Our Leaning Tower of PISA

Fifteen-year-olds in the United States score in the middle of the developed world in reading and science while lagging in math, according to results reported in the New York Times for the The Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA. 

PISA was administered to 15-year-olds in 65 countries.  As in previous years, the scores of students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea put those school systems at the top of the rankings for math, science and reading.

In the midst of increasingly polarized discussions about public education, the scores set off a familiar round of hand-wringing, blaming and credit-taking:

“The United States’ standings haven’t improved dramatically because we as a nation haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance — the effects of poverty on students,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, said in a statement.

Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, noted that American students from families with incomes in the highest quartile did not perform as well as students with similar backgrounds in other countries.

An increasingly vocal group of parents, teachers, union leaders and others have also objected to a focus on standardized tests at the expense of values like creativity. “The question is, can we walk and chew gum at the same time?” said Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy group. “There’s no reason why we can’t keep the creativity that we value while also teaching kids how to do math better.”

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