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Breaking down that awful American education thingy
| Do we really need to fix our schools, or is it just that certain subsets of the student population aren't holding up their end? |
Almost everyone who worries about America's "competitiveness" in the world bemoans the sorry state of U.S. K-12 education. The Chinese and others do better. We need to catch up. From President Obama to CEOs, the refrain is to "fix the schools," almost as if it were an engineering problem. The diagnosis spans the political spectrum. But what if it's not true?
We now have a massive study of the reading abilities of 15-year-olds (roughly 10th-graders) in 65 systems worldwide showing that U.S. schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts.
The study, called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. It covered the OECD's 34 mostly wealthy member nations (including the United States, most European countries and Japan) and 31 others. The test was scored on a zero to 1,000 scale... The United States ranked 17th (500), slightly above the average (493) of the OECD's advanced countries. This was behind Japan (520) and Belgium(506), and just ahead of Germany (497), France (496) and Britain(494).
| Summary of the rest: digging into the data reveals that non-Hispanic white American students (average score 525) match or beat most white OECD countries, putting them in the top ten country scores, Asian-Americans (541) ditto for Asian countries. But African-Americans (441) and Hispanics (legal status not noted, average score 466) continue to pose a challenge, and the writer questions how much is caused by abysmal schools and how much by the home and community environment. |
| Robert J.Samuelson is a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of "Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom is (Almost Always) Wrong" (2001), and his photo reveals thoughtful eyes, an archaic, bushy mustache, and a wedding ring. |
Posted by: trailing wife 2011-01-12 |
