Surprising the post-industrial world, the United States for the first time has the highest achieving students in international education rankings according to PISA’s math, reading and science assessments.*
The influential PISA rankings, run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), are based on tests taken every three years by fifteen-year-olds in more than seventy countries. The United States, to the dismay of many, has forever produced mediocre scores—typically behind countries such as Japan, Estonia, Finland and even Vietnam.
The 2016 results therefore continue a whirlwind twelve months of unexpected outcomes for the world: the Chicago Cubs winning the world series, Leicester City winning the English premier league, Brexit, and the U.S. presidential election.**
The results also held some hard truths for many nations. The UK and France failed to make any substantial gains. Traditionally low-performing countries like Peru and Colombia improved. And education ministers in Moscow were thrilled to see Russia jump into second place in reading, math, and science—mere points behind the U.S. of A.***
The broader consequences of the results for the education reform world are as yet unknown, but many have already declared definitively that education has now been reformed.
SOURCE: “2016 Pisa Results in Focus,” OECD (April 2017)
* This is actually big news—so big that even President Trump weighed in with a 5:00am Tweet on Saturday-morning: “US schools have been failing for decades under Obama. Sad! Now I’ve MADE THEM GREAT AGAIN!” Following this tweet was a White House press release claiming that the President has been working diligently to improving U.S. education since his inauguration, and the results merely reflect this.
Such claims were thrown into doubt, however, at that day’s press briefing when Glenn Thrush of the New York Times informed Press Secretary Sean Spicer that the claims must be false because the exams were taken in May 2016 and reflect the culmination of a broader upward curve beginning seven to eight years ago. Spicer ignored the information and accused Thrush of being an “unpatriotic peddler of nonsense.”
** Nobody thought Trump would win, but he did, suggesting that no one knows anything and nothing matters.
*** These scores are, however, currently under investigation by the OECD after U.S. intelligence agencies informed the organization that, based on “incidentally collected” conversations, the scores might have been affected by electronic tampering.
