Sign In
Join Now
Subscribe to Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in education in the United States.
It’s a familiar story, with some twists and turns.
That’s how a senior federal official described the effects of the 2022 tests for U. S. school academics on a large-scale foreign exam that compares what 15-year-olds around the world know and can do in math, reading and science.
Results released Tuesday through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that math scores fell particularly last year for 15-year-olds in the United States compared to 2018, the last time the test was taken. But there were also encouraging news: Scores in reading and science remained strong during this period. And the country’s PISA score has really gone up because the functionality of other countries has declined.
“These effects are further evidence of the math crisis,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers PISA in the United States. “Only now can we see that this is a global concern. “
Declining math scores as a result of the pandemic is a cause for national concern, as fourth- and eighth-grade students’ scores particularly fell on a key national check last year. Students in several states have also noticed significant drops in math as a result of COVID, though there has been some recovery recently.
Some educators say this is because math skills complement each other, so students who missed classes earlier during the pandemic might struggle to fill those gaps and catch up with their current grade level.
The findings come as officials and educators in several states compare how productive it is to teach math to academics and how many courses focus on real-world uses of math compared to more theoretical applications. Others are looking to expand access to higher-level math. courses such as algebra and calculus. Historically, Black and Latino scholars have had far less access to those courses than their peers.
“There are a lot of assumptions about what we want to do to make progress in math,” Carr said. “But it’s clear that we didn’t get there. “
Although the average grades of U. S. scholars have declined or not replaced much, the U. S. has not replaced much. In the U. S. , foreign scores have increased in all three subjects, while scores have declined in other countries that tend to outperform the U. S. U. S.
The U.S. improved its rankings even as its students reported that their schools were closed on average for longer periods of time during the pandemic than their peers in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
The relationship between academic performance and the length of school closures was small, Carr said, meaning that the variance in scores was mostly due to other factors. Some OECD countries that reopened for in-person learning more quickly than the U.S. saw steeper drops on the test, she said.
The finding echoes a study by a research team published last year, which found that remote learning contributed to lower scores, but was not the primary cause of those educational losses.
Among the 81 international school systems that participated in the PISA last year, the U.S. ranked 26th in math achievement, up from 29th among the same group of school systems in 2018.
Among the 37 members of the OECD that gave the test, most of which are higher-income countries, the U.S. ranked 22nd in math achievement.
Norway, France, Iceland and Portugal, for example, performed better than the United States in math in 2018, but now score statistically at the same level.
The U. S. ranks sixth in reading and 10th in science among the 81 school systems that conducted PISA last year. In 2018, the U. S. ranked eighth in reading and eleventh in science.
The strong reading scores among top students in U. S. schools run counter to the significant declines in reading seen last year among younger students as a component of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Back-to-school reading has also been uneven. said this could simply imply that the NAEP has a higher difficulty point than PISA.
U. S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona noted that the effects are an indicator of the effect of federal investments made in schools during the pandemic, much of which has gone toward school recovery initiatives, such as tutoring and support for students’ intellectual aptitude.
That spending “kept the U. S. in the game,” Cardona said. Without it, he said, the U. S. would be “in the same boat” as other countries that haven’t spent as much and have noticed steeper declines.
The PISA was given to around 4,600 students across the U.S. and some 620,000 students around the world.
Kalyn Belsha is a senior reporter for National Education in Chicago. Contact her at [email protected].
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
© 2023 LongmontLeader