PIAAC is produced by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the same organization behind Program for International Student Assessment; since 2000, that academic assessment has found U.S. 15 year-olds to be below average in math and science compared with their peers in other countries. And the International Student Assessment is one of several worldwide tests that have found U.S. students trailing their peers elsewhere. In 1964, the U.S. ranked 11 out of 12 on the first international math assessment—and that was in the middle of a decades-long period of prodigious economic growth.

A January report by the liberal advocacy group Washington Center for Equitable Growth calculated that if the U.S. were to invest in resources to raise the performance of its 15-year-olds on the International Student Assessment—bringing them on par with the average score of test-takers worldwide—the result would jumpstart the economy. The center's researchers concluded that the investment would yield an increase of $900 billion in the country’s local, state, and federal tax revenues over the next 35 years. Those gains far outweigh the resources necessary to improve U.S. student scores, the report’s authors wrote.

Goodman cited the kinds of policy decisions that have shaped the U.S. in the last four decades, largely in response to "globalizing changes in the economy and technology ... But all of those global forces have affected European countries, as well, and yet they made different kinds of policy choices and have different results."

Loveless of The Brookings Institution says that, empirically speaking, the PIAAC results don’t match up with existing data about the U.S. economy’s performance. But a bigger qualm Loveless has is the assumptions that the adult-competencies assessment makes about the skills workers will need going forward. "Let’s say I was alive in 1915 and I gave a test that predicted the job skills and future economic productivity of nations," he said. "I just don’t see how anyone in 1915 could have foreseen the skills that would have been important for the rest of the 20th century, and I doubt that anyone’s doing that now for the 21st century."

No test maker, Loveless said, "has come up with an assessment that’s a crystal ball like that."

But the report’s authors said their findings are consistent with other data sets that capture where the U.S. stands academically on both a national and global scale, particularly the International Student Assessment and the Nation’s Report Card, the federal exam that measures the academic proficiency of students in certain grade levels. "If our data were showing something that’s not in line with other kinds of large-scale assessments, it might raise questions," Goodman said. "But that’s not the case."

This post appears courtesy of The Educated Reporter.

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