In case you thought the United States’ middling performance on PISA could be explained by a drag from the bottom, some further analysis I did for an EdWeek story just posted online suggests that our nation is not exactly a world leader in producing top-tier performers in math and science.
As the story explains, only about 10 percent of U.S. students scored in the two highest achievement categories in math on the Program for International Student Assessment. That’s significantly below the figures for a lot of other nations, from South Korea and Japan to France, Germany, and New Zealand.
In science, the United States was about average among OECD nations, with 9.2 percent of American students meeting levels 5 or 6.
Here’s my original story from December when the PISA results first came out.