The United States ranks 19th out of 30 countries for the outcomes achieved from its education investments, according to “The Efficiency Index: Which Education Systems Deliver the Best Value for the Money?,” a report released last week by GEMS Education Solutions, a London-based consultancy.
Finland, South Korea, and the Czech Republic were deemed the most educationally efficient countries in the study, which used composite results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, as the performance measure.
Of 63 factors studied, only two were found to be predictive of efficiency: teacher pay and class size. The United States would need to reduce salaries about 5 percent below the average $41,460 and increase class size by 10 percent—to nearly 17 students per teacher—to be optimally efficient, the researchers said.
