How Does the U.S. Education System Compete?

In honor of International Education Week, check this out... The American Institutes for Research released a study that ranks individual U.S. state performances in schools and compares them to other countries around the world. The report gathered statistics from 8th graders in science and mathematics from 2005 and 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress and from 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. The study concluded that students in Massachusetts are the only ones ‘on par’ with students in Japan, but below students in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong.  According to Dr. Gary Phillips, a chief scientist at AIR and author of the report,

“If you think of states and nations as in a race to prepare the future generation of workers, scholars and citizens to be competent and competitive in a technologically complex world, then the states are in the middle of the pack... The bad news is that even our best performing states are running far behind the highest performing countries.”

The state with the lowest mathematics performance was the District of Colombia. This study only highlights the U.S.’s need for progress and improvement on educational standards in order to compete globally.