U.S. lags in high-level math achievement
The U.S. isn’t a high achiever in math education, conclude Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson and Ludger Woessmann in Education Next.
No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
Only 6 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level on the PISA 2006 math exam, compared to 28 percent of Taiwanese students and at least 20 percent of students in Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland. Race and poverty don’t explain it: Eight percent of white students in the U.S. and 10.3 of those with a college-graduate parent achieve at the advanced level.
Twelve other countries had more than twice the percentage of advanced students as the United