That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [58]
And standardized international math and reading tests consistently show that American fourth graders compare well with their peers in countries such as Finland, Korea, and Singapore. But our high school students lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” the McKinsey & Company consulting firm concluded in an April 2009 report entitled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools. There are millions of students in modern American suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the report’s authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs—not $40 to $50 an hour.”
Every three years the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures how fifteen-year-old students in several dozen industrial countries are being prepared for the jobs of the future by asking them to use their knowledge of math and science to solve realworld problems and to use their reading skills to “construct, extend and reflect on the meaning of what they have read.”
Here is a sample PISA science question. Test yourself: “Ray’s bus is, like most buses, powered by a petrol engine. These buses contribute to environmental pollution. Some cities have trolley buses: they are powered by an electric engine. The voltage needed for such an electric engine is provided by overhead lines (like electric trains). The electricity is supplied by a power station using fossil fuels. Supporters for the use of trolley buses in a city say that these buses don’t contribute to environmental pollution. Are these supporters right? Explain your answer.”
Here is a sample math question: “A pizzeria serves two round pizzas of the same thickness in different sizes. The smaller one has a diameter of 30 cm and costs 30 zeds. The larger one has a diameter of 40 cm and costs 40 zeds. Which pizza is better value for the money? Show your reasoning.”
Precisely because the PISA test is designed by the OECD to nurture and measure critical thinking and other twenty-first-century workplace skills, the showing of American students in 2009 is troubling. In reading, Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia posted the highest scores. American students were in the middle of the pack, tied with those in Iceland and Poland. In math, the American fifteen-year-olds scored below the international average, more or less even with Ireland and Portugal, but lagging far behind Korea, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, and Switzerland. In science literacy, the U.S. students again were the middle of the pack, and again lagging behind the likes of Shanghai, Singapore, and Finland. It’s notable that Shanghai, the only city tested in China, did better in math, science, and reading than any of the other sixty-five countries.
Of Shanghai’s performance, Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in the Department of Education during the Reagan administration, told The New York Times (December 7, 2010), “Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik … I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if they can do this in Shanghai in 2009, they can do it in 10 cities in 2019, and in 50 cities by 2029.” That is the Chinese way: experiment, identify what works, and then scale it. Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has noted that “while many Americans believe that other countries get better results because those countries educate only a few, while the United States educates everyone, that turns out not to be true.” Compared to the United States, most top-performing countries do a better job of educating students from low-income families, he said.
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