Why National Standards Won’t Fix American Education: Misalignment of Power and Incentives

By: Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall

Abstract: American education needs to be fixed, but national standards and testing are not the way to do it. The problems that need fixing are too deeply ingrained in the power and incentive structure of the public education system, and the renewed focus on national standards threatens to distract from the fundamental issues. Besides, federal control over education has been growing since the 1960s as both standards and achievement have deteriorated. Heritage Foundation education policy experts Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall explain why centralized standard-setting will likely result in the standardization of mediocrity, not excellence.

TOPICS:

1- National standards and testing are unlikely to overcome the deficiencies of American elementary and secondary schooling, which are rooted in the public education system’s power and incentive structure.

2- National standards would strengthen federal power over education while weakening schools’ direct accountability to parents and taxpayers.

3- Centralized standard-setting will likely result in the standardization of mediocrity rather than establishing standards of excellence.

4- While proponents of national standards point to the variation in state standards, the rigor and content of national standards will face pressure to scale down toward the mean among states, undercutting states with high quality standards.

5- Federal policymakers should provide states with increased flexibility and freedom from red tape to make state leaders more accountable to parents and taxpayers. States should also strengthen standards, increase transparency about school performance, and allow parents to act on that information by choosing their children’s schools.

This report discusses:

Department of Education
Education Performance
K-12 Education
Standardized Testing

To read complete report, go to: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/05/why-national-standards-won-t-fix-american-education-misalignment-of-power-and-incentives

How to fix American Education

Fareed Zakaria, Gates and Khan Explore How to Fix America’s Education System
Did you know that the U.S students ranked 15th in the world reading and 31st in math?

That’s what CNN and Time magazine’s Fareed Zakaria tweeted on Nov. 6 as he was interviewing leaders who are working to fix our education system.

His prime time special titled “ Restoring the American Dream – FIXING EDUCATION” featured four guests including Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated $5 billion to schools and libraries. The prime time also featured Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, an educational organization that provides free self-paced tutorials and students assessment online. He also spoke with education reformer Michelle Rhee.

If you missed the program you can watch it when it airs again on Nov. 12 at 8 pm EST. In the meantime, we have curated some videos from the program for you.

Here is the video of Zakaria, where he explains how education impacts social mobility in the U.S.

Sources: http://www.wiredacademic.com/2011/11/fareed-zakaria-explores-how-to-fix-americas-education-system-with-gates-khan/

Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms

BY Marc Tucker. Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of the book Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems.

Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order.

You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.

Some of these uniquely American solutions -- charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers' unions, and basing teachers' pay on how their students do on standardized tests -- may be appealing on their surface. To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

Yet, these proposed solutions are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations. And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we're not doing.

The top-performing nations have followed paths that are remarkably similar and straightforward. Most start by putting more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate. In the U.S., we do the opposite.

They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.

The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs. They insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers and raising teacher pay to that of other high-status professions. They then encourage these highly trained teachers to take the lead in improving classroom practices.

The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world's highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.

In the U.S., on the other hand, teaching remains a low-status profession. Our teacher colleges have minimal admission standards, and most teachers are educated in professional schools with very little prestige. Once they start working, they are paid substantially less than other professionals.

Many of our teachers also have a very weak background in the subjects they are assigned to teach, and increasingly, they're allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training. When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.

All this leads to poor student achievement, which leads to even shriller attacks on the profession and more calls for stricter accountability -- and that makes it even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers. And that leads to low student achievement.

Thirty years ago, Japan was eating the lunch of some of America's greatest corporations. Those U.S. companies who survived figured out how the Japanese were doing it--and did it even better. The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the U.S. is to figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.

The apostles of exceptionalism say we need more innovation. But our problem is not lack of innovation. Our problem is that we lack what the most successful countries have: coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.

Playing to our strengths makes sense. Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.

How to fix USA schools

By Marty Nemko

In the last 35 years alone, we have bet $3 trillion in tax dollars that we can improve the schools. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the bet. According to educational assessment’s gold standard—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—student achievement has barely budged since NAEP began measuring the impacts of the school reform movement in 1969. In international comparisons, American students score near the bottom among industrialized nations. Even our top students are now sinking compared with other countries’ best students.
As disheartening, the definitive study of the effectiveness of Title I, the expensive linchpin of the federal government’s efforts to help low-performing schools, finds that Title I hasn’t even made a dent into the differences between society’s have and have-nots—and since 1989, the achievement gap has actually increased.

