Global Lessons for Improving U.S. Education

摘要

The middling performance of U.S. students on international achievement tests is by now familiar, so the overall results of the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, released in late 2010, came as no surprise. Among the 34 developed democracies that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 15-year-olds in the United States ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and no better than 25th in mathematics. The new wrinkle in the data was the participation of Chinas Shanghai province, whose students took top honors in all three subjects, besting U.S. students by the equivalent of multiple grade levels in each. Home to the nation's wealthiest city and a magnet for its most ambitious and talented citizens, Shanghai'sYesults are hardly representative of China as a whole. Yet its students' eye-popping performance seemed to highlight new challenges facing the U.S. economy in an age of unprecedented global trade.