If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.
These words are 30 years old. They come from a commission set up by Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education to look into the sorry state of American schools. But if our performance on the latest rankings of 15-year-olds from the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is any indicator, America continues to punch well below our weight.
The rankings come from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment tests. The top performers are Asian: Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong and South Korea. But it’s not only Asia that’s beating us. Students from Switzerland and Belgium to the Netherlands and Poland are also doing better than Americans.
In reading and science, US students scored at the OECD average. In math, we’re below average.
It’s not for lack of money. Only four other nations spend more than we do, and South Korea — whose students were tops in math — spends well below the OECD per-student average. Even our best performers — students from Massachusetts — are no match against the world’s best performers, in this case Shanghai.
In anticipation of these results, the teachers unions have been trying to blame the results on testing. But many of the high performers also have testing. What the teachers unions cannot admit is that in too many places they have transformed a system of learning for children into a protected jobs program for teachers.