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(Image: source)
Hold on...let
me start with the fingers on my left hand...one, two, three, four, five...now
on to the other ...six, seven, eight, nine, ten...and then to
my right foot...eleven, twelve, thirteen...aw, forget it -- we're just
too far down the list to matter.
Didn't we used
to need only one hand -- or just a few fingers -- to figure out
where we stood in comparison to everyone else?
"Can the
US Compete if Only 32 Percent of Its Students Are Proficient in Math?" (Christian
Science Monitor)
Among the
top-scoring places in the world that participated in a recent exam, math
proficiency of 15-year-olds was well above 50 percent. One US state,
Massachusetts, cleared that mark, barely.
Jeremy Kennefick leads an eighth-grade science class at Normandin Middle School. New Bedford, Massachusetts in
2008.
What do
Massachusetts, Switzerland, and Singapore have in common? Their students are
among the top performers in the world when it comes to mathematical
proficiency.
As for the rest
of the United States, the comparison is more bleak, according to a new
report: The US ranked 32nd out of 65 countries (or cities such as Shanghai
and Hong Kong) that participated in the latest international PISA, an exam
administered to representative samples of 15-year-old students by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
To researchers
who authored Wednesday’s report – “Globally Challenged: Are
U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” – it’s yet another cause
for alarm about the ability of the United States to compete on the global
economic scene.
“This is
an urgent problem.... We cannot continue to ignore the mathematical education
of the next generation if we expect to be a ... highly productive
society,” said Paul Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard and
co-author of the report, in a live webinar Wednesday morning.
How times have
changed.
Michael J. Panzner
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