Why Are the Schools So Bad?
Why have we lost our $3 trillion bet on school reform?
Some people believe that it’s because the schools need still more money. This is a view promulgated mainly by self-serving educators. Fact is, study after study has found that increasing school spending has not improved student achievement.For example, a truly massive spending increase in the Kansas City schools resulted in no improvement whatsoever.And the states that spend the most (New York and New Jersey spend over $10,000 per year per student) report among the lowest school achievement while the states spending the least (Utah and New Hampshire which spend just $3,000) report top achievement.
We blithely accept that millions of children consider school boring. We cannot accept that. Kids will not learn if they are bored. School cannot always be fun, but it cannot regularly be soporific if we expect kids to learn, let alone to remember what they learned more than a day after the exam. Another part of the problem is the unfortunate truth that educational research is still in its infancy. Although politicians and educators won’t publicly admit it, we still don’t know what works—especially with kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds. In designing school program and policy, we still rely largely on conjecture and on flimsy research data.
Another reason why school reform has been so unsuccessful is that most education policy is made by elected officials: school board members, state superintendents, and state and federal legislators. As a result, the decision to support an education policy is heavily made on whether, as a sound bite, it’s appealing to voters, especially to vocal special-interest groups. Too often, politics take precedence over pedagogy. As a result, many school reforms not only don’t improve education, as this paper will assert, they actually hurt kids.

WHAT TO DO?

Better Teachers
I walk into classrooms, even in supposed “good’ schools, and I routinely see things that sadden me. For example, I walked into a room in a suburban school and saw “grammer” and “calender” on the chalkboard. “What’s the big deal,?” you ask. Kids are expected to make such errors. The problem is that those words were written by the teacher.

Reinventing Teacher Training
It is difficult to imagine why university professors rather than K-12 master teachers are the designated trainers of K-12 teachers. Most university professors are researchers, rarely master K-12 teachers. Many have never taught K-12 at all. And because so many professors are hyperintellectual, enjoy esoterica, and are more comfortable with data than with children, there’s particular reason to doubt that they are the best people to train K-12 teachers.

Better Curriculum
Think back to the last class or workshop you attended. How much do you remember? If you’re like most people, not much. And that was when you were an adult, you chose the class, and perhaps paid for it. We must ask ourselves: What are the most important things kids need to learn? We must teach those first. Reading, sure. Number sense, yes. Writing, of course. How to use a computer. Sure. Appreciating the complexity of major life dilemmas, yes. Interpersonal communication skills, absolutely.

Create a National Curriculum
Imagine what would be possible with a national curriculum. For every major concept, K-12, there could be a superlative lesson plan. Take the classic frog dissection lesson. Instead of killing millions of frogs, a high-quality interactive video-based course (too expensive to develop locally, but affordable nationally), distributed on the internet, would allow students to simulate the frog dissection. Click on an icon and you get a mini-lecture or demonstration by a nationally renowned teacher. A lesson plan would be included for the in-classroom teacher, including stimulating questions, group activities, and homework assignments. Why should 70,000 biology teachers each have to try to figure out a wonderful way to teach the frog dissection lesson, not to mention bring in and then kill 30 frogs per period?

An Obvious Idea: Increase Time on Task
The research shows, and it’s only common sense, that the more time spent learning, the more that students will learn. Yet the average school year in the US remains at 179 days. Compare that with England: 192 days. Canada: 195. Russia: 208. Germany: 240. Japan: 243. China: 248. That means that American kids spend 26 weeks a year in school compared, for example, with 35 weeks in Japan. With a difference like that, it would be a miracle if Japanese kids didn’t outscore US kids. There’s no miracle.
Now let's look at the length of the school day. The average US student spends only 5.6 hours a day in school. That comes to 1,000 hours a year or a total over 13 years of 13,000 hours. Only 70% of that time is devoted to instruction: there’s homeroom, lunch, PE, recess, etc. That brings us down to 9,000 hours of designated instruction time. Even some of that isn’t used on instruction. Too many teachers don’t consider time to be the valuable commodity it is. They may routinely start class late (“We’re waiting for a few students.”) and end early (“Well, there are only five minutes left in the period, so you can start on your homework.”) Or they use activities such as “sustained silent reading” to kill time. So our kids get perhaps 8,000 hours of instruction over their entire K-12 school career to learn the ever-growing amount of material that we throw at them. That’s just 77 eight-hour days per year!
Students should spend 220 eight-hour days in school. With the involving curriculum described above, most kids, even Jeremy, won’t mind the longer school year. That must be our goal: to make school pleasurable enough that kids are glad it’s a school day. We must think big.

