Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” The word "average" was not in his lexicon. Nor is it in ours, even when it seems that we are average. But perhaps even more appropriate for today's lesson is that other famous sports bromide given to us by hockey legend Scotty Bowman: “Statistics are for losers.”

When it comes to the PISA and most internatoinal testing, and the use of average scores as measures of future global dominance or decline, I think the losers are us. Like so many numbers in education these days, I question whether the PISA results tell us much of anything at all.

Data-driven decision-making is only as good as the data that drives it. But too often in education, we make decisions based on dubious data. I think this is the case in our analysys of this year’s PISA results.

Who Doesn’t Want to Be Great?

It’s easy to be in favor of American exceptionalism; singular achievement is our national birthright. To be average is anathema. So let’s pick up those PISA scores boys and girls because if we don’t… Well, I’m sure something bad will happen, won’t it?

I think we're misinterpreting the PISA data. I also question if it's even valid at all.

Brace(y) Yourself

I’m going to let Gerald Bracey do most of the talking here. I recently came across some writing of his on the PISA test in Valerie Strauss’s WaPo Answer Sheet column. This set of comments seems particularly salient:

“It should be noted that these rankings are determined by nations’ average scores. Some researchers have suggested, however, that average score comparisons are not useful: even presuming that the tests have some meaning for future accomplishment, average students are not likely to be the leaders in fields of mathematics and science.

Those roles are more likely to fall to those scoring well. A publication from OECD itself observes that if one examines the number of highest-scoring students in science, the United States has 25% of all high-scoring students in the world (at least in “the world” as defined by the 58 nations taking part in the assessment—the 30 OECD nations and 28 “partner” countries). Among nations with high average scores, Japan accounted for 13% of the highest scorers, Korea 5%, Taipei 3%, Finland 1%, and Hong Kong 1%. Singapore did not participate.

The picture emerging from this highest-scorer comparison is far different than that suggested by the frequently cited national average comparisons; it is a picture that suggests many American schools are actually doing very well indeed.

Of course, the U.S. is much larger than these other countries and should be expected to produce larger numbers of successful students. But it is only when we look beyond the mean and consider the distribution of students and schools that we see the true picture. Students attending American schools run the gamut from excellent to poor. Well-resourced schools serving wealthy neighborhoods are showing excellent results. Poorly resourced schools serving low-income communities of color do far worse.”

But Wait, There’s More

“…comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It’s like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have. On both TIMSS math and science, the U. S. has a much higher proportion of "advanced" scorers than the international median although the proportion is much smaller than in Asian nations.

This was not true on PISA, another international comparison that tests 15-year-olds. Only 1.5% of American students scored at the highest level compared to top performing New Zealand at 4% and second place Finland at 3.9%.

Yet the proportion of Americans at the highest level meant that 70,000 kids scored there compared to about 2,000 for New Zealand and Sweden. No one else even came close—Japan was second with about 33,000 top performers. These are the people who might end up creating leading edge technology in the future. Who cares if Singapore, with about the same population as the Washington Metro Area, and Hong Kong, with about twice that number, score high?

There aren’t many people there. (And, as journalist Fareed Zakariya found out, the Singapore kids fade as they become adults. More about that in a moment). The bad news is that the U. S., on PISA anyway, had many more students scoring at the lowest levels; these kids likely can’t compete for the good jobs in the country.”

Bracey Coontinues on Testing and Global Competitiveness

“…test scores, at least average test scores, don’t seem to be related to anything important to a national economy. Japan’s kids have always done well, but the economy sank into the Pacific in 1990 and has never recovered.

The two Swiss-based organizations that rank nations on global competitiveness, the Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum, both rank the U. S. #1 and have for a number of years. The WEF examines 12 "pillars of competitiveness," only one of which is education. We do OK there, but we shine on innovation. Innovation is the only quality of competitiveness that does not show at some point diminishing returns. Building bigger and faster airplanes can only improve productivity so much.

