That is not an abstract milestone for researchers or policy circles. PISA is a premier scoreboard used globally to compare how well countries are preparing young people for the future. When AI literacy becomes part of that scoreboard, it will send a clear message about who’s ready and who’s not.

The warning signs are already there. The latest PISA results place U.S. students at roughly 28th in mathematics, 6th in reading, and 10th in science among peer nations. Taken together, those rankings paint an uncomfortable picture. By international standards, the United States is already falling behind in areas that will define economic competitiveness in the years ahead.

Based on my experience as a former state commissioner of K-12 education, America is not anywhere near ready to top this list when it comes to AI literacy. If we stay on this trajectory, we may not even make the top 30. Are we ready for this level of embarrassment on the global stage for a technology we largely created?

The problem is not that we lack innovation. Innovation is part of our national identity. The creation of transformational tools is woven into our nation’s history, and AI may prove to be the most revolutionary technology yet. The real problem is that we are not urgently preparing ourselves for the changes AