Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Your child left behind: The sorry state of education in the U. S.

Here is the Atlantic magazine, in a new article, "Your Child Left Behind," on the sorry state of education in the United States:

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place—the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future—using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.

We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?

Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.

Read more here.

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1 comment:

  1. KyCobb8:07 PM

    Martin,

    This report suggests that its not so much that public schools are failures in general but rather there is a specific problem with educating african-american boys:

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/report-black-boys-lagging-badly-in-school

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