Innovation has no such limits. When Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why his high-flying students faded in after-school years, the Minister cited creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge, all of which he thought American excelled in. But, as Bob Sternberg of Tufts University [he is now provost of Oklahoma State University] has pointed out, our obsession with standardized testing has produced one of the best instruments in the nation’s history for stifling creativity.

But really, does the fate of the nation rest on how well 9- and 13-year-olds bubble in answer sheets? I don’t think so. Neither does British economist, S. J. Prais. We look at the test scores and worry about the nation’s economic performance. Prais looks at the economic performance and worries about the validity of the test scores: "That the United States, the world’s top economic performing country, was found to have school attainments that are only middling casts fundamental doubts about the value and approach of these [international assessments]."

Bracey Discusses America’s Supply Side Scorecard

“…even if comparisons of average test scores were a meaningful exercise, it only looks at one dimension—the supply side. Predictably, the results gave rise to calls for more spending on science instruction. This ignores the fact that we have more scientists and engineers than we can absorb. In one study, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University and Harold Salzman of the Urban Institute found that we mint three new engineers for every new job (this is from permanent residents and citizens, not foreigners).

More disturbing was the attrition rate. While educators fret over losing 50% of teachers in 5 years (and well they should), Lowell and Salzman found that engineering loses 65% in two years. Why? Low pay, lousy working conditions, little chance for advancement. American schools of engineering are dominated by foreigners because only people from third world nations can view our jobs as attractive. In fact, long-time science writer, Dan Greenberg, invented a new position for those emerging with Ph.D.’s: post-doc emeritus.

Schools are doing a great job on the supply side. Business and industry are doing a lousy job on the demand side. The oil industry, responding to increased demand for oil exploration, raised the entry-level salaries for petroleum engineers by 30-60%. The number of students lining up to be petroleum engineers has doubled and enrollment at Texas Tech has increased six fold.

As usual in these comparisons, Americans in low-poverty schools look very good, even in mathematics. They would be ranked third in the 4th grade (among 36 nations) 6th in the 8th grade (among 47 nations). This is important because while other developed nations have poor children, the U. S. has a much higher proportion and a much weaker safety net. When UNICEF studied poverty in 22 wealthy nations, the U. S. ranked 21st.”

The Leaning Tower of PISA

If Bracey’s comments aren’t bracing enough, Diane McGuinness takes on international testing directly in her 2004 book, “Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading”.

With the dogged statistical precision for which she is known, Ms. McGuinness eviscerates the validity of at least one version of the PISA test by pointing out that the PISA consortium does not effectively enforce its own compliance guidelines regarding student participation, and that average country scores are severely distorted as a result.

“As project directors obviously have lost control over these studies, international testing has become an exercise in futility. It is an enormous waste of time and resources, and proves nothing.”

Bracey and McGuinness don’t qualify as a world-wide organization for sanctioning tests. But they didn’t just fall off the turnip truck either. These are smart folks who know their stats. My hunch is that a lot of other smart folks know exactly the same things they do.

The Market for Meaningful Metrics

I suppose PISA could have cleaned up its act by now. But, as in so many of the testing situations with which we contend, how would we know for sure?

There’s certainly no incentive for any organization to report educational statistics accurately is there? If we want to take a free market argument to the limit, let’s look at the market for good stats. Does such a market exist?

Organizations that give tests and conduct studies make the same amount of money regardless of the quality of their methodology or the validity of their work. And policy folks just like to get their hands on new numbers. So everyone’s a winner, right?

U.S. states are probably the biggest offenders in this regard because “market incentives” encourage them to inflate scores, make tests easier to pass, and exploit loopholes for short-term political gain.

Who’s Watching the Watchers?

If there’s one thing we could do to strengthen the accountability component of NCLB it would be putting in controls that assure the validity of testing and the accuracy of educational statistics. If data-driven reform is the law of the land, why do we knowingly tolerate so much lawlessness?

This is a question we do not like to discuss. And I have no idea why.

