Education & America’s Decline
American’s mediocre placement in the world of standardized tests has little to do with the popular notion of its present decline—the golden age of American education simply never was.
It seems commentators are grasping at straws to explain the world’s currently changing balance of power—the rise of China, for example. Some point to recent testing results that put the American education system far behind Eastern powers like Japan, South Korea and China. This may be a mistake: “Alarmist comparisons with other countries whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States don’t help. Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester County.”
