The Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, tests 15 year-olds (that is, mostly 10th-graders in the US) on reading, mathematics, and science literacy. It is done about every three years, and coordinated across 81 countries by the OECD. It’s high-level data for cross-country comparisons of what students know. The 2022 results are out. Here’s are some headline measures of US results in international context.
The blue dots and lines show actual US results and scores. The black line shows a trend-line for US results based on those scores. The orange line is the average for 23 OECD countries (that is, typically other high-income countries around the world).
As you can see, US scores are a mixed bag: pretty much flat in reading, trending down in math, and trending up in science. Compared to the other OECD nations, the US scores are higher in reading, lower in math, and used to be lower but now are higher in science. The international comparisons also suggest a substantial drop-off in scores for other countries across the board, which seems to have started before the pandemic, and which allows the US scores in reading and science to look better. I do not know of a good theory as to why schools across the rest of the high-income countries have declined in performance.
The two volumes of reports and underlying data, which look in more detail at issues like the distribution of top-level and bottom-level performers across countries, along with socioeconomic and gender differences, are available at https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/index#pisa2022results. Here’s one of many interesting figures. The horizontal axis measures per capita GDP (converted at purchasing power parity exchange rates, a calculation which which emphasizes the prices of internationally traded goods), while the vertical axis measures mathematics scores.
In this type of figure, what’s interesting is to look at countries that are substantially above or below the curve–thus, performing substantially better or worse than one might expect given their per capita GDP. The US is in near the middle of the graph, underperforming the OECD average and lower than one would expect based on its per capita GDP. Those who are significantly outperforming what one would expect, based on per capita GDP, include a number of east Asian nations, ranging from Vietnam (on the left) to Japan and Korea (closer to the center) and Chinese Taipei, Macao, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Other out-performers in the middle of the figure include a cluster of eastern and central European countries, like Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia, and Czech Republic.
