Widgets Magazine

U.S. global education ranking is misleading, School of Education scholar argues

“The hard truth is that other high-performing nations have passed us by during the last two decades. Americans need to wake up to this educational reality, instead of napping at the wheel while emerging competitors prepare their students for economic leadership,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a 2010 press release responding to test results showing large gaps between the national performance of American students and students in high-performing nations such as Korea and Finland.

But a recently released study by Martin Carnoy, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and his research partner, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, argues that this assessment might be too harsh and that, in fact, international education ranking reports misinterpret the United States’ global ranking.

According to the study’s findings, a re-estimate would improve the United States’ place in the ranking of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries from 14th to 4th in reading and 25th to 10th in math based on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test administered in 2011.

The study describes these international ranking reports as “oversimplified, frequently exaggerated and misleading,” which for Carnoy presents a serious practical problem.
“These test scores are now playing a very important role, influencing policy research in many countries,” Carnoy said, “It’s very important to see whether the way the result is presented accurately reflects the quality of education system in the country.”

Carnoy and Rothstein’s study, “What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?” took a closer look at the PISA and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) databases and recalculated the United States’ student performance after accounting for the different social class composition of sampled students.

“The United States, compared to other developed countries, has a much higher fraction of low social class students taking the test,” Carnoy said.

The study found that disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading, and perform about the same in math.

Meanwhile, comparisons of test score trends across time shows that the United States has made greater improvement in both math and reading than top-scoring countries, such as Korea, Canada and Finland.

“If you look at Korean students’ performance in reading compared to U.S. students’ performance, we see that our students are making gains, while Korean students are not,” Carnoy said.

The report also shows that in some middle- and upper-class groups where U.S. performance has not improved, comparable social class group performance in some top-scoring post-industrial countries has declined.

But while controlling for social class distribution would narrow the difference in average scores between these countries and the United States, it would not eliminate the gap.

At all points in the social class distribution, U.S. students perform worse than students in a group of top-scoring countries, according to the research. Carnoy wonders whether this is actually a problem that needs attention.

“Do we want to score as high as Korean students? Is this our single objective in our education system?” Carnoy asked. “Probably not.”

Carnoy attributed the discrepancy in test performance to greater investment of Korean parents on education outside of school by sending their children to for-profit private schools called hagwons, where students receive private, after-hour tutoring.

“I believe that the test scores of our students can go up if we are willing to spend as much money outside of school,” Carnoy said.

Despite what the authors say is an incorrect interpretation of international test rankings, Carnoy remarked that the ranking’s influence on our present education system is not necessarily “detrimental”.

“Our policy is oriented very heavily around school and teacher accountability,” Carnoy said, “We are also making many efforts to raise our curriculum standards and have our teachers meet up these standards.”

“However, first thing we have to do is to do a better job in identifying whether our system is improving, and we have done that in this paper,” he added.

In future research, Carnoy said he and Rothstein will examine the reasons for differences in academic performance across states where, within the same social classes and ethnic groups, there are wide gaps in test scores.

  • james


    This statement seems to be the only point the article makes to indicate the rankings are misleading. I would describe that as nothing more than semantics. The fact is the U.S. does have a higher fraction of “low social class” students and we have to deal with it, not excuse test scores because of it.

  • People were actually paid good money to write this duplicitous, politically correct nonsense? Yes, the U.S. global education ranking is misleading, and Steve Sailer already discovered this over two years ago. He crunched the numbers and found that Asians in America did better than any Asian country on the PISA test, whites in America did better than any European country (except Finland), Hispanics in America did better than any Latin American country, and the blacks in America probably did better than any African majority country, though none bothered to compete.

    The politically incorrect but indisputable reason that America is consistently dropping in the world rankings is because of America’s increasing diversity.

  • What?!?! It’s really not so bad because we just have more poor people!?! Oh well, that explains it! **sarcasm**

  • Krystal Borkowski

    The only “misleading” part about this article is that they make it sound better than it is. I go to a public school in a pretty well-off suburb and some of the kids in my classes can barely read. Our standards for education are incredibly low, and making excuses won’t help.

  • Evidently the professor and his colleague have not been to a rural school, or read much of what is posted by the average person on the internet. I would have guessed that the rankings first published were too high, rather than the other way around.

  • Addie

    Diversity is not the reason that America’s world rankings are dropping. I swear inconsiderate and brash people these days.

  • These are the same standards that were used when the USA was top 5, now that it is bottom 5, the analysis is flawed! HEH, HEH ! SMH!

  • Lets just import all Asians, because this score is what totally matters most in the grand scheme of everything.

  • American Dad

    Hogwash! the basis of comparison is the composition of our social class. So are we to conclude that we should just ignore the lower class and only consider the upper class and this would move us up the ranking? really? this moronic conclusion coming from a liberal article? shocking. There is no logic and objectivity in the effort to write this article. It sounds more like a desperate excuse to justify a higher ranking. The truth is the US education system is among the worse in the world, not because we are incapable but because it is the progressive agenda to do so. I was educated in Peru, a country with much larger lower class than the US, but with a middle and upper class education system that trumps the US public school system. I have since lived in the US (over 30 yrs) and love this country and hate to see such a powerful country WASTE children’ talents due to political motivation.

    Education is not fixed by throwing more money at it, unless your purpose is to enrich the unions. School choice under the control of each state is the solution. Abolition of teacher’s unions and higher pay for teachers based on performance (not test rankings) as well as less spending on fancy multi-million designer schools. Abolish Common Core and get back to classics including geography, american history, global history, civics, math, reading, logic, science, PE, languages, arts, music based on text books and not photocopies of selected paragraphs that teachers hand out nowadays to students.

    US education ranking is horrendous. Making excuses will not help solve the problem, only justify it and communicates that “it’s ok”. This is such a lame attempt to defend and artificially bring up the state of our education system which was purposely designed to fail by progressives in order to produce weak-minded, low-reasoning herd-following sheep. Based on the recent presidential elections, it is working.

    BTW, I moved to the US after high school and without preparing for the SATs I aced the math with a perfect score and scored average on the English after one year of learning the language. What I noticed of this test is that it was not inclusive of all sciences or even history, just basic math and reading. Why is this? why are we neglecting history you ask? the answer lies in the ignorance of current school aged and college aged kids who don’t even understand what communism is and what atrocities have been committed, and how it has failed throughout history. Why is this important, specially for this regime? if you have read this far, you already know the answer.

    Our failure in education is politically motivated. This is why I will NOT vote for ANY candidate who supports common core, and I will support ANY conservative candidate who supports returning control of education back to the states and offering education vouchers and choice of schooling. That is what I grew up with and created so much competition among schools academically. We took pride in our schools. Parents had choices. There were catholic based schools, protestant schools, German schools, American schools, Italian, Chinese and so many more. Our parents were free to choose among all these types of schools.

    Lastly, If we applied the silly rationale implied by the author of this article to every country, and simply ignore the lower classes, you would have most South American countries surpassing the US. I say that as a proud American with 2 kids in the public school system attending the “top” schools in cities such as Boston and Charlotte. Its time for a major change.

  • American Dad

    Flawed conclusion. You can’t separate classes in the US and compare to an entire country, any country where the is also diversity. You are comparing apples to oranges, and fishing for a justification of our poor rankings. The methodology itself should NOT consider race. Shouldn’t our goal be to educate all equally? dow e need to find a way to play the statistics to favor us and make us look better even if we compare apples to oranges?