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U.S. 15-year-olds continued to lose ground in math on a recent international exam, sparking concerns about U.S. economic competitiveness, while scores for reading and science remained flat.
Results released Tuesday for the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, show the U.S. with an 11-point drop in the average score for math—the biggest decrease in the subject for American students since 2009, the last year that the score improved.
“We’re losing ground—a troubling prospect when, in today’s knowledge-based economy, the best jobs can go anywhere in the world,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. “As the new PISA results show, U.S. students are scoring well behind their peers in top-performing nations.”
A representative sample of about 540,000 students took the PISA in 72 countries and education systems. Every three years, 15-year-olds take the exam, which was started in 2000. It is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 35 mostly industrialized countries, including the U.S.
“Mathematics remains the subject that the U.S. fares worst in, comparatively, and our students continue to score below the average for OECD member nations,” said Peggy G. Carr, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “We need to take a strong look at ourselves in mathematics.”
Six percent of U.S. students scored high enough to rate as “top performers” in math, while 29% were “low performers.”
The average math score for U.S. students decreased from 481 to 470 on a scale of 0 to 1,000. The U.S. math ranking fell to 35 from 28, when compared with 60 countries that participated in the 2015 and 2012 exams.
Scores for U.S. students in science and reading weren't measurably different, down by 1 point to 496 and 497, respectively. But the U.S. rankings in those subjects still improved because some countries performed worse this testing cycle, according to Ms. Carr. The U.S. ranking in science improved to 18 from 21 and rose to 15 from 18 in reading.
“The U.S. would be well served to take a hard look at the strategies used by the top-performing education systems and adapt lessons learned from them to fit the U.S. context and needs.” said Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Several education systems had higher average scores than the U.S. in all three subjects, including Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand.
Asian countries had a good showing overall—and outperformed all other countries in math. Singapore, in Southeast Asia, had the highest scores in all three subjects.
