The National Center for Education Statistics
April 2003
The National Center for Education Statistics has published this 30-page summary of U.S.-relevant findings from the long-awaited PIRLS study of reading literacy among 9 year olds, conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Thirty-five countries participated in this first round of a planned 5-year cycle of international trend studies in reading literacy. Bottom line: On average, U.S. fourth graders did better at reading than most--but not all--of their age mates in other lands. On a scale that combines literary and informational reading, they were surpassed only by England, Sweden and Netherlands. Good news, surely, as far as it goes, though America generally looks better on 4th grade comparisons than at the end of middle and high school. But it's not good news for everybody. African-American youngsters' reading score is smack at the international average, tied with Slovenia. Scores for U.S. youngsters in high-poverty schools are between those of Turkey and Moldova, this despite the fact that American schools spend far more time on reading than schools in other lands. (65% of U.S. 4th graders undergo 6+ hours of weekly reading instruction; worldwide, just 28% of kids are in such reading-intensive classrooms.) Readers may be surprised to learn that the average American 4th grader is being taught by a teacher with MORE years of experience (7) than the international norm (5). They are apt to be less surprised to see that U.S. private school pupils score significantly higher than those enrolled in public schools. (That difference is similar to the white-minority score gap.) There's plenty more here, as well as in the big tables that show more detail on other countries. You can find the U.S. report at http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003073 and the worldwide IEA reports at http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003026.
