"Education is a tremendously important lever for ensuring competitiveness and prosperity in the age of globalization, albeit not the only one. Recent economic studies show that high skills lead to better wages, more equitable distributions of income, and substantial gains in economic productivity. Higher math performance at the end of high school translates into a 12 percent increase in future earnings. If the United States raised students' math and science skills to globally competitive levels over the next two decades, its GDP would be an additional 36 percent higher 75 years from now."
"Unfortunately,American education has not adequately responded to these challenges. As other countries seize the opportunity to improve their education systems so their citizens can benefit from new economic opportunities, the United States is rapidly losing its leading edge in the resource that matters most for economic success: human capital."
"A July 2008 study found that the University of California, Berkeley had been displaced by not one but two Chinese universities as the top undergraduate feeder institutions for U.S. Ph.D. programs.56 In addition, while America could once expect talented foreigners studying here to stay and contribute to the U.S. economy after graduation, foreign-born specialists educated in this country are increasingly returning home to take advantage of new economic opportunities in their own countries."
“The U.S. education system in general is very introverted,” observes Sir Michael Barber, a former top education official in Great Britain who now focuses on international benchmarking at McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm. The U.S. participates in far fewer international benchmarking studies than do many other countries, especially compared with those working hardest to improve."
"But the U.S. cannot afford to rest on its past accomplishments. The global knowledge economy is here, and if state leaders want to ensure that their citizens can compete in it, they must seize the initiative, looking beyond America’s borders and benchmarking their education systems with the best in the world. The state mandate to educate all students remains, but the world that schools are preparing students for has changed—and will continue to change—dramatically."
"Research has revealed striking similarities among the math and science standards in top-performing nations, along with stark differences between those worldclass expectations and the standards adopted by most U.S. states. According to Bill Schmidt, a Michigan State University researcher and expert on international benchmarking, standards in the best- performing nations share the following three characteristics that are not commonly found in U.S. standards:
"Focus. World-class content standards cover a smaller number of topics in greater depth at every grade level, enabling teachers to spend more time on each topic so that all students learn it well before they advance to more difficult content. In contrast, state content standards in the U.S. typically cover a large number of topics in each grade level—even first and second grade. U.S. schools therefore end up using curricula that are “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
"Rigor. By the eighth grade, students in top performing nations are studying algebra and geometry, while in the U.S., most eighth-grade math courses focus on arithmetic. In science, American eighth-graders are memorizing the parts of the eye, while students in top-performing nations are learning about how the eye actually works by capturing photons that are
translated into images by the brain. In fact, the curriculum studied by the typical American eighth-grader is two full years behind the curriculum being studied by eighth-graders in highperforming countries."
"Coherence. Math and science standards in topperforming countries lay out an orderly progression of topics that follow the logic of the discipline, allowing thorough and deep coverage of content. In contrast, standards in many U.S. states resemble an arbitrary “laundry list” of topics, resulting in too much repetition across grades. “In the United States the principle that seems to guide our curriculum development is that you teach everything everywhere,” says Michigan researcher Schmidt,“because then somehow somebody will learn something somewhere.”
"The federal government can help, but states must lead. They must look beyond their borders and America’s shores to fully understand how to benchmark expectations for student learning. They must significantly broaden the policy lens by drawing lessons from the highest performing, most equitable, and fastest advancing nations and states around the globe and adapting the very best educational practices to incorporate here at home."