• You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American – Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic

  Interesting data …

  tags: assessment educational reform

  • once you compare students from similar income and class backgrounds, our relative performance improves dramatically, suggesting that our educational problems may be as much about our sheer number of poor families as our supposedly poor schools.
  • When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.
  • If we have so many of the best minds, why are our average scores so disappointingly average? As Rutgers’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown’s B. Lindsay Lowell, who co-authored the EPI report, noted in a 2008 Nature article, our high scorers are balanced out by an very large number of low scorers. Our education system, just like our economy, is polarized. 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.