America You Just Don't Get It

Interesting blog post by Jeff Uctecht on his Blog The Thinking Stick entitled America You Just Don't Get It

The Race is Not Always to the Richest

I found the article The Race is Not Always to the Richest, in the December 6th issue of the Economist very sobering. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), conducted a study that compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took center stage. For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world's largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data.

"At the top are some old stars: Finland as usual did best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier, followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest performer in the OECD, showed gains in math; Chile did best in Latin America.

There is bad news for the United States: average performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, Americans are only now realizing the scale of the task they face".

Are we fixing the wrong things?

I thought this article by Yong Zhao was interesting commentary on US Education from a Global Lens.

Are we fixing the wrong things?