Gregory Popular, 1

Gregory Joseph Popular

English 111 B2

Roy Cole

28 APR 2022

The Missing E: Improving American Education

Hyperbole almost becomes required when comparing the United States of America to literally

any other country in the world. As a country it is almost always the most or least on any metric of

comparison to the rest of the world. Indeed, a key point of interest when studying America is to observe

where it is instead mediocre. American mediocrity is most on display in education. Ever since the

Programme for International Student Assessment began in 2000, the US consistently hovers at slightly

above or below the mean scores of the 79 countries, and consistently below the scores of its peers in the

global north. Perhaps most telling is that this is a fact that has not changed, as educational experts such

as Tom Loveless from the Brooking Institute mention what is most surprising about these results is

“how stable U.S. performance is. The scores have always been mediocre.” (Barshay) In fact, in the

2018 PISA Insights and Interpretations publication of the OECD, The US was defined as having “No

significant average trend” since the 2000 assessment. (OECD)

These results are especially interesting when considering the changes in education and

especially the role of schools in the United states over the last twenty years. Neither charter schools nor

No Child Left Behind had an effect on the average ability of students, if the metrics used by PISA are

reliable. From this evidence, an observer must conclude that educational reform in the US is not

targeting the sources of American educational mediocrity. In recent years, through looking to

educational efforts in other countries as well as the data across nearly twenty years of international

educational research, a possible culprit becomes visible, and with it brings one of the greatest
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challenges a country like the United States could face. The United States cannot improve the quality of

its education until it improves the equality of its education.

Whenever PISA scores started, the greatest surprise for many educational experts came in the

scores that Finland had over its peers. They consistently placed in the top ten, and even in the 2018

PISA report showed consistently high scores even as the points values of their scores have begun to go

down. This can also be compared to Estonia, who showed year over year improvement and also is in

the top ten in the 2018 PISA results across all subjects and had comparable or even lower standard

deviations than Finland (OECD). Both of these countries use a single track egalitarian approach, and

both tried tracking student's grades and sorting them in classes, but both did away with this practice. As

Estonian Principal Karin Lukk said in an article for the Atlantic regarding the experiment, it simply

“Didn’t work. The lowest group didn’t improve at all. They just vegetated.”(Butrymowicz)

These practices can again be compared to the American public school system, where the

buzzword since education reform began in earnest in the 1980s is “choice”. In most American schools

there are multiple pipelines for students to either choose their rate of academic advancement for

themselves or be placed in by academic performance. Sara Butrymowicz, writing for the Atlantic,

noted that on average, “states track three-quarters of eighth graders in math, meaning they might be put

on a path in middle school that determines which level of math class they’ll end up in in their final year

of high school.” This inequity is further exacerbated by placements in honors, AP, and IB programs as

well as the differences in distribution of those programs across different school systems in the United

States. This can be noted in the incredibly high deviation that American schools have on average

between their highest and lowest performers. According to the 2018 PISA results, that deviation is

shown in a 100% variance in the scores between the lowest and highest scores within individual

schools, against an OECD average of 71% (OECD). That is high enough to tie the US as having the

third highest variance rate, only getting beaten to the bottom by Norway and Iceland.
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This denial of educational equality is literally built into the American educational system.

Education in America can be a private school funded by private endowments and tuition, parochial

schools funded through religious organizations, home schooling by parents or hired tutors, or public

schools funded by state educational systems. Public schools can even further be divided by state

system schools whose educators and administrators are employed by the state, as well as charter

schools funded by taxes but whose staff are employed by private sector companies. This is an

astounding amount of choice in comparison to single track equality focused programs, where the

standard idea is that regardless of where anyone lives and how much their family makes, the schooling

they experience will be the same. This even flies in the face of the accusations of Finnish education

benefiting from a homogeneous population, making such acts of equality easier. In a Smithsonian

article, LyNell Hancock interviews a Finnish teacher who worked at a school where “more than half of

its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia

and Ethiopia, among other nations.” These students enjoy the same level of education as the Finnish or

Fenno-Swede natives of the country, and indeed instead of complaining of the difficulties this diversity

brings, the teachers seem to relish it. The interviewed teacher said with a smile that “Children from

wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers… We try to catch the weak

students. It’s deep in our thinking.”(Hancock) By comparison, there is a wide variance in academic

ability in US schools, the viewpoint that diversity is a weakness, and the gap between the best and

worst schools continues, as seen on the 2018 PISA scores. Where choice in quality is emphasized and

common equality of education is de emphasized, it only makes sense that discrepancies will grow. Jill

Barshay, writing for the Hechinger Report, eloquently summarizes this by saying “If what the students

are learning in their classrooms are different, you’d expect the test scores to be different too.”

