Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School

3. A Global View of U.S. Student Proficiency Rates

33 The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future. —National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983 If American students are to have successful careers, and if the country as a whole is to prosper in the decades to come, American students must be, at a minimum, proficient in math and reading. There is much more to education than competence in these basic subjects, but it is difficult to imagine high levels of scientific and historical knowledge, artistic production, or cultural awareness if students by the time they have reached the age of fifteen are not proficient in the tools that open the door to these domains of learning. In this chapter we show that a significantly smaller percentage of U.S. students in the high school graduating class of 2011 achieved proficiency in these basic subjects Chapter three A GlobAl View of U.S. StUdent Proficiency rAteS 13291-03_CH03_3rdPgs.indd 33 6/6/13 10:40 AM 34 a Global View of U.S. StUdent profiCienCy rateS than their counterparts in many other industrialized countries. We obtained information from the NAEP tests about U.S. students in the class of 2011, when they were in the eighth grade. Then, two years later a nationally representative sample of U.S. students (albeit different students) in this age cohort took the PISA test, which was administered throughout the world. We give special attention to math performance because math appears to be the subject in which accomplishment in secondary school is particularly significant for both an individual’s and a country’s future economic well-being. Existing research, though not conclusive, indicates that math skills better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school.1 There is also a technical reason for focusing on math. This subject is particularly well suited to rigorous comparisons across countries and cultures. There is a fairly clear international consensus on the math concepts and techniques that need to be mastered and on the order in which those concepts should be introduced into the curriculum. The knowledge to be gleaned remains the same regardless of the dominant language in a country . Comparing reading performance is more challenging because of structural differences in languages, and science comparisons can be faulted for a lack of consensus on the sequence of concepts that need to be mastered. what is Math Proficiency? NAEP has set three benchmarks for student performance— advanced, proficient, and basic. Over the last two decades there have been improvements in math performance. Yet in 2007 when the class of 2011 took the eighth grade NAEP exams in math, the results were disappointingly low. Just 7 percent of the students were performing at or above the advanced level, only 32 percent were scoring above the proficiency bar, while 29 percent 13291-03_CH03_3rdPgs.indd 34 6/6/13 10:40 AM 35 a Global View of U.S. StUdent profiCienCy rateS were performing below the basic level. But what do these levels mean substantively? What does it mean to say a student is proficient in mathematics? Like beauty, proficiency is in the eye of the beholder. Oddly enough, more American students think they are proficient in math than students in any other country, while in Singapore, one of the world’s math achievement leaders, students think poorly of their abilities in this subject.2 The governing board responsible for the NAEP, in accordance with the judgment of experts in the field, defines eighth-grade proficiency in math as follows: Eighth graders performing at the proficient level should be able to conjecture, defend their ideas, and give supporting examples. They should understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions. . . . Quantity and spatial relationships in problem solving and reasoning should be familiar to them, and they should be able to convey underlying reasoning skills beyond the level of arithmetic. . . . These students should make inferences from data and graphs, apply properties of informal geometry , and accurately use the tools of technology. Students at this level should . . . be able to calculate, evaluate, and communicate results within the domain of statistics and probability.3 Although NAEP’s definition may be too abstract to give a complete sense of what the governing board had in mind, a concrete example from the sample test that was generally answered...