We love data so much, and we use it for so many important things, you’d think we’d take extraordinary measures to assure its integrity. But we don’t. And that makes me think this whole educational data thing is a smokescreen for something else.

Like so many things about education reform, knowingly relying on bad data in a data-driven national effort to improve our schools, just doesn’t add up.

Will new standards from CCSSI and new tests from the consortia change things? Maybe. But, once again, how will we know for sure?

Time to Take Our Thorazine

It seems we have a schizophrenic relationship with data. On the one hand, we love it; on the other, we’re scared to death of it.

The truth is a bitter pill made even less palatable by the difficulty involved in getting to the bottom of it.

To most of us, education seems intractable. Numbers give us something simple to grab a hold of. But when we grab, we often end up with a fistful of problems we don’t want to deal with.

If we can fix the numbers, we can fix the problems, right? Isn’t that where all this is heading? As soon as we can say that every kid in America is “proficient”, won’t we be able to hang that “Mission Accomplished” banner? And since “proficiency” is an undefinable term which can be expressed only through correlational pyschometric constructs and statistics that are beyond the ken of the average American, student achievement data can easily be manipulated without most of us having any idea about what’s really going on.

The state of educational data, much like the state of educational research that we discussed some weeks ago, is intolerable. We can’t continue to make decisions of policy and practice using data that we know is suspect or meaningless. It isn’t right and it isn’t smart. The longer we continue with this charade, the harder it will be to wean our nation off its addiction to the crack cocaine of illegitimate educational statistics.

It’s not a Data Problem; it’s a People Problem

We all thought Joel Klein was working miracles in New York. He did some good work, no doubt about it. But it turns out he had a little help from the folks in Albany who were quietly making their tests a little easier each year.

New York is hardly alone in this regard. Virtually every state in the country has had procedural, statistical, or informational irregularities in their testing systems. Not surprisingly, these “errors” always seem to lead to higher scores.

Here in North Carolina, I tried to find out the answer to one simple question about state testing for an article I was writing for my local paper. I sent a short e-mail with the question to the guy who runs our testing system. The two of us must have passed 20 messages back and forth over the next several months as he tried to put me off, bury me in pointless information about Item Response Theory, or just tell me that my question wasn’t worthy of an answer.

Eventually, I got him on the phone. But he had to bring a PR flak with him on the call. I’m writing for a weekly paper with a circulation of 5000 copies in a town of less than 20,000 people. This ain’t The New York Times. I think the body guard can stay in the limo, don't you?

All I wanted to do was explain to the parents in our community how many questions a kid needs to answer on a multiple choice reading test in order to pass. I know there are multiple forms of the test, I know how IRT works, I know there’s not a single number the guy can give me. But I also know he can give me a range and tell me how that range maps to a range of raw scores with a known margin of errof. I also know that under any normal circumstance a state employee has nothing to fear from a simple question posed by a small town journalist.

But maybe state testing directors do have something to fear. Maybe they fear that the people of their state will find out that things in Dataland aren’t all sugar and spice. Maybe they’re afraid that this whole testing business will fall down like a house of cards if people find out how it really works.

(NOTA BENE: The main reason our state testing guy gave me for not explaining how the scoring worked was that he didn’t explain it to our state board of education. The reason he didn’t do that, he said, was that they didn’t understand it. When I asked if they were comfortable not understanding the testing system they oversaw, he said they were. Note the irony here: the people who are in charge of accountability in education are not themselves accountable even to each other—or to their taxpaying constituents—and the leading member of this group is so comfortable with this fact that he will admit it to a reporter over the phone to avoid answering an utterly benign question about test scoring.)

It’s Time the Testers Were Put to the Test

We have bet virtually all of ed reform on test data and other educational statistics. We have reached an uneasy but significant national consensus that data is unconditionally valuable. Yet there is a condition: the data we use must be valid. Without this assurance, we lose the ability to make good decisions about schools, about teachers, about kids, about almost everything in education today.

