New findings: U.S. squarely in middle on many global education indicators

Greg Toppo | USATODAY

From pre-kindergarten through graduate school, the education system in the United States faces tough competition from the rest of the world, a new study found.

The study made public Tuesday by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows other nations are catching up and in many cases have surpassed the United States at many levels, from pre-kindergarten enrollment to the percentage of adults with advanced degrees.

OECD's annual "Education at a Glance" report finds, for instance, that 41% of 3-year-olds in the U.S. are enrolled in pre-kindergarten. Among all OECD countries, the average is 72%.

For 4-year-olds in the United State, the number rises to 66%, but still falls below the OECD average of 88%.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's deputy director for education and skills, said the gap in pre-school enrollment — as well as other factors — isn't necessarily because things have gotten worse in the U.S.. "There has just been enormous progress" elsewhere in the world, he said.

The report analyzes the education systems of the 34 OECD member countries, which include most industrialized nations, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Chile Israel, Japan, and most European nations, as well as non-member countries: Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

On average, OECD nations invest about 0.6% of GDP in pre-primary education. Countries such as Norway, Iceland and Finland invest about 1% of GDP in pre-K, while in the USA, it's closer to 0.4%, "at the lower end of the spectrum," Schleicher said.

When it comes to class sizes in K-12 education, the United States has larger than average classes in primary grades, but below average in middle school and high school classes. But even that upper-grade advantage, long touted by education advocates, doesn't necessarily give U.S. schools an edge, Schleicher said. In the U.S., he said, teachers may enjoy smaller classes, but they get fewer opportunities to collaborate professionally and observe one another at work.

By contrast, in closely watched Finland, 30% of instructional time is spent outside the classroom setting. "So there's a lot of space and time that teachers have to do other things than teach," he said. "You don't see that in the United States."

Most countries that have large classes "use the resources that creates, actually, to give teachers opportunities to do other things than teach," Schleicher said.

And as Congress debates overhauling a federal law that could help change the K-12 testing and accountability system, the new OECD statistics present an unexpected finding: globally speaking, the United States doesn't necessarily give more tests to its students, dispelling what Schleicher called a "popular belief" that the U.S. is "the country with a lot of heavy testing."

That's actually not borne out by the data, he said. "There are other countries where the stakes for students are certainly a lot larger and where kids get tested a lot more frequently."

On the other end of the system, the United States, which once ranked second worldwide behind Israel in the percentage of adults with a college degree of some sort, now sits just above the OECD average.

"It's sort of a middle position, basically very similar to many other countries," Schleicher said, "not because it's the worst, but because so many countries have made very heavy investments in equipping more people with university degrees or other types of tertiary education."

In places like the United Kingdom, expanded grant funding for higher education means that "anybody who wants to and is qualified to go to a university ... can now do that," he said. "That's clearly not what we see in the United States. You clearly have strong support for students in the United States, but at the end of the day, people have to pay that back. That poses a barrier for many people."

On the bright side, he said, the U.S. labor market rewards advanced degrees like few others. "If you have great skills, that's the country to turn those into a better job and a better life."

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo