Strong Performers And Successful Reformers In Education Lessons From Pisa For The United States

This volume combines an analysis of PISA with a description of the policies and practices of those education systems that are close to the top or advancing rapidly, in order to offer insights for policy in the United States.

This volume combines an analysis of PISA with a description of the policies and practices of those education systems that are close to the top or advancing rapidly, in order to offer insights for policy in the United States.

This report compares the performance of 15-year-olds in the United States in PISA against the global patterns and trends.

The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role. This report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. The report proposes three overarching policy recommendations: implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security; make structural changes to provide students with good choices; and, launch a "national security readiness audit" to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.

This report compares the performance of 15-year-olds in the United States in PISA against the global patterns and trends. But it goes beyond the aggregate level analysis that have so far been published in the PISA 2012 reports, to give analysis of student performance on individual mathematics test items in order to reveal students' strengths and weaknesses. Considering this also in the context of the relationship between PISA and the Common Core Standards for Mathematics can help connect these results to what the United States aspires to teach in classrooms and help inform teaching practices that can support performance improvement.

This book answers a simple question: How would one redesign the American education system if the aim was to take advantage of everything that has been learned by countries with the world’s best education systems? With a growing number of countries outperforming the United States on the most respected comparisons of student achievement—and spending less on education per student—this question is critical. Surpassing Shanghai looks in depth at the education systems that are leading the world in student performance to find out what strategies are working and how they might apply to the United States. Developed from the work of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which has been researching the education systems of countries with the highest student performance for more than twenty years, this book provides a series of answers to the question of how the United States can compete with the world’s best.

This report presents the best current evidence about what can make teacher-oriented reforms effective and points to examples of reforms that have produced specific results, show promise or illustrate imaginative ways of implementing change.

This report presents examples that might be useful for Japan from other countries with consistently high-performing education systems.