US students fail to gain in 2019 international exam

Results of a test given to 600,000 15-year-olds in 79 public and private education systems around the world showed that US teenagers made no significant gains on the exam and continue to trail students in Asian countries.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam — the largest international comparison of education performance — has been conducted every three years since its launch in 2000.

The test was developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of 37 mostly industrialized countries, including the US.

It tests students' problem-solving skills rather than their knowledge and is considered an indicator of how well students will succeed in higher education and the job market. The test also is used to compare the performance of countries' education systems.

Last year's test assessed performance in science, mathematics and reading. About half of the questions on the two-hour computerized exam were devoted to reading. Students were asked to determine when written evidence supported a particular claim and to distinguish between fact and opinion, among other tasks.

The exam results released on Tuesday showed students from the four participating cities on the Chinese mainland – Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang – finished first in all three categories, with an average reading score of 555, math at 591 and science at 590, on a scale of 0 to 1,000.

US students had an average reading score of 505, a math score of 478 and a science score of 502. The scores across all three subjects were virtually unchanged from 2015.

Also outperforming the US were Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland and Ireland. The UK, Japan and Australia performed similarly to the US.

Several countries lost ground, boosting the ranking of the United States to eighth in reading and 11th in science. Its math score — below the average for other countries in the OECD — put it at 30th in the world, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the PISA in the United States. 

About a fifth of 4,800 US students from 215 schools who took the test scored so low that it appeared they hadn't mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, exam administrator.

Those students, he said, face "pretty grim prospects" in the job market.

"The scores are flat. We're struggling in math in comparison to our peers around the world," said Peggy G. Carr, the associate commissioner of assessments for the Educations Statistics Center. "We're sliding with regard to our most struggling readers."  

US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said Tuesday that "the bottom line is there has not been a single study that shows American education is improving enough".

"Scores have flatlined for a decade. Worse yet, scores for our most vulnerable students continue to decline. We are being outpaced not only by our global competitors like China and Russia, but also by countries like Estonia, Finland and Canada," she said.

But some US educators have cautioned to not read too deeply into the results. Students aren't penalized for performing poorly and never see the results, and students in the US tend to be less motivated to perform well on it compared with other countries' teens, according to recent studies.