Global+Achievement+Gap+Validity

Does such a gap exist? How do we know?
We believe that a global achievement gap does exist. Wagner (2008) argues that the United States has not made progress in education, while other countries are changing for the better. Countries such as Denmark, Japan, and Sweden have greater high school graduation rates, higher PISA scores, lower college drop out rates, and more prepared candidates for the global job market. Students in the United States are unprepared for the work place because our education system is not giving the students the skills they need to survive in the global economy. (p.4-18)

Standardized tests given to students in the United States are vastly different from those given in many other countries. While the U.S. is testing for content knowledge, other countries are assessing if students can analyze, reason, and interpret. OECD (2010) states that these tests have an, "innovative approach to 'literacy', which is concerned with the capacity of students to extrapolate from what they have learned and to analyze and reason as they pose, solve and interpret problems (see video below) in a variety of situations." (p. 3) When students from around the world take these tests, it is clear that the United States is falling behind. The U.S. government has spent a lot of time and money reforming the education system (i.e., NCLB), but no measurable change or increase has been shown in test scores. Ornstein (2010) reported that the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), in 1998 and 2001, show that United States twelfth graders scored twentieth, out of twenty industrialized nations. The PISA test scores from 2006 showed fifteen year olds ranked twenty-fifth out of thirty and twenty-fourth out of thirty in Mathematics and Science respectively. OECD (2010) results for the PISA test from 2009 showed the United States thirtieth out of thirty-four countries for Mathematics (see figure 1) and twenty-third out of thirty-four countries in Science.



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