Is the U.S. Catching Up?

Annual Rate of Growth in Student Achievement in Math, Reading and Science in 41 U. S. states, 1992-2011

No.

18

Texas

2.26%
of a standard deviation

See "Is the U,S, Catching Up?" by Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann for methodological details. 25% of a standard deviation equals approximately one year's worth of learning
Map created by Max Harless.

Posted: 16 Jul 2012 07:18 AM PDT Read the unabridged version of this report here. Find an interactive map of the states’ annual gains here. “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.” Such was the dire warning issued recently by an education task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said the country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.” Along much the same lines, President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union address, declared, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Although these proclamations are only the latest in a long series of exhortations to restore America’s school system to a leading position in the world, the U.S. position remains problematic. In a report issued in 2010, we found only 6 percent of U.S. students performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. And the problem isn’t limited to top-performing students. In 2011, we showed that just 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States were proficient in mathematics, placing the U.S. 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Admittedly, American governments at every level have taken actions that would seem to be highly promising. Federal, state, and local governments spent 35 percent more per pupil—in real-dollar terms—in 2009 than they had in 1990. States began holding schools accountable for student performance in the 1990s, and the federal government developed its own nationwide school-accountability program in 2002. And, in fact, U.S. students in elementary school do seem to be performing considerably better than they were a couple of decades ago. Most notably, the performance of 4th-grade students on math tests rose steeply between the mid-1990s and 2011. Perhaps, then, after a half century of concern and efforts, the United States may finally be taking the steps needed to catch up. To find out whether the United States is narrowing the international education gap, we provide in this report estimates of learning gains over the period between 1995 and 2009 for 49 countries from most of the developed and some of the newly developing parts of the world. We also examine changes in student performance in 41 states within the United States, allowing us to compare these states with each other as well as with the 48 other countries. Data and Analytic Approach Data availability varies from one international jurisdiction to another, but for many countries enough information is available to provide estimates of change for the 14-year period between 1995 and 2009. For 41 U.S. states, one can estimate the improvement trend for a 19-year period—from 1992 to 2011. Those time frames are extensive enough to provide a reasonable estimate of the pace at which student test-score performance is improving in countries across the globe and within the United States. To facilitate a comparison between the United States as a whole and other nations, the aggregate U.S. trend is estimated for that 14-year period and each U.S. test is weighted to take into account the specific years that international tests were administered. (Because of the difference in length and because international tests are not administered in exactly the same years as the NAEP tests, the results for each state are not perfectly calibrated to the international tests, and each state appears to be doing slightly better internationally than would be the case if the calibration were exact. The differences are marginal, however, and the comparative ranking of states is not affected by this discrepancy.) Our findings come from assessments of performance in math, science, and reading of representative samples in particular political jurisdictions of students who at the time of testing were in 4th or 8th grade or were roughly ages 9‒10 or 14‒15. The political jurisdictions may be nations or states. The data come from one series of U.S. tests and three series of tests administered by international organizations. Using the equating method described in the methodology sidebar, it is possible to link states’ performance on the U.S. tests to countries’ performance on the international tests, because representative samples of U.S. students have taken all four series of tests.