FOREIGN POLICY: Not really. Anybody seeking signs of American decline in the early 21st century need look no further, it would seem, than the latest international educational testing results. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) — the most-watched international measure in the field — found that American high school students ranked 31st out of 65 economic regions in mathematics, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. Students from the Chinese city of Shanghai, meanwhile, shot to the top of the ranking in all three categories — and this was the first time they had taken the test. “For me, it’s a massive wake-up call,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Washington Post when the results were released in December. “Have we ever been satisfied as Americans being average in anything? Is that our aspiration? Our goal should be absolutely to lead the world in education.” The findings drove home the sense that the United States faced, as President Barack Obama put it in his State of the Union address, a “Sputnik moment.”
In fact, the U.S. education system has been having this sort of Sputnik moment since — well, Sputnik. Six months after the 1957 Soviet satellite launch that shook the world, a Life magazine cover story warned Americans of a “crisis in education.” …
Wrong. While Americans have worried about their elementary and high school performance for decades, they could reliably comfort themselves with the knowledge that at least their college education system was second to none. But today, American university leaders fret that other countries are catching up in, among other things, the market for international students, for whom the United States has long been the world’s largest magnet… (more)
