says the US spends over $115,000 per student. Is that supposed to be a per year figure or through their public education life? (K-12)?
PISA is an organization who strives to do their best to help countries increase their educational opportunities. They are reputable but their testing is done on a small number of students in a small target area. There are many reasons for exclusions in their testing. I do believe that they are trying to improve education world-wide. But, testing is not the best or the only way to measure educational competence. If testing was the only way, there are a great many professionals in our world who do superior work in their chosen field, who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be in that profession if they were judged competent only on their test scores. There is a great deal more to education than testing well.
Good post. I still think we should just throw more money at it. That seems to be the general ideal these days. Doesn’t our great Emperor promote that sort of thing? Our wonderful Senate thinks so too. Surely they aren’t wrong are they?
Not all students are tested by PISA… it is a randomly selected group of students, at least in Mason City, based on nothing but being a public school student. Some of these students have special needs, etc. In other countries, only the best students are selected to test, as those are the only students in public schools at that age group. Let’s have PISA test the top 10, 20, 50% of students here compared to the same else ware, and the results would be better. Statistics are skewed in this case. Not saying US schools can’t improve, but don’t think they are not trying.
You don’t seem to understand sarcasm.
@didn’t how do you know that? I have seen nothing that supports your comments.
@bodacious-Good post. However, if they don’t test and grade by testing just how do you propose to measure the progress of a student? We test everything in this country to see if it works and I know of no other way to accomplish what we need to know.
That is the problem. How do we test competency? I am not sure we can do it unless we set up baseline standards that students need to achieve before they are considered competent and can move on to the next level. We would have to do away with schools as they are now and move to schools that have levels rather than grade levels (5th grade, Sophomores, etc) . We would also have to do away with grading as we know it now. No A’s B’s or F’s. It would take a lot of work and a lot of retraining-not only teachers but students and parents too. Can you imagine if your kid came home with a report card that didn’t have the traditional grades on it, but something else? I am not clever enough to devise such a system but I know it is being worked on in some circles. However, the new Common Core is not the answer.
@bodacious-If you set up a baseline standard would that not require a test of some sort to see if they meet the standard. It just seems like they would be trading one test for another. Everything in life is a test in one way or another and I really don’t have any idea how you can measure levels without some type of guidelines. It doesn’t matter if you call it a test or not as it amounts to the same thing. Just saying.
@bodacious-now all that being said, I seriously doubt that they will ever do anything to change the education system except throw more money at it. There are just to many people who make to much money off it the way it is, and people are afraid of change.
You’re right LVS…we should just throw more money at it.
Eventually many states will have to face reality like Wisconsin did after giving and giving to teachers and government unions which led to bankruptcy . It seems the answer to everything when it applies to government jobs is more money.
here is a great idea. Why don’t we just throw a bunch of money at it and pay teachers a lot more for under performing? Or, hire administrators at 100K p/ year to spend all that money. That has worked real well up to now.
Dollars dont equal results. The teachers unions have folks scammed, aint gonna change tell their out of education