We know that much of our data we have is not valid. But in fine Rumsfeldian fashion, we go to school with the data we have.

Some might say that bad data is better than no data at all. But I think this incorrect. With no data at all, we would have to do other things to evaluate the condition of our schools. We would have to gather other information by other means. We would have to develop sharper senses and better analytic abilities. We might have to visit schools, sit in classrooms, look at student work, talk to parents. We might have to innterview high school students about their first year of college.We might have to talk employers about the college grads they hire.

We might have to do a lot of things that would tell us a lot of things about our schools.

But with data, we don’t have to worry about any of this. Data takes the pressure off. But it also means that most of the time, we’re flying blind. We’re also losing the trust of teachers, parents, kids, and the general citizenry, most of whom have no reason to believe anymore that any aspect of reform will make any difference at all—or that any differences reported as a result of reform policies are real.

Up to the present, the data we have been getting has not been good. Much of it is invalid. Some is flat out faked. Most of it is misinterpreted. Almost all of it is misapplied. Yet we’ve been using it like it’s rock solid.

Of course, data is not to blame; we are.

In every case where data is found wanting, we find people like you and me—many, many people—who seemingly knew all along what was going on. How many people in New York knew about those test changes? And when did these people plan on revealing their “adjustments”?

New Standards for Data

Without honesty and transparency in data collection and interpretation, data is merely noise. And the noisier the system gets, the harder it is to fix. McGuinness doers a wonderful job of connecting the problems we have with literacy in our country to the extreme amount of statistical noise generated by flawed reading research.

It's nearly impossible for anyone, other than an expert, to sift through the data on reading and determine an effective way to teach it or a solid program to adopt. There's so much noise from bad data collection that we can't parse the signal of truth. Even before the The Great Age of Educational Data, we were generating numbers about school. And, according to McGuinness in her review of almost 20,000 studies on reading, only about 1% of this particular research base was legit.

We’re big on setting standards for teachers and kids these days. But I don’t see too many of them mucking around with the numbers. Why don’t we set a standard for ourselves?

Surely there are procedures that can be standardized to ensure data integrity? Surely there are ethical standards we can agree to adhere to? Surely there is local, state, and federal legislation that can be drafted to disincentivize people from playing fast and loose with statistical truth. Sarbanes-Oxley makes CEOs sign off on earnings reports. Why don't we make state testing directors sign off on state testing data? Why don't we make federal agencies sign off on the data they supply?

If the truth of educational data gathering is that the people who gather it can’t be trusted, then Scotty Bowman’s famous line will ring just as true for schooling as it does for sports. As it stands right now, educational statistics are for losers—and the losers are us.

&ldquoWhy strive to improve our standing in the OECD’s education rankings? Why not be satisfied to be average or even, as we are in math, a bit below average? For the same reasons that the Obama administration has called its signature education initiative “Race to the Top” rather than, say, race to the middle.

First, because these rankings represent not just international bragging rights but real deficiencies in the education we give our young people: a national college graduation rate just above 50%--and that’s of those who make it to college. A minority graduation rate closer to 40%. The large numbers of college students—33% overall, but over half of all minority students—who must take remedial courses in college, courses in which they pay college tuition, but receive no college credit, to learn what they should have been taught in high school and before.

We pay for these deficiencies in our national economic health and vigor. President Obama is right to refer to education as the economic issue of our time, and to warn that “the country that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” Jobs follow well-educated workforces. Once it was only manual, mass-production jobs we were losing to low-wage countries. Now, an emphasis on education is paying off for countries like China and India in high-tech and white-collar jobs.

A second reason that regaining educational leadership is so important to the United States is that aspiration is central to what we are as a nation and society. Distinctively among the nations of the world, American prosperity has been fueled by mobility, the belief—and the reality—that economically modest beginnings could lead to success and security. And the engine of that mobility has always been education, a good and free public education through high school, and the prospect of a college education, not just for chosen elite but for everyone. We have not always been true to these ideals, but the closer we have come the stronger the country has been, socially and economically.

