By STEPHANIE BANCHERO CONNECTUpdated Dec. 3, 2013 7:12 a.m.ET
I just returned from 10 days in China. The last part of the trip we visited a family friend and former intern of mine, Max Leary. Max is enrolled in the Business and Financial Services Program at Hong Kong Polytech. It’s no surprise to me that Shanghai students now rank #1 in the world in public education. The Chinese people are ambitious, serious, and there is no social media. The kids study a lot. I mean a lot. The PISA scores show that. And Shanghai, the city, blew our mind. The architecture and scale made San Francisco look puny and last century as we landed there on our plane ride home.
Andrew Vega, right, teaches eighth graders on Monday in Boston. Massachusetts students performed well on recent international tests. Dominick Reuter for The Wall Street JournalU.S. 15-year-olds made no progress on recent international achievement exams and fell further in the rankings, reviving a debate about Americas ability to compete in a global economy.Related ArticleEurope Lags East Asia in School PerformanceThe results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment PISA, which are being released on Tuesday, show that teenagers in the U.S. slipped from 25th to 31st in math since 2009; from 20th to 24th in science; and from 11th to 21st in reading, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which gathers and analyzes the data in the U.S.U.S. 15-year-olds made no progress on recent international achievement exams and fell further in the rankings, reviving a debate about Americas ability to compete in a global economy. Stephanie Banchero reports. Photo: Dominick Reuter for The Wall Street Journal.The PISA is administered every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A representative sample of about 510,000 students took the exam in 65 countries and locales, representing 80% of the world economy.
via U.S. 15-Year-Olds Slip in Rankings on International Exams – WSJ.com.