Other nations passing U.S. by in student scores, exam shows

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Scores in math, reading and science posted by 15-year-olds in the United States were flat while their counterparts elsewhere - particularly in Shanghai, Singapore and other Asian provinces or countries - soared ahead, according to results of a well-regarded international exam released Tuesday.

While U.S. teenagers scored slightly above average in reading, their scores were average in science and below average in math, compared with those in 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, which was administered last fall. That pattern has not changed much since the test was first administered in 2000.

“Our scores are stagnant. We’re not seeing any improvement for our 15-yearolds,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. “But our ranking is slipping because a lot of these other countries are improving.”

The test scores offer fresh evidence for those who argue that the United States is losing ground to competitors in the global market and others who say a decade’s worth of school policy changes have done little to improve educational outcomes.

“While the intentions may have been good, a decade of top-down, test-based schooling created by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top - focused on hyper-testing students, sanctioning teachers and closing schools - has failed to improve the quality of American public education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. The federation released a video Monday in which it implored the public not to blame teachers, the unions, parents or students for the poor test results.

Shanghai dominated the exam, occupying the top slot in all three subjects. The Chinese province has catapulted to the top in the international testing over the past decade after focusing on teacher preparation and investing in its most challenging classrooms, among other things.

Germany, Poland and Vietnam were among several countries that saw significant improvements in their test scores while Finland, which had been a top-scorer in the past several exams, dropped from its elite perch.

“Finland is still a strong performing educational system that’s seen a drop,” Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said Monday. “I’m not yet able to explain it.”

The test, administered every three years by the organization, measures performance on math, reading and science. The exam is designed to test whether students can apply what they’ve learned in school to real-life problems. Approximately 510,000 15-year-olds in public and private schools took the paper-and-pencil exam in 2012.

On the math portion, 28 countries tested better than the United States. Aside from the Asia powerhouses of Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Korea and Japan, the United States was outscored by a string of European countries including Latvia, the United Kingdom, Poland, France, Germany and Slovenia.

In science, 22 countries posted better results than the United States, including Vietnam, Canada and Poland. In reading, 19 countries had higher scores than U.S. students, including Estonia and Liechtenstein.

Three states - Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida - participated in the test and were ranked as if they were individual countries to see how their students compared internationally.

Students in Massachusetts and Connecticut scored above the national and international average in math, while Florida scored below those averages. The same pattern repeated in science testing. In reading, Massachusetts and Connecticut scored above the U.S. and international averages while Florida teenagers scored about the same as the U.S. and international averages.

Not only did the United States score below average compared with the other countries that took the international math exam, it had fewer top performers. These are students who can develop “models for complex situations, and work strategically using broad, well developed thinking and reasoning skills,” according to a report on the international results from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While just 2 percent of U.S. teenagers reached that level in math, 31 percent reached that level in Shanghai. The organization’s average was 3 percent.

“I was surprised by that,” Schleicher said.

Even in Massachusetts, which leads the country in math performance, 19 percent of students who took the international exam placed in the top two levels of proficiency while 55 percent of students in Shanghai reached those top tiers. Compared with Massachusetts, students in Shanghai were scoring at a level that was equivalent to more than two additional years of formal schooling, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

At the other end of the spectrum, about 25 percent of U.S. students tested in the lowest levels of math proficiency - more than the organization’s average. That statistic has not changed since 2003.

U.S. students are particularly weak in performing math tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations and translating them into mathematical terms, according to the organization’s report.

Some observers say the United States does not perform well in international competitions because it is a large, diverse country, with the highest child poverty rate among industrialized countries.

But countries like Vietnam, where 79 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, outscored U.S. students in math.

“So it’s not demography itself. Those demographics are a factor, not the only factor,” Buckley said.

A weak curriculum could be the culprit, the report suggested.

“Perhaps the application problems that most students encounter today are the worst of all worlds: fake applications that strive to make the mathematics curriculum more palatable, yet do no justice either to modeling or to the pure mathematics involved,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report said.Providing students with better opportunities to learn will help them develop the skills to make frequent and productive use of math in their work and daily life, it said.

The new Common Core academic standards in math and reading, which have been fully adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, could go a long way to pulling up the nation’s Program for International Student Assessment scores, according to the organization. While the standards are now being implemented in most U.S. classrooms, there has been growing political opposition to them from the right, left and center.

Starting this spring, any U.S. high school will be able to participate in a new test that is comparable to the Program for International Student Assessment and will allow schools to compare themselves with the participating Program for International Student Assessment countries.

Jon Schnur, executive chairman of America Achieves, which has worked with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to develop the test, said 150 high schools have registered to participate. A handful of schools participated in a pilot test last year and used the results to make changes to curriculum and instruction, Schnur said.

“More important than the horse race of the rankings is what can we learn from these tests,” Schnur said.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said the country should stop divisive debates about education policies, figure out what is working in top-scoring nations and adopt their strategies.

“The number one thing is commitment,” Van Roekel said. “We need to say we know what works, take it out of the political arena and do what’s right for kids.”

Germany, shocked by its moderate international exam results in 2000, has adopted national education standards and taken steps to improve teacher education and establish a common test for final high school exams in all 16 German states. Germany’s scores have improved in math, reading and science.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement that the United States must “invest in early education, raise academic standards, make college affordable, and do more to recruit and retain top-notch educators. By taking those vital steps, we will ensure all of America’s children have access to a high-quality education that prepares them for college and careers.”

Buckley cautioned against using the international exam results to draw conclusions about whether education policies are working.

“People like to take international results like this and focus on high performers and pick out areas of policy that support the policies that they support,” he said. “I never expect tests like these to tell us what works in education. That’s like taking a thermometer to explain why it’s cold outside.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/04/2013