Restore Achievement-Grouped Classes
Imagine that you wanted to learn Spanish. Would you sign up for a class that had beginners, intermediates, and fluent Spanish speakers in the same class? Of course not. Yet, that’s how we increasingly group classes K-8 and even in high school. High achievers fare even worse in mixed-achievement classes. In the past, there were classes for gifted children so they didn't need to be held back while waiting for slower children to learn. Today, however, able students are now usually relegated to mixed-achievement classes, where they too often are bored, and spend much time helping that student who is—figuratively or literally-- still struggling to read Dr. Seuss. Learning to help others is beneficial, but too often denies able students of their right to learn. How short-sighted: a student has more ability so let's not teach her more, let's have her help the weak students. That’s a path likely to reduce everyone to a lower common denominator.

To read complete article: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/how-to-fix-the-schools_id1495

Dr. Nemko was senior author of California's procedures for high school
accreditation and program review. He has taught at UC Berkeley and been a consultant to 15 college presidents and to such organizations as the Educational Testing Service and Consumer Reports. He is the author of four books and 300 articles. His book, “How to Get Your Child a Private School Education in a Public School” was named one of the year’s Ten Must books by the American School Board Association.

Are we preparing our kids to succeed in College?

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 4, 2011
The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.
But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for medical school fade. There is no doubt that the main majors are difficult and growing more complex. Some students still lack math preparation or aren’t willing to work hard enough.
The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.
The National Science Board, a public advisory body, warned in the mid-1980s that students were losing sight of why they wanted to be scientists and engineers in the first place.

To read complete article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=education

Plans to get better?

Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at OECD's Release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 Results
DECEMBER 7, 2010

Contact:(202) 401-1576 , press@ed.gov


Since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) first implemented PISA in 2000, it has mushroomed to 60 countries and five non-national entities, such as Shanghai.

It is fast becoming the measuring rod by which countries track trends in national performance and assess college and career-readiness of students as they near the end of their compulsory education and prepare to participate in the global economy.

Here in the United States, we have looked forwardly eagerly to the 2009 PISA results. But the findings, I'm sorry to report, show that the United States needs to urgently accelerate student learning to remain competitive in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.

The United States has a long way to go before it lives up to the American dream and the promise of education as the great equalizer.

Every three years, PISA assesses the reading, mathematics, and scientific literacy of 15-year old students. It provides crucial information about how well our students are prepared to do the sorts of reading, mathematics, and science that will be demanded of them in postsecondary education or the job market, and as young adults in modern society.

Unfortunately, the 2009 PISA results show that American students are poorly prepared to compete in today's knowledge economy.

President Obama has repeatedly warned that the nation that "out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow." And the PISA results, to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are out-educating us.

Finland, Korea, and Canada are consistent high-performers. And the jewel of China's education system, Shanghai, debuted this year as the highest scoring participant globally.

With the exception of some improvement in science from 2006 to 2009, U.S. performance on the PISA has been largely stagnant. The U.S. is not among the top performing OECD nations in any subject tested by PISA--though U.S. students express more self-confidence in their academic skills than students in virtually all OECD nations. This stunning finding may be explained because students here are being commended for work that would not be acceptable in high-performing education systems.

The hard truth is that other high-performing nations have passed us by during the last two decades.

Americans need to wake up to this educational reality--instead of napping at the wheel while emerging competitors prepare their students for economic leadership.

The basic findings of the 2009 PISA for the United States are as follows. In reading literacy, 15-year old American students were average performers among 34 OECD nations. The U.S. effectively showed no change in reading skills since 2000. Overall, the OECD's rankings have U.S. students in 14th place in reading literacy among OECD nations.

In mathematics, U.S. 15-year olds are below-average performers among OECD nations.

After a dip in our 2006 math scores, U.S. students returned to the same level of performance in 2009 as six years earlier, in 2003. Still, we rank a lowly 25th in math.

The most encouraging finding from PISA is that our average science score is up. In 2006, American 15-year olds had below-average skills in scientific literacy, compared to their OECD peers. Today, U.S. students have improved enough to become average performers in science among OECD nations, earning 17th place in the OECD rankings.

