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Little Progress for U.S. in International Education Benchmarks

The United States continues to perform below-average in math and middle-of-the-road in reading and science when compared with other industrialized nations.

ClassroomPISA
Students in a classroom at Mar Elias High School, Ibillin, Israel.
flickr user hoyasmeg
The United States’ academic standing in newly released international exams has remained middling at best, prompting heated debate about what is to blame and how to fix the problem.

The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, is administered every three years to 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 industrialized nations formed during the Cold War. Another 31 nations took part in the exam, representing a sample of about 510,000 students. 

Among the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. continued to perform below average in math, ranking 26th. But its ranking of 17th in reading and 21st in science placed the U.S. at about the OECD average. The test administrator noted that those rankings aren’t exact because of margins of error in the sampling data. But regardless, the scores were not “measurably different from average scores in previous PISA assessment years” dating back to the start of the decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which analyzes the data for a U.S. audience.  

That prompted Education Secretary Arne Duncan to call the performance “a picture of educational stagnation.” To improve U.S. competitiveness, he advocated investing in preschool, boosting academic standards and recruiting talented teachers—all initiatives of the Obama administration’s reform agenda. Its tacit support of new educational expectations called the Common Core State Standards, which are intended to raise the level of critical thinking that PISA strives for, has drawn criticism from both the left and the right.   

Others seized upon the results to argue the reforms of the past decade have failed to show results. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest unions in the country, argued years of “hyper-testing students, sanctioning teachers and closing schools has failed to improve the quality of American public education.” 

But others criticized attempts to shape the results to serve a particular reform agenda and downplayed the significance of the test. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute and Martin Camoy of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education attacked Duncan for holding a day-long event with policy experts whom they argue share the administration’s thinking. 

“Those with different interpretations of international test scores will see the reports only after the headlines have become history,” they wrote in a blog post.

Both authored a study last year pointing out that PISA doesn’t provide data broken down by socio-economic groups until well after the initial release, and the level of inequality in the U.S. helps explain its mediocre scores. When controlling for income, the U.S. ranks far better, they argued. The OECD, in turn, acknowledges differences in background have a “significant impact.”    

Others note that nations such as Vietnam that are far poorer than the U.S. still outperform it in international benchmarks. The Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group that emphasizes improving education for disadvantaged students, argues PISA asks the typical American student to do more than they have to do in standardized tests at the state level. PISA includes multiple choice but also writing responses that require students to apply a piece of information in situations that might be different from the original context. Questions are organized around a single passage or real-world problem and accelerate in terms of the level of thought required. The OECD argues this approach "reflects the fact that modern societies reward individuals not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know."

“PISA is about problem solving,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance and a former West Virginia governor. “It’s about taking knowledge and then applying it to a real-world problem as opposed to multiple-choice, measuring what you know.”

The latest PISA results also underscored differences in achievement among states. Florida, Massachusetts and Connecticut all increased sample sizes so they could be included in international comparisons among the countries. Massachusetts and Connecticut posted scores on all exams that were generally better than the OECD average. But Florida, a center of school reforms that value greater testing and accountability through data, finished below the average in math and science. 

Find the full report here.




How Countries Compare in Math, Reading and Science
In the 2012 Programme for International Assessment (PISA), OECD countries recorded average scores of 494 for math, 496 for reading and 501 for science. The following table shows mean 2012 PISA scores for each country, along with annualized change.

Country Average Math Score Math Score Change Average Reading Score Reading Score Change Average Science Score Science Score Change
Shanghai-China 613 4.2 570 4.6 580 1.8
Singapore 573 3.8 542 5.4 551 3.3
Hong Kong-China 561 1.3 545 2.3 555 2.1
Chinese Taipei 560 1.7 523 4.5 523 -1.5
Korea 554 1.1 536 0.9 538 2.6
Macao-China 538 1.0 509 0.8 521 1.6
Japan 536 0.4 538 1.5 547 2.6
Liechtenstein 535 0.3 516 1.3 525 0.4
Switzerland 531 0.6 509 1.0 515 0.6
Netherlands 523 -1.6 511 -0.1 522 -0.5
Estonia 521 0.9 516 2.4 541 1.5
Finland 519 -2.8 524 -1.7 545 -3.0
Canada 518 -1.4 523 -0.9 525 -1.5
Poland 518 2.6 518 2.8 526 4.6
Belgium 515 -1.6 509 0.1 505 -0.8
Germany 514 1.4 508 1.8 524 1.4
Viet Nam 511   508   528  
Austria 506 0.0 490 -0.2 506 -0.8
Australia 504 -2.2 512 -1.4 521 -0.9
Ireland 501 -0.6 523 -0.9 522 2.3
Slovenia 501 -0.6 481 -2.2 514 -0.8
Denmark 500 -1.8 496 0.1 498 0.4
New Zealand 500 -2.5 512 -1.1 516 -2.5
Czech Republic 499 -2.5 493 -0.5 508 -1.0
France 495 -1.5 505 0.0 499 0.6
United Kingdom 494 -0.3 499 0.7 514 -0.1
Iceland 493 -2.2 483 -1.3 478 -2.0
Latvia 491 0.5 489 1.9 502 2.0
Luxembourg 490 -0.3 488 0.7 491 0.9
Norway 489 -0.3 504 0.1 495 1.3
Portugal 487 2.8 488 1.6 489 2.5
Italy 485 2.7 490 0.5 494 3.0
Spain 484 0.1 488 -0.3 496 1.3
Russian Federation 482 1.1 475 1.1 486 1.0
Slovak Republic 482 -1.4 463 -0.1 471 -2.7
United States 481 0.3 498 -0.3 497 1.4
Lithuania 479 -1.4 477 1.1 496 1.3
Sweden 478 -3.3 483 -2.8 485 -3.1
Hungary 477 -1.3 488 1.0 494 -1.6
Croatia 471 0.6 485 1.2 491 -0.3
Israel 466 4.2 486 3.7 470 2.8
Greece 453 1.1 477 0.5 467 -1.1
Serbia 449 2.2 446 7.6 445 1.5
Turkey 448 3.2 475 4.1 463 6.4
Romania 445 4.9 438 1.1 439 3.4
Cyprus 440   449   438  
Bulgaria 439 4.2 436 0.4 446 2.0
United Arab Emirates 434   442   448  
Kazakhstan 432 9.0 393 0.8 425 8.1
Thailand 427 1.0 441 1.1 444 3.9
Chile 423 1.9 441 3.1 445 1.1
Malaysia 421 8.1 398 -7.8 420 -1.4
Mexico 413 3.1 424 1.1 415 0.9
Montenegro 410 1.7 422 5.0 410 -0.3
Uruguay 409 -1.4 411 -1.8 416 -2.1
Costa Rica 407 -1.2 441 -1.0 429 -0.6
Albania 394 5.6 394 4.1 397 2.2
Brazil 391 4.1 410 1.2 405 2.3
Argentina 388 1.2 396 -1.6 406 2.4
Tunisia 388 3.1 404 3.8 398 2.2
Jordan 386 0.2 399 -0.3 409 -2.1
Colombia 376 1.1 403 3.0 399 1.8
Qatar 376 9.2 388 12.0 384 5.4
Indonesia 375 0.7 396 2.3 382 -1.9
Peru 368 1.0 384 5.2 373 1.3

Source: OECD
Chris covers health care for GOVERNING. An Ohio native with an interest in education, he set out for New Orleans with Teach For America after finishing a degree at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. He later covered government and politics at the Savannah Morning News and its South Carolina paper. He most recently covered North Carolina’s 2013 legislative session for the Associated Press.
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