The latest international tests cores from the Programme for International Assessment came out last week, and U.S. high school students performed an average of 12 points worse than their peers had in 2012. Alice B. Lloyd at The Weekly Standard reports:
PISA tests how well fifteen-year-olds stack up against their global contemporaries. In math American teens rank 20 points lower than the international average—and 12 points lower than their own 2012 average. A yearly exam, the PISA rotates between reading, science and math so that a comparative ranking of the world’s teens rolls out once every three years in each subject…
The Common Core State Standards for high school math expressly emphasize teaching applied math skills through practical problem solving. And yet we’re now, as a nation, in the bottom half of 72 participating regions and countries when it comes to applying our math skills to practical problems, known as “mathematical literacy.”
This is especially disappointing because PISA is a low-grade test that at best measures up to middle-school math competence, and focuses on low, “consumer math”-type knowledge and skills.
It’s also important to note that this is just the latest in a string of national and international test results that show declines in math and reading achievement directly after the national roll-out of Common Core, a nationalized program of education that dictates what schools must teach in every grade in math and reading.
Supporters insisted Common Core would raise achievement, but, six years after the Obama administration forced states to switch to Common Core, not one achievement indicator has improved and many have declined. The declines include national results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, SAT, ACT, and advanced high school math tests.
So far, experience is bearing out the predictions of Common Core opponents, who pointed out that no research supports Common Core in whole or part, and actively suggests its methods will at best not improve student achievement, and at worst degrade it. To learn more details about this research and why the people who forced Common Core on America’s schools disregarded it, pre-order a copy of Redeemer Classical School founder Joy Pullmann’s “The Education Invasion,” which is out from Encounter Books on January 3.
Redeemer Classical School 