Still, that's not much to celebrate. Being average in science is a mantle of mediocrity--and especially in a knowledge economy where scientific literacy is so central to sustaining innovation and international competitiveness.

I would caution you against making too much of small gradations in rankings. They are not meaningful. But the gap between top-performing countries and the U.S. is meaningful—and large. To take one example, OECD analysis suggests that 15-year olds in Korea and Finland are, on average, one to two years ahead of their American peers in math and science.

As disturbing as these national trends are for America, enormous achievement gaps among black and Hispanic students portend even more trouble for the U.S. in the years ahead. Last year, McKinsey & Company released an analysis which concluded that America's failure to close achievement gaps had imposed—and here I quote—"the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession."

So, the big picture from PISA is one of educational stagnation, at a time of fast-rising demand for highly-educated workers. The mediocre performance of America's students is a problem we cannot afford to accept and cannot afford to ignore.

In a highly-competitive knowledge-based economy, maintaining the educational status quo means America's students are effectively losing ground. And that is one reason I asked the OECD earlier this year to prepare a study of what the U.S. could learn from the education systems of high-performing nations.

That study, as the Secretary General discussed, is rich with lessons for the United States. But a recurring theme that stands out is that much of the conventional wisdom about the barriers to dramatically accelerating achievement in the U.S. is mistaken.

The chief reason that U.S. students lag behind their peers in high-performing countries is not their diversity, or the fact that a significant number of public school students come from disadvantaged backgrounds. The problem, OECD concludes, is that "socioeconomic disadvantage leads more directly to poor educational performance in the United States than is the case in many other countries." Disadvantaged Canadians are much less at risk of poor educational performance than their counterparts here.

Our schools, in other words, are not doing nearly as much as they could to close achievement gaps. As schoolchildren age in America, they "make less progress each year than children in the best-performing countries," according to the OECD.

By contrast, high-performing countries not only dramatically boost student achievement, they do so while closing achievement gaps at the same time. In Finland, there are consistent, strong, and predictable educational outcomes for children regardless of where they go to school.

The OECD study also finds that more resources are not the simple answer for America's educational shortcomings. The U.S. spends more per student than any OECD nation except Luxembourg. Students in Estonia and Poland perform at roughly the same level as those in the U.S., even though Estonia and Poland spend less than half as much per student. Higher performing countries tend to invest differently from us. For example, many prioritize higher teacher salaries over small class sizes. More broadly, they professionalize the teaching profession.

The real problem with K-12 spending in the U.S. is our low educational productivity. Unlike high-performing systems, we achieve less per dollar. And we do less to target spending on the most challenged students and schools. All OECD nations--except the U.S., Israel, and Turkey--devote as much funding or more to schools facing the biggest socioeconomic challenges as they do to schools with more privileged students.

Most countries invest money where the challenges are greatest, and they put in place incentives and support systems that attract the most talented teachers to the most difficult classrooms. Here in the U.S., at best, we are in our infancy in this critically important work.

Let me just say in closing that I was struck by the convergence between the practices of high-performing countries and many of the reforms that state and local leaders have pursued in the last two years in adopting the Common Core standards, and in competing for the Race to the Top program, School Turnaround grants, and the Teacher Incentive Fund.

Almost all high-performing education systems set rigorous, shared academic standards for student success.

Thanks to the courage and commitment of our nation's governors, state school chiefs, state school boards, and state lawmakers, 40 states and the District of Columbia this year have adopted the Common Core standards in math and English. That is a game-changer. That will largely put an end to the insidious practice of dummying down academic standards to make politicians look good.

The OECD reported that virtually every high-performing country they studied (and I quote) "mirrors Race to the Top's effort to support the recruitment, development, rewarding, and retaining of effective teachers and principals."

So, yes, our policies are moving us in the right direction. But the practices of high-performing countries show clearly that America in particular has to do much more to elevate the teaching profession, from the recruitment and training of teachers to their evaluation and professional development.

The United States has a lot to learn from South Korea, Singapore, and Finland about building the teaching profession and recruiting teachers from the ranks of top students. In high-performing countries, teachers are typically recruited from the top third of students; in Finland, it's the top ten percent of students who vie to become teachers.

And before they ever enter the classroom, they receive rigorous clinical training. In the U.S., clinical training is often haphazard and of uneven quality.

