Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School

Notes

121 Notes to Chapter 1 1. PISA is the acronym for the Program for International Student Assessment, which is conducted regularly by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD is an association of thirty-four nations, largely the most economically developed in the world, that considers a wide range of economic and social issues. 2. Flattau and others (2006). 3. Independent Task Force (2012), p. 8. 4. Independent Task Force (2012), p. 3. Emphasis in original. 5. National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). 6. Peterson (2010). 7. President William Clinton, “Message to the Congress Transmitting the ‘Goals 2000: Educate America Act,’ ” April 21, 1993 (www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-1993-book1/pdf/PPP1993 -book1-doc-pg477.pdf). 8. President George W. Bush, “President’s Letter to the Nation Announcing ‘American Competitiveness Initiative,’ ” February 2, 2006 (http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/ stateoftheunion/2006/aci/index.html). Notes 13291-10_Notes_3rdPgs.indd 121 6/6/13 10:48 AM 122 Notes for pages 4–23 9. Subsequent references are to countries, even though some political jurisdictions are not sovereign entities. See figure 4-1 for exact listing. 10. Howell, Peterson, and West (2009); Peterson, Henderson, and West (2013, forthcoming). 11. Independent Task Force (2012, p. 29). 12. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Brantley_Aycock. 13. Results include those for sixty-five countries and three political subdivisions (Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai). 14. U.S. Department of Education (2012, table 195). 15. Peterson (2010, figure 1). Notes to Chapter 2 1. Murnane (2013). 2. For example, Card (1999); Heckman, Lochner, and Todd (2006). 3. One standard deviation moves a person from the middle of the distribution to the 84th percentile. See the review and discussion in Hanushek (2011). 4. Note, however, that international comparisons are quite limited ; see Hanushek and Zhang (2009). 5. Murnane and others (2000). 6. See for example Cunha and Heckman (2007). 7. Additionally, this measure assumes that formal schooling is the primary (or sole) source of education and that variations in nonschool factors have a negligible effect on education outcomes. This neglect of cross-country differences in the strength of family, health, and other influences in addition to the quality of schooling is a major drawback of such a quantitative measure of schooling. 8. The initial analysis of Hanushek and Kimko (2000) has now been replicated and expanded in a range of studies, as reviewed by Hanushek and Woessmann (2008), with the most recent addition being Hanushek and Woessmann (2012a). 9. Recent international testing has gone beyond just math and science to include reading. We focus on just math and science for reliability reasons, but including reading performance does not qualitatively change any of the conclusions about international growth differences. 10. There are many technical details involved in the construction of the combined test score measure (see Hanushek and Woessmann, 2012a). 13291-10_Notes_3rdPgs.indd 122 6/6/13 10:48 AM 123 Notes for pages 23–29 11. Inclusion of initial differences in incomes reflects the fact that it is easier to grow faster when a country starts out behind, because it just has to imitate what more advanced countries are doing instead of inventing new things. 12. Bils and Klenow (2000). 13. Hanushek and Woessmann (2011a). 14. These are more fully reported in Hanushek and Woessmann (2012a). 15. The formal approach is called instrumental variables. In order for this to be a valid approach, it must be the case that the institutions are not themselves related to differences in growth other than through their relation with test scores. For a fuller discussion, see Hanushek and Woessmann (2012a). 16. Three potential problems arise in this analysis. First, it just looks at the labor market returns for the individual and not the aggregate impact on the economy of achievement differences. Second, those who migrate at a young enough age to be educated in the United States might differ from those who migrate at later ages. Third, employers may treat people with a foreign education differently from those with a U.S. education . The second two potential problems, however, can only affect the results in complicated ways, because the identification of the impact of cognitive skills is based on a comparison across the home countries. As long as the impact of these is similar for the different origin countries, the results would remain. Any problems would come from different patterns of these factors that are correlated...