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By Root 6762 0

they say in football, “You are what your record says you are.” Our record says that we are a country whose educational performance is at best undistinguished. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made no excuses for the results. The day the 2009 PISA results were published (December 7, 2010), he issued a statement, saying, “Being average in reading and science—and below average in math—is not nearly good enough in a knowledge economy where scientific and technological literacy is so central to sustaining innovation and international competitiveness.”

The PISA test results got some fleeting newspaper coverage and then disappeared. No radio or television station interrupted its programming to tell us how poorly we had done; neither party picked up the issue and used it in the 2010 midterms. Partial-birth abortion received more attention. The president did not make a prime-time address. The twenty-first-century equivalent of Sputnik went up—and yet very few Americans seemed to hear the signal it was sending.

Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams College and the author of Red Flags or Red Herrings? Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, frames our challenge this way: “There are two basic problems with education in America. The first glaring problem, the one getting lots of attention, is that too many kids have no choice but to go to schools that are dangerous, badly staffed, educationally indifferent, and underfunded. If you take those kids and put them in a school with reasonable funding, a school board and an administration that are excited about what is happening, and with energetic teachers, it’s a huge improvement over what those kids have had. So, problem one: too many kids in America go to schools that don’t even begin to offer them the hope of getting to average.”

Selected countries’ performance in mathematics, reading, and science, 2009

Mathematics Reading Science

Shanghai-China 600 Shanghai-China 556 Shanghai-China 556

Singapore 562 Korea 539 Finland 539

Hong Kong-China 555 Finland 536 Hong Kong-China 536

Korea 546 Hong Kong-China 533 Singapore 533

Chinese Taipei 543 Singapore 526 Japan 526

Finland 541 Canada 524 Korea 524

Liechtenstein 536 New Zealand 521 New Zealand 521

Switzerland 534 Japan 520 Canada 520

Japan 529 Australia 515 Estonia 515

Canada 527 Netherlands 508 Australia 508

Netherlands 526 Belgium 506 Netherlands 506

Macao-China 525 Norway 503 Chinese Taipei 503

New Zealand 519 Estonia 501 Germany 501

Belgium 515 Switzerland 501 Liechtenstein 501

Australia 514 Poland 500 Switzerland 500

Germany 513 Iceland 500 United Kingdom 500

Estonia 512 United States 500 Slovenia 500

Iceland 507 Liechtenstein 499 Macao-China 499

Denmark 503 Sweden 497 Poland 497

Slovenia 501 Germany 497 Ireland 497

Norway 498 Ireland 496 Belgium 496

France 497 France 496 Hungary 496

Slovak Republic 497 Chinese Taipei 495 United States 495

Austria 496 Denmark 495 Czech Republic 495

Poland 495 United Kingdom 494 Norway 494

Sweden 494 Hungary 494 Denmark 494

Czech Republic 493 Portugal 489 France 489

United Kingdom 492 Macao-China 487 Iceland 487

Hungary 490 Italy 486 Sweden 486

Luxembourg 489 Latvia 484 Austria 484

United States 487 Slovenia 483 Latvia 483

Ireland 487 Greece 483 Portugal 483

Portugal 487 Spain 481 Lithuania 481

Significantly above the OECD average GECD average Significantly below the OECD average

PISA focuses on young people’s ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in the goals and objectives of curricula themselves, which are increasingly concerned with what students can do with what they learn at school and not merely with whether they have mastered specific curricular content.

Source: OECD PISA 2009 database

Our second problem, explains Engel, is just as big, if not bigger. It’s that “even the ‘nice’ schools aren’t good enough. These schools have decent facilities, adequate class sizes, a good number of teachers who like their job and/or like kids,