Are Ya’ll Smarter Than Texans? Finns? Koreans?: Math and Science Test Scores Compared to the World and Nation
Are U.S. students really as horrible in math and science as the media would have us to believe? How do “reform” oriented states like Texas, Florida and Louisiana stack up against other nations across the world? Other U.S. states? While perfect apples to apples comparisons between U.S. states and international education data do not exist, we can use existing data to provide a general idea about how the Lone Star State compares to some nations in the world. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA is an assessment that focuses on 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading, mathematics, and science in OECD countries worldwide.[i] Relative to all OECD countries, the U.S. performed at 36th in math, 28th in science, and 24th in reading on the 2012 PISA. However, it must be noted that the U.S. sample was based on students testing in only three states: Connecticut, Florida, and Massachusetts. To our knowledge, NCES has not released a linkage study to understand international comparative achievement beyond the three states that participated in the PISA assessments.[ii] As a result, to contrast student achievement for U.S. states to OECD countries around the world, I use NAEP data standardized by NCES and