High-performing countries have moved away from the century-old factory model of education still used in much of America. In countries that are out-educating us, teachers are often thought of as nation builders. Unlike in the U.S., meaningful evaluations, compensation for highly-effective teachers, and high-quality professional development are all embedded in the job.

In the United States, our system far too often fails to provide meaningful evaluation and incentives for the most effective teachers to teach the most challenged students. Too often, we treat teachers as if they were interchangeable widgets in a school assembly-line.

Americans take real pride in the idea that our nation is exceptional. And is true that our education has unique strengths—we have rich resources, an unmatched tradition of innovation, and a higher education system that is still the finest in the world.

Never before have we had so many pockets of excellence in the K-12 system that can point the way for excellence in all our schools. The 2009 PISA shows that 20 percent of American students enrolled in high-poverty schools reach the average performance of students in Finland, one of the world's most high-achieving nations. This is encouraging.

But we must raise our sights. Our goal must be to be great again and to lead the world in achievement and college attainment, success must become the norm. It is time to acknowledge that much of our preK-12 system is not exceptional.

The highest-performing and most rapidly-improving countries have a great deal to learn from one another.

To continue and deepen that conversation, we--together with OECD and other partners--will convene an International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York in March to bring together Ministers of Education and national teachers-union leaders from these countries.

I have every confidence that America can capitalize on our strengths, adapt where we need to, and learn from others. We've done so before.

The U.S. currently has many of the world's top research universities. But a century ago we adopted the concept of the research university from Germany.

Vocational and technical education in the U.S. has its roots in Scotland's mechanical institutes, which were then on the cutting edge of technology training. Our leading prep schools are modeled after England's.

Today, America has to study and learn from other nations once again. The need is urgent, the opportunity unique. Children only get one chance at an education.

Martin Luther King famously said that he couldn't wait for justice to prevail. And as a nation, we can no longer wait to improve schools that deny children of the opportunity for a world-class education.

Our children, and our country, need and deserve the best.

WHAT ARE WE DOING TO BETTER EDUCATE OUR KIDS?

Report
By MARY BRUCE (@marykbruce)
Dec. 7, 2010
American educators received a wake-up call today when it was revealed that students in Shanghai rank number one globally in reading, math and science, far outpacing their American peers. Despite modest gains in math and science, the U.S. continues to lag behind other developed countries.

A report out today, "Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context," shows the U.S. now ranks 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

While OECD countries such as Finland, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand continue to outpace the U.S. in reading, science and math, all eyes are on China. In its first year to be included in the study as a non-OECD education system, Shanghai ranked first in all three categories. Hong Kong came in second in reading and science and third in math.

"The 2009 PISA data demonstrate the rise in the quality of education in Asia -- among the top performers were Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Korea," said Tony Jackson, Vice President of Education at the Asia Society. "Aligning education goals to economic development, Asian nations have scoured the world for models of effective education systems, and implemented them consistently through deliberate policies and long-term investments. Any definition of a world-class education must include knowledge of Asia and the language and cultural skills to deal with Asia. It's a two-way street: America must now learn from — and with — Asia and the world."

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the findings, "to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are out-educating us."

"The findings, I have to admit, show that the United States needs to urgently accelerate student learning to try to remain competitive in the knowledge economy of the 21st century," Duncan said at a press conference in Washington. "Americans need to wake up to this educational reality, instead of napping at the wheel while emerging competitors prepare their students for economic leadership."

The U.S. did show improvement in science and math from 2006 to 2009, but Duncan said, "I don't think that's much for us to celebrate. Being average in science is a mantle of mediocrity."

In science, American students jumped from an average score of 489 in 2006 to 502 in 2009, which is no longer below the OECD average (science, math and reading are all measured on a zero to 1,000 point scale). Finland continues to hold the top spot in science.

In math, the U.S. scores improved from 2006 but were not measurably different from scores on the 2003 assessment, and were still below the OECD average. American students scored an average of 474 in 2006, and 487 in 2009. South Korea surpassed Finland for the number one spot in 2009. Finland now ranks number two, followed by Switzerland, Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Belgium, Australia and Germany in the top ten.

For comparison, in 2006 American students ranked 21st in science and 25th in math out of the 30 countries then counted by the OECD (Chile, Israel, Slovenia and Estonia have since joined the OECD).


Check this link to watch interesting related videos:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/china-debuts-top-international-education-rankings/story?id=12336108#.TrL2ZkP7i4A