Closely connected to that dynamic is our diversity. The question seems to suggest that our diversity is a handicap in competing with less diverse countries like Finland and Korea. Quite the contrary: Our diversity is our strength, our competitive advantage over economic rivals. Our economy and society have been energized by the striving of successive generations of individuals and groups to improve their lives and their communities. Our diversity is a distinct advantage in understanding and succeeding in an infinitely diverse global marketplace.

This is about national will, priority and strategy. We are not a country consigned to the middle of the educational and economic pack because of lack of human, natural or financial resources. We are a country well-positioned for leadership. We know how to educate people to become active participants and leaders in the economy and in civil society. As a country, we can well afford to do so. Shame on us that we’re not doing it. It’s beyond a national tragedy that future generations will be adversely effected by our lack of commitment to do better.

When I first read this week’s question, I thought: “Is this a Saturday Night Live joke?” I was remembering the fictitious character, Stuart Smalley, made famous by Al Franken. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and – doggone it – people like me!”

Sadly, it’s not comedy. Nor is it fiction.

I don’t buy the argument suggesting students from other countries outperform U.S. students because of that country’s singular culture or demographic make-up. America’s diversity is precisely what has made it exceptional. Fact is, for a generation we have failed to educate our students well, and now our failure is signaling back to us as an SOS flare. At the very least, the realization that students in countries like Finland and Korea are outperforming U.S. students in reading, science and math should serve as a dramatic wake-up call. It’s time to right the ship, and soon.

Amazingly, the very law that guides our education system belies this “average” notion. No Child Left Behind expects all children to succeed and acknowledged the potential in every child. School districts became responsible for raising achievement for all children.

If anything, our system has failed our students because, by and large, it has continued to teach students the same way it did 30 years ago. We have failed to personalize their learning experiences. We don’t organize systems in a way that supports innovative, personalized instruction. And we don’t bring the community to the table at the front-end of the decision-making and educational processes.

This steady decline in academic achievement must end with this generation. To be “average” is not what I wish for my grandchildren and the millions of students who will matriculate through our education system today. Millions will drop out of school without the skills they need to let them compete with their global counterparts if we don’t change right now.

There has never been a country that has accomplished so much in such a short period of time as the United States of America. In just a little more than two centuries of existence, the United States put a man on the moon, led an amazing industrial revolution and remains in the leading edge of technology development.

Being average didn’t make us the envy of the world – even dating to early in our founding and de Tocqueville’s glowing observations about the boundless optimism and cooperative spirit that marked our fledgling democracy. Our constitution and our free-market economy make us unique and provide the foundation that has made us exceptional.

So, no, “average” has never been what the United States expects of its students – nor should we ever expect it to be.

“Good enough” is not good enough when the definition falls far below international standards and even our own aspirations for high-quality education. The American Institutes for Research pointed this out in October when its analysis revealed that only two states—Massachusetts and South Carolina—have 8th-grade math curricula equal to that of the seven leading nations and territories in math. When we know that 8th-graders in Hawaii are more likely to get a highly rigorous math instruction than their peers in Colorado, then we can’t even say that we have “good enough”.

The 2009 PISA results released last week are one more clarion call that “good enough” is failing our kids. Just 30 percent—that’s three and one zero—of American high school sophomores read at the advanced, critical-thinking levels of proficiency our increasingly global economy demands. If our African-American students were categorized as a nation, they would rank 46th in the world in reading—beh...

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“Good enough” is not good enough when the definition falls far below international standards and even our own aspirations for high-quality education. The American Institutes for Research pointed this out in October when its analysis revealed that only two states—Massachusetts and South Carolina—have 8th-grade math curricula equal to that of the seven leading nations and territories in math. When we know that 8th-graders in Hawaii are more likely to get a highly rigorous math instruction than their peers in Colorado, then we can’t even say that we have “good enough”.

