The U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.
It's a provocative statement, in part because it's full of lies. It's true, of course, that the U.S. spends more per capita than most other countries and does worse on some international tests in some subjects and some grades compared to a significant number of other countries, particularly our industrialized competitors. But there are 192 countries in the world and I'll eat my shoe if we're trailing more than 96 of them on any legitimate educational measure. For example, on the 2004 PISA test, "Of the 45 countries ranked in the eighth-grade survey, the United States was 15th in math and 9th in science; among 25 countries in the fourth-grade rankings, it was 12th in math and 6th in science." And that's not a random distribution of countries; PISA tends to undersample nations that lack functioning governments, universities, developed economies, etc. Similarly, according to the OECD countries including Norway and Switzerland spend more per-student on high school, others spend more on elementary school, and a fair number are within 10 percent or so of U.S. levels.
Now, one could say that Scheiffer's overall point about spending and achievement is valid and the question would have been less clear with the appropriate caveats. But I say: too bad; sometimes the world is complicated and your job is to figure out how to be clear and accurate when you talk about it. There's plenty of legitimate data to suggest that the American education system needs to be better; there's no reason to make stuff up or exaggerate for effect. Indeed, this kind of doomsaying tends to undermine the whole effort to improve education because people think if it's really that bad it must be essentially unfixable.
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