Laney Heffelfinger
Staff Writer
It’s certainly a little bit of an eye-opener when millions of dollars are put into an education system, only for the students in that system to regress or remain stagnant in their education. Recently, an exam was administered to 15-year-olds all over the world demonstrates that this specific demographic of American teenagers have remained stagnant in their education in both reading and math since 2000. For many years, a test referred to as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been administered to adolescents all over the world, and for those of us in the United States, the results were not what we were expecting.
This ultimately means that despite the United States’ numerous attempts to improve the educational progress of American youth, these efforts have only been effective for those who fall into certain demographics.
It seems that the gap between the higher and lower scoring individuals has been growing larger and larger. The scores of those in the top 25 percent have been increasing since 2012, however, those who fall into the bottom 10 percent have been scoring lower and lower on these international exams as time has passed.
The overall result from the PISA exams demonstrated that ⅔ of the children examined were shown as below proficient in reading.
When you look deeper into these results, you are able to see that when comparing American children’s scores to other countries, on average, children from the US fall “below the middle of the pack in math” according to the New York Times.
Those who fall lower in these statistics have been the primary targets of the billions of dollars spent by the nation, however, despite the production of numerous national educational programs, the resulting scores are always uneven, with the higher-ranking students improving their scores with those in the lower percentiles falling more and more behind.
Different educational groups such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are trying their hardest to evaluate what is leading to such an immense gap in scores between not only American children, but also between our youth and that of other countries.
