Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Looking at states

The U.S. has not performed very well with regard to OECD's PISA tests, which aim to measure the performance in math of high school students. Many have claimed that the basic problem lies with poor kids in central city schools. Three professors have analyzed the data on a state basis and have concluded that there are wide variances by state.

To wit, the results of students in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand. While results for Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey and Montana would rank among the highest compared to other countries. New York and California are similar in ability to countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, well below the averages for the US and OECD industrialised countries.

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