China, Finland and Singapore are creating stronger students—and finally inspiring American educators to take action.
If the results of the most recent international achievement tests were graded on a curve, U.S. students probably would rank somewhere in the B range. They placed 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in mathematics among 70 countries whose 15-year-olds participated in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing, the latest figures available.
How could U.S. students make it to the top tier and thus maximize their chances of competing in a global economy? It would require that radical reforms in curriculum, testing and funding be instituted at the national level, says the nonprofit National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), which has investigated the educational systems of high-ranking countries like Canada, China, Finland, Japan and Singapore to distill best practices.
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