Education

Study Finds U.S. Students Don’t Match Up Regardless of Background

June 19th, 2014

U.S. schools have long struggled to effectively educate low-income students. But a recent Harvard study found compared with other industrialized countries, the U.S. doesn’t educate higher-income students that well either.

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The study looked at 15-year-olds in families where at least one parent has a college degree or higher. Just 43% of those U.S. students scored at a proficient math level.

“That compares to, say, Germany where 64% of students from similar families are proficient in math,” says Paul Peterson, one of the study’s authors and director of Harvard’s education policy and governance program. “So that’s a 20 percentage point difference in similar kinds of students.”

In math, Georgia students ranked 41st among states and 31^st among the 33 countries tested.

It’s not just Georgia. Southern states have some of the lowest scores in the country.

Peterson says that lag is probably the result of racial disparities that began during slavery. He says during the nineteenth century, few Southern students of any race attended school past the elementary grades.

“We tend to see that education as it existed 200 years ago affects the way education is today. It takes a very long time to build a very high-quality educational system.”

Peterson says Georgia will need to make some big changes to gain ground. He says the state will need to improve teacher quality by opening more doors for teachers, increasing pay and letting ineffective teachers go. He says the state would also benefit from giving parents more choices and holding students to higher standards.