One of the favorite complaints of the corporate reformers
is that we are “losing” the international test score race. Richard
Rothstein and Martin Carnoy put that canard to rest in a report
released earlier this year.

It did not get the attention it deserved because it challenged the conventional wisdom. Since
the Obama administration’s education policy rests on the
conventional wisdom, and since the privatizers rely on the
conventional wisdom, the report was greeted not with elation but
stony silence.

No, we are not first in the world: by their
calculations, that distinction goes to Canada, Finland, and Korea.

But our average performance is dragged down by the very large
proportion of children living in poverty. When demographics are
factored in, our performance is quite good–not perfect–but not
the disaster claimed by those who have a vested interest in making
American schools and teachers and students look bad. They find:
“Because social class inequality is greater in the United States
than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be
compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better
than it appears when countries’ national average performance is
conventionally compared. “Because in every country, students at the
bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students
higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be
relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from
the bottom of the social class distribution. “A sampling error in
the U.S. administration of the most recent international (PISA)
test resulted in students from the most disadvantaged schools being
over-represented in the overall U.S. test-taker sample.

This error further depressed the reported average U.S. test score. “If U.S.
adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the
distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently
compared, average reading scores in the United States would be
higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial
countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom),
and average math scores in the United States would be about the
same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.

“A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student
population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than
populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for
the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools
in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the
U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher
than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics,
substantially higher). “This re-estimate would also improve the
U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries,
bringing the U.S. average score to sixth in reading and 13th in
math. Conventional ranking reports based on PISA, which make no
adjustments for social class composition or for sampling errors,
and which rank countries irrespective of whether score differences
are large enough to be meaningful, report that the U.S. average
score is 14th in reading and 25th in math. Disadvantaged and
lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases,
substantially better) than comparable students in similar
post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and
lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as
comparable students in similar post-industrial countries. “At all
points in the social class distribution, U.S. students perform
worse, and in many cases substantially worse, than students in a
group of top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea).
Although controlling for social class distribution would narrow the
difference in average scores between these countries and the United
States, it would not eliminate it.

“U.S. students from
disadvantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to
their social class peers in the three similar post-industrial
countries than advantaged U.S. students perform relative to their
social class peers. But U.S. students from advantaged social class
backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in
the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada than disadvantaged
U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers. “On
average, and for almost every social class group, U.S. students do
relatively better in reading than in math, compared to students in
both the top-scoring and the similar post-industrial countries.

Because not only educational effectiveness but also countries’
social class composition changes over time, comparisons of test
score trends over time by social class group provide more useful
information to policymakers than comparisons of total average test
scores at one point in time or even of changes in total average
test scores over time. “The performance of the lowest social class
U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance
of such students in both top-scoring and similar post-industrial
countries has been falling. “Over time, in some middle and
advantaged social class groups where U.S. performance has not
improved, comparable social class groups in some top-scoring and
similar post-industrial countries have had declines in
performance.”