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The High Price of the Achievement Gap

Thomas Friedman has been sounding the alarm about US education for a while, and he notes in his April 21 NY Times article:

…the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science.

He cites conclusions from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.

There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.

I find this to feel like an uncomfortable truth….many students in my graduate level courses are using cognitive processes more suitable for technical jobs than those requiring higher order thinking.

The report then attempts to put a dollar amount on this gap:

Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us….If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

While these stats are open to debate, the bottom line is clear. Those of us in higher ed/graduate education have challenges ahead to bring our students up to par with the world while operating on limited time and funding. Innovative ideas anyone?

Asides

• All time number of views of Evolution of Dance on YouTube video (as of January 7, 2008): 70.74 million #
• Most watched TV episodes: M*A*S*H Final Episode 50.15 million households #
• Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose. Pew Internet and American Life project #