Dear Commons Community,
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results have been released for 2012. As provided at its website:
“PISA is an ongoing triennial survey that assesses the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired key knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies. The assessment does not just ascertain whether students can reproduce knowledge; it also examines how well students can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply that knowledge in unfamiliar settings, both in and outside of school. This approach reflects the fact that modern economies reward individuals not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know.”
For Fall 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development administered PISA to 510,000 students between ages 15 and 16 in 65 economies, including 34 OECD countries — a sample that OECD says represents 28 million students. Among those 34 countries, the U.S. performed slightly below average in math, scoring 481, and ranked 26 (though the report notes that due to measurement error, the ranking could range from 23 to 29.) Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Korea and Japan came out on top, followed by such European countries as Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Netherlands, Estonia, Finland and Poland. Peru, Indonesia, Qatar, Colombia and Jordan came in last.
In reading, the U.S. performed around the OECD average of 496, ranking 17 (or between 14 and 20) with an average score of 498. Again, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Ireland, Taipei, Poland and Estonia came out on top, with Argentina, Albania, Kazakhstan, Qatar and Peru filling out the bottom.
Critics have used the PISA results to express concerns that America’s economic future is in jeopardy because we are losing our competitive education edge. Others put little credence in these tests . Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes of Research, feels that the results have very little bearing on economic development.
“Do I want Israel’s economy, the American economy or Belgium’s economy? Or Taipei, where the fertility rate is 1 percent? In Korea, they’re closing schools because they don’t have enough kids, they have this whole inverted age pyramid and they’re going to run into giant problems. The U.S. has a dramatically growing population, enormous wealth and entrepreneurial spirit.”
Schneider added, “PISA’s not the thing that matters at all. You want to know you’re not Montenegro or Kazakhstan — then you’re okay. What would we prefer — high PISA scores or Silicon Valley?”
Tony
