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November 14, 2007

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren't just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they're competing globally.

A detailed study lets them know just how well kids may do if they really compete globally someday — and it's not exactly pretty.

Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.

But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

"We're kind of in the middle of the pack," Phillips says. "Being in the middle of the pack is really a mediocre place to be."

The differences between states are stark: While students in Massachusetts, the top-scoring state in math, can rightly boast that they do nearly as well as students in those highflying Asian nations, students in places such as Mississippi, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., register math results comparable to Bulgaria, Moldova and Macedonia.

"We are not in the lead in winning this race to prepare the minds for the future generation," Phillips says.

He should know. Before joining AIR, he headed the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Education Department, overseeing large-scale testing programs that included the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS ), the two tests he compares in the new analysis.

The findings were welcomed by Dane Linn, who heads the education division of the National Governors Association. He says reports like Phillips' will prompt state lawmakers to rethink their academic standards.

"I think it's the beginning of giving governors the tools to see how they're going to improve student achievement relative to other countries," he says.

The project was funded by AIR, and Phillips says he wasn't approached by lawmakers or interest groups to undertake it.

"This comes from my personal interest and concern about math and science literacy," he told reporters this week.

Andrew Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector, an education-policy think tank, calls the analysis "a sober walk through the evidence in a debate that's often characterized by hysterics. It points out both the good news and the challenges."