Beyond PISA: How the U.S. Ranks Internationally on Five Key Education Issues
By Kathy Tuck and Tim Walker
When the 2010 Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) results were released two years go, the news media and many politicians held them up as evidence that U.S. students were falling badly behind their counterparts in nations such as Finland, South Korea, Canada and Singapore. The somewhat alarmist coverage obviously didn’t consider relevant data that could provide valuable context for these scores. For example, little consideration is ever given to the cultural and demographic factors that define school systems in top-performing nations and in the United States. Not doing so paints, at best, an incomplete and distorted picture of how U.S. students actually stack up internationally, and it obscures the real issues that need addressing in our schools.
Recently, researchers at the National Education Association reviewed data from a multitude of sources to assess how the United States compares with high-performing nations in a number of key educational areas: face-to-face instruction time, equity in teacher pay, public perception of teachers, and impact of immigration. What they found was a more complete but more complex portrait, one that goes beyond the international “test factor” to compare specific aspects of education that are shaped by the norms and values of societies and, to a large extent, form the core of education systems. Through such comparisons, a clearer picture emerges of how particular countries that score well on international assessments differ from the United States and other nations.
Below is just a summary of some of the experts’ findings. You can find the complete report with sources here.
When the 2010 Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) results were released two years go, the news media and many politicians held them up as evidence that U.S. students were falling badly behind their counterparts in nations such as Finland, South Korea, Canada and Singapore. The somewhat alarmist coverage obviously didn’t consider relevant data that could provide valuable context for these scores. For example, little consideration is ever given to the cultural and demographic factors that define school systems in top-performing nations and in the United States. Not doing so paints, at best, an incomplete and distorted picture of how U.S. students actually stack up internationally, and it obscures the real issues that need addressing in our schools.Recently, researchers at the National Education Association reviewed data from a multitude of sources to assess how the United States compares with high-performing nations in a number of key educational areas: face-to-face instruction time, equity in teacher pay, public perception of teachers, and impact of immigration. What they found was a more complete but more complex portrait, one that goes beyond the international “test factor” to compare specific aspects of education that are shaped by the norms and values of societies and, to a large extent, form the core of education systems. Through such comparisons, a clearer picture emerges of how particular countries that score well on international assessments differ from the United States and other nations.
Below is just a summary of some of the experts’ findings. You can find the complete report with sources here.