"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams famously wrote, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Nowhere is that truer than in education, where passions and wishes often take the place of hard information.
In recent years, an unexpectedly rich source of factual information about U.S. education has turned out to be the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based "club" of the world's more prosperous lands. When I attended OECD education meetings back in the 1980s, they were sleepy, formalistic affairs that only an education minister (or ed school professor) could love. But of late the organization has evolved into a valuable font of comparative data on education in what we once called the "industrial world." Its annual Education at a Glance is especially helpful in placing U.S. education facts in international perspective, though some of its "indicators" are hard to interpret as a result of OECD's need to massage the data in arcane ways to make them comparable from country to country. (The post-secondary numbers are especially gnarly.)
You may want to get the 2003 edition for yourself, but it now runs a whopping 450 pages so allow me to note some facts contained therein that seem especially illuminating for American education reformers.
- The U.S. high school graduation rate-72 percent of the age cohort, using OECD calculations-is now well below average. Not only do we lag countries that you might expect to do well (Denmark at 96 percent, Japan at 93 percent) but we're also behind Poland (92 percent) and Italy (79 percent). The U.S. position improves when later graduates and GED recipients are factored in, but many analysts have come to doubt both their intellectual equivalence and their career- and income-boosting power.
- Though American 4th graders have reading skills in the upper end of the OECD distribution, our 15-year-olds are just average on this scale-and in both cohorts the "standard error" of the U.S. score is greater than for any other land, meaning we have greater disparities in the test-taking sample.
- When it comes to the performance of 15-year-olds in math and science (on the PISA math and science "literacy scales"), the U.S. score is again average in both subjects and again has the largest standard error.
- Our outcomes may be average, but our inputs are way above average. From pre-school through university, American education institutions spent an average of $10,240 per student in 2000, the most of any country and about twice the OECD mean ($5,736). To be sure, this is skewed by the high spending of our colleges, but it is also a fact that U.S. pre-school, primary, and secondary school per-pupil expenditures are second in the OECD world (after Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland, respectively).
- Relative to GDP, our overall per-pupil expenditures are tied for first place (with Austria), though several countries outstrip us on this measure when preschool, primary, and secondary school are separated out from higher ed. More interesting, while the U.S. leads in overall per-pupil expenditures, it lags in public investment in private schools. According to the report "in a number of OECD countries, governments pay most of the costs of primary, secondary, and post-secondary non-tertiary education but leave the management of educational institutions to the private sector to provide a wider range of learning opportunities without creating barriers to the participation of students from low-income families."
- U.S. private expenditures on education are second highest at about 32 percent of total institutional expenditures, trailing only Korea (40 percent) and almost triple the OECD average. But that's mainly due to higher education. And when you flip it around, you find that U.S. public expenditures in support of private K-12 education are among the world's lowest: just 0.3 percent of total public education outlays, vastly below such countries as Australia, France, Germany, Spain, and Britain.
- America channels less of its GDP into government than do most OECD countries-not surprising, considering the heavy tax burdens of most European nations-but within our total public expenditure the share going to education (15.5 percent) surpasses the OECD mean (13 percent) and is bested only by Korea, Mexico, and Norway.
- Once upon a time, Americans didn't necessarily go to better schools but they got more schooling. That's no longer true. The average number of years of full-time schooling expected for today's young American is 15.5, compared with an OECD average of 15.7. Adding part-time schooling brings our average to 17.1, versus an OECD mean of 16.9, but we're way outstripped by Australia (20.6), all of Scandinavia, Germany, New Zealand, even Spain.
- Not surprisingly, our college-going rate no longer leads the world, nor do our persistence rates within college. (Even when full and part-time tertiary education are combined, our expected average of 3.5 years is outdone by Finland and Korea.) And we've developed a wider-than-average female-male discrepancy in college matriculation and completion rates.
- Though the U.S. is surpassed by just a few countries (Hungary, Iceland, Italy) in the number of school employees per 1000 K-12 students-we're at 116.2 vs. the OECD average of 99.5-we have relatively fewer teachers (and other academic personnel) within that workforce (62.1 per 1000 students vs. an OECD mean of 71.4). That's because we have more administrators and "maintenance and operations" personnel.
- U.S. teachers get better-than-average pay at every level-beginners, after 15 years, and at the top of the salary scale-but compared with the nation's wealth (measured as GDP per capita) they earn less than their peers in a number of countries. The average U.S. teacher salary after fifteen years of experience equals 1.19 GDP per capita, compared to OECD averages of 1.31 to 1.43. American teachers also work more student "contact" hours each year. Our high-school teachers, however, are no better paid than primary teachers-strikingly different from the pattern in most other lands.
What to make of such stubborn facts? America looks strikingly AVERAGE on most measures of education performance and efficiency, including some where we once beat "the competition." Where we now do best is on gauges of education spending. Where we fare worst is on measures of educational attainment, both quantitative and qualitative. If average returns to large investments are good enough for the world's only super-power, we can quit trying to reform our education system. To those who see the present situation as the path to national decline, however, these data should serve as an alarm bell.
Education at a Glance 2003, Organisation of Economic Co-Operation and Development, September 2003
