America's Chronic Educational Underachievement

When it comes to education, America is not doing very well. The New York Times reports the results of the latest international test of academic achievement. The results have been disappointing:

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.

And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.

For all the time and energy placed into educational reform, by federal, state and local governments, something is not working. Even Common Core, whose promoters still believe that it will prove to be a panacea, has not produced the promised results.

Worse yet, 20% of American 15-year-olds are so far behind that they are hopeless. That means, that their future employment prospects barely exist:

About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam.

As for who was leading the pack, strangely, it was China. In what we are told is an authoritarian dictatorship, a communist government with fascist aspirations, children do not merely excel in math, but they are doing very well in reading comprehension.

We note that the test was only given to students in China’s coastal regions. Thus, children from inland China, who would likely have performed less well, were not tested. On the other side, the numbers of children who live in coastal China is very, very large. As it happens, they will most likely form the elites that will lead China toward the future. 

The Times reports the results of the reading comprehension tests:

The top performers in reading were four provinces of China — Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Also outperforming the United States were Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland and Ireland. The United Kingdom, Japan and Australia performed similarly to the United States.