As for American kids scoring lower than other countries, here's a good myth for us to debunk. At the risk of shocking many French people, American students not only score average but even slightly higher than their French counterparts.
According to PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) results in 2009 , basically France and the United States score close to the OECD mean.
| Reading | Science | Maths |
| Score points + rank out of 65 countries | ||
France | 496 points (ranks 22) | 498 points (ranks 27) | 497 points (ranks 22) |
The US | 500 points - (ranks 17) | 502 points (ranks 23) | 487 points (ranks 31) |
OECD | 493 points | 501 points | 496 points |
What is not such good news is the decline in student performance in mathematics in France and in reading in both the U.S. and France between 2000 and 2009.
Both countries have remarkable similar results when it comes to the strength of the relationship between students' socio-economic background and reading performance at 16.7 for France and 16.8 for the U.S. (above the OECD average of 14.0)
But forget about égalité : the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged is more than 50 points in France - one of the highest in the OECD along with New Zealand, while it is 'only' 42 in the United-States.See America, your students don't have it so bad after all.
One last note: Stewart's guess, Diane Ravitch, has written a book in which she accuses the U.S. educational system of having become "testing factories". This is all the more interesting that France is reforming its system to do just that... asking teachers to test at every level all the time.
Watch and enjoy:
1 comment:
Hello,
it is just that the french education is failing its students too (in part because of the "excellent" pedagogic methods imported from the us)
Sincerely yours,
a french teacher
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