The 2009 PISA results released last week are one more clarion call that “good enough” is failing our kids. Just 30 percent—that’s three and one zero—of American high school sophomores read at the advanced, critical-thinking levels of proficiency our increasingly global economy demands. If our African-American students were categorized as a nation, they would rank 46th in the world in reading—behind, Russia, Chile and Serbia —while our Latino students would rank 41st among all nations. Meanwhile our young men are performing 25 points behind their female peers on PISA; this should be worrisome to every father and mother, including my fellow education experts.

I see the consequences of “good enough” every time I drive by the unemployment office in my home town of Greenville, South Carolina. I see the consequences of “good enough” when I see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate for high school dropouts is 14 percent; that just 46 percent of them are participating in the labor market; and that few of them would qualify for high-paying jobs such as elevator installers and repairmen (who must have strong math and science skills before they can even begin apprenticeships).

We have failed far too many young men and women because our definition of “good enough”—from math and reading standards, to the funding of our schools—isn’t anywhere close to preparing these young people for today’s economic realities. We fail them further when we say that only some kids can succeed in school and in life and that diversity equals accepting less than the best. In fact, America’s diversity is its strength, not a weakness, and we should build on it. As I tell my fellow PTA members, “good enough” and “I don’t know” don’t belong in our vocabulary. We make a promise to every child that their futures will be brighter than our present—and we cannot keep our word if all we accept from them and ourselves is “good enough”.

The members of the National PTA, with the help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have already begun the first step in putting an end to “good enough” by working to get Common Core State Standards in English, math and science adopted in six states. We will offer a guide on the standards in order to help parents understand how they can help ensure that every child gets the same high-quality education no matter whether they live in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, or in Rochester, New York. Through our Million Hours of Power Campaign, we aim to engage more men in improving education for our kids—and especially for young men, who need the guiding hands of fathers, uncles, brothers and other caring adults.

The time for “good enough” must be over. Our kids should have more than that.

Our blogmeister seems a mite hard-up for topics this holiday season. The short, sweet answer to the question is that if we don’t fare better in worldwide educational comparisons we’re likely to fare worse in worldwide economic comparisons. As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz point out in their landmark work, The Race Between Education and Technology, it is our educational edge that gave the US its economic advantage—as that advantage disappears, our relative position in the world economy is likely to decline. Perhaps we’re ready to think about Slovakia as our peer, when it comes to our standard of living, but somehow I doubt it.

Several things about those international comparisons do bear emphasizing. For one, all of the countries that are outpacing us have highly centralized systems with prescribed curriculum—no charter schools, the most modest power to local authorities—and well-trained, comparatively well-paid teachers. While they adopt different strategies, ranging from skill-and-drill to a Dewey-influenced constructivist approach, they rely on the same approach to educate all their children. And all these countries place an increasingly heavy emphasis on early education. (Even as Britain was slashing its budget, it expanded early education for at-risk two-year-olds.). That’s the take-away for the U.S.

Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.

Why does this matter? McKinsey suggests that lagging U.S. achievement amounts to a permanent recession the size of what we’re digging out of.

In a recent edReformer blog my colleague Marshall Roslyn, who just returned from two years running the Learn Capital office in Beijing, agrees with Checker Finn. “If China can produce top PISA scorers in one city in 2009—Shanghai’s population of 20 million is larger than that of many whole countries—it can do this in 10 cities in 2019 and 50 in 2029. Or maybe faster.” Marshall added the emphasis “because one of the key lessons I have learned from the several years I have spent living and working in China is that milestones there always seem to hit faster than anyone expects.”

There is an idea economy and a service economy. Between the two growth sectors, middle class jobs—the ones that created two-car-garage suburban American—are disappearing. Learning is the entry ticket to the idea economy.

The PISA results suggest that most other OECD countries are going a better job preparing a higher percentage of young people for the idea economy. The result is that our children will be the first generation of American kids to be less well off than their parents. The slide will continue unless we confront the data and the barriers to improved achievement.

It is beyond troubling that American students remain in the lower tier among the global community, even with more money being piped into our education system than ever before.

