...the skills gap persisted among students who are least likely to be considered academically at risk. Those who performed in the top 10 percent of all Americans in their age group still performed worse than the top performers in 15 other countries, including Germany and the Republic of Korea.
The United States did rank first in one area: It has the widest gap of any of the countries studied between the achievement of those in the top 10 percent and those in the bottom 10 percent of performance.
This is not to say that the statistics shared in this article aren't important or valid, I'm just saying that we need to compare apples to apples. In a throw-away paragraph at the end of the article, even EdWeek seems to acknowledge this. They say:
Ms. Kanter cautioned that it is still difficult to compare the U.S. population of 340 million with the smaller and more homogenous populations of many OECD countries.
My experiences with the TGC program have taught me a lot about teaching the Global Competencies - skills that will help our students perform in a flat world, and I strongly believe that teaching them, and making them as much a part of our daily and weekly educational activities in our classrooms, will prove to be a powerful tool towards increasing student achievement. I am interested in seeing whether these Global Competencies are the same set of skills that the study mentioned above tested, and whether we are, in fact, doing as poorly as Education Week is suggesting.
Have you read the article? Are you familiar with the PIAAC? I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts about both! Please keep comments professional!