At its core, American education enshrines the idea that students do not require and cannot have equal

access to school, which in turn stems from the fact that American schools cannot have equal access to
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resources, or even equal ability to provide resources. Private schools and charter schools, for example,

do not have the same requirements that state public schools have to accept students with learning issues

or cognitive disabilities and therefore do not have to allocate resources to maintain special needs

professionals or aides for such students. Public schools, while they often have more stringent

requirements, still provide unequal resources to students and even ‘cherry pick’ students through means

of suspension, or steering parents to different schools by emphasizing the ability for other schools to

provide for their child’s individual needs. All of this is bad enough, but discounts that the largest

discrepancy lies in school funding predominately coming from property taxes within school districts.

Zachary Wright notes in an article for Ed Post that “In Pennsylvania, such structures allow for one

district to spend upwards of $25,000 per student while a neighboring district spends $14,000.”

In spite of all this, there exists a compelling counterpoint. Put simply, the performance of American

students in these international tests have not shown any correlation to what might be defined as “real

world success”. Afterall, America continues to not just be a much larger economic force than countries

that score better than it does, but it also remains a powerhouse of innovation and scholarship. All of this

is true, and all of this is even acknowledged by the OECD, the international organization that conducts

the PISA. According to studies compiled in a comprehensive OECD publication titled “Lessons from

PISA for Korea", some “Countries like the United States and Norway rank high in the global

competitiveness ratings (Schwab, 2010) – but only modestly in the assessments of their students’

learning achievement, such as PISA. On the other hand, Korea, Canada and the Netherlands are high in

the student learning comparisons but not at the top of economic competitiveness rankings.” It seems

then that while American test scores are embarrassing, and while the inequalities of American

education are not ideal, they are not explicitly a problem. This surface level counterargument is

rebutted by the simple history of America itself. America’s ability to harness its potential, both

economically and socially, always grows when educational equity grows. Integration of black students
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in the sixties, especially bussing children of poor black families to more resource rich white schools,

created a broader base for future innovation. Aerospace in America especially benefited from the rise of

black scientists, as acknowledged by the Movie “Hidden Figures”, which documented the plight of

black women who worked as human calculators for NASA, as well as by more recent figures such as

Gregory Robinson, the director for the James Webb Space Telescope. These innovations came from

beneficiaries of a progressive mindset in American education and by their opportunity to participate in

an equal education, they in turn strengthened and innovated in a field that the United States is famous

for and proud of.

Through these different functions, through the tracking and sorting of American students, through the

glut of school systems that are permitted to bypass basic requirements of student inclusion, and through

the inherent inequality of public school funding, education in America hamstrings itself. State and local

governments are willing to try every new idea that is expressed in educational journals until the ideas

deal with the discrepancies inherent to the system. It becomes obvious that if there is a correlation

between educational quality and educational equality in countries, and that equality is antithetical to the

current American system of education, then the path forward is a difficult one. This is true to a certain

degree, any great change in infrastructure is difficult, but it is always worth remembering the potential

benefits of such a change. In America, we grow up learning the value of a good education, and we owe

it to the next generation to push for a higher quality of education for all students. Time and again, in

countries that align themselves toward education as a universal right, an education that equally benefits

everyone creates a society that does the same. After all, “most Americans want education to be a public

good, an inherent right guaranteed to all that exists outside the imperfections and inequalities of the

free market.” (Wright) We know the way forward, we know the way through our twenty year

educational rut. Now we just have to take the first step.

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Works Cited

Barshay, Jill. “What 2018 Pisa International Rankings Tell Us about U.S. Schools.” The Hechinger

Report, The Hechinger Report, 30 Mar. 2020, https://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-

international-rankings-tell-us-about-u-s-schools/.

Butrymowicz, Sarah. “Estonia Is Becoming the New Finland.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company,

23 June 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/is-estonia-the-new-

finland/488351/.

Hancock, LynNel. “Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian

Institution, 1 Sept. 2011, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-

successful-49859555/.

OECD. “A Noncompetitive Education for a Competitive Economy.” Lessons from Pisa for Korea,

OECD Publishing, Paris, 2014.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264190672-en

Schleicher, Andreas. Pisa 2018: Insights and Interpretations. OECD, 2019.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264190672-en

Wright, Zachary. “Think Education Is a Public Good? Think Again.” Ed Post, 13 Jan. 2020,

https://www.edpost.com/stories/think-education-is-a-public-good-think-again.