Despite 20 years worth of attempts to change the system, and while new quality school options are available to parents in many areas of the country, there are not enough options for kids who desperately - and obviously - need them. When our students continue to score merely average marks in reading and science compared to children in those country's with whom we compete economically every day, we cannot pat ourselves on the back when we gain a few points here or there. Rewarding mediocrity serves only to maintain mediocrity.

America needs to expect more of our schools, our teachers and our kids if we are to regain a competitive foothold in the global community. We cannot lead from the middle of the pack.

The idea that America's diversity represents an insurmountable barrier to educational excellence doesn't hold water. The questions cites perennial PISA champion Finland, a country with a lot of empty space, few natural resources, and an overwhelmingly white population almost all of whom practice the same denomination of Christianity and are concentrated near the capital city. If that's the recipe for high test scores, we might expect the U.S. state that most resembles this profile to be knocking the socks off the NAEP every year.

That state would be Utah, whose results are decidedly mediocre.

Finland isn't successful because it's homogenous. (Albania is homogenous.) It's successful because it has clear, well-implemented national standards, equitable school funding, a strong social safety net, high-quality early childhood education, and smart, highly-trained teachers. We could have those things in America, too.

While the recent PISA results showing U.S. students to be average in comparison to their international peers may be a blow to American national pride, the fact is given how poorly we treat our teaching force and many of our students, it’s amazing the results aren’t worse. The really good news is that doing better is fully within our power and resources.

The PISA standings shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise; America was running in the middle of the pack at the 2003 release of those same tests, behind countries such as Finland, South Korea, and Canada.

Over the last 30 years, other countries have studied the U.S. educational system, or more correctly, they have studied what our best practices and research say would maximize student learning. Unlike us, they have been willing to move national policy and resources in line with that knowledge. For example, many other countries have taken seriously the importance of sustaining teacher quality by making better use of the expertise of their veteran teachers, allowing them to spend significant portions of their work time mentoring newer teachers or developing curriculum materials. Meanwhile, here in the U.S. archaic systems stifle teacher creativity, ignore market realities, and isolate teaching expertise” (Teaching 2030, p.105).

Following research-based best practices, many of our competitors have invested heavily in rigorous systems to prepare and keep high quality teachers. Even a tiny country like Singapore “has one of the most sophisticated systems of teacher development in the world. Teachers are highly recruited, well-prepared, and well paid” (Teaching 2030, p. 125). Conversely, across the U.S., states and districts have lowered standards for those entering teaching while providing little or no support during their first years in the classroom. Since it is primarily these poorer prepared recruits who end up working in the most challenging schools, the persistently high teacher turnover and low student performance rates can be guaranteed.

We can do better, in part by taking back our own ideas and putting them to work for America’s children.

Yikes. Why shouldn’t National Journal settle for being average, too, maybe like People, Road & Track, or Teen Star Hairstyles? Why shouldn’t American athletes settle for the middle of the pack in the summer and winter Olympics? Who really cares about gold medals? Oscars? Nobel Prizes? Three Michelin stars?

Yet you want us seriously to ponder the possibility that average is fine for the United States when it comes to education?

The response has been loud and clear since at least A Nation at Risk and its stirring declaration—this was 27 years ago, before a bunch of countries had surpassed us—that “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge….We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”

All that’s really changed since then is that more nations have been outpacing us. Yes, we have tiny gains to report in some subjects at some grade levels—the yield from two decades of ardent reforming and quite a lot of spending—but fundamentally our trend lines are flat while others rise.

As for the “they’re homogeneous, we’re diverse” argument, the worst off of young Americans when it comes to educational attainment are those of color, black and brown in particular. (Asian-Americans generally do quite well.) Excusing our overall performance on grounds that we have more such kids than some other countries have is tantamount to consigning them permanently to the back of the bus.

The PISA results should be read as a loud fire bell in the night, designed to awaken us to impending doom. That Shanghai won the gold medal should deepen and intensify our resolve.