Globally Challenged: Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?

Last November, Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) teamed up with Education Next to assess how well American states fare at getting their students to advanced levels in mathematics compared to their international peers. (Hint: not so well.) Continuing this line of work, this new PEPG/Ed Next report analyzes how successful states are at lifting their students to proficient levels—this time for both math and reading. To do so, Paul Peterson, Ludgar Woessman, Eric Hanushek, and Carlos Lastra-Anadon performed a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA results for math and reading for the Class of 2011 (a representative sample of which took both the eighth-grade NAEP in 2007 and the fifteen-year-old PISA in 2009). And the findings aren’t any more promising: In terms of math proficiency, the U.S. average puts us on par with Iceland, Italy, and Spain. Our worst states, Alabama and New Mexico, rank below Turkey and just ahead of Bulgaria and Serbia. Similar results are found with reading. The report goes on to explain that America’s lackluster results aren’t just about our achievement gap; even U.S. white students don’t command international acclaim—they are surpassed (in terms of percent proficient) by students from sixteen countries in math and eight countries in reading. Going further, the research team determined that the U.S. could enjoy staggering bumps in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of its students—we’re talking $75 trillion over twenty years (which is roughly five times our current GDP). The debt-ceiling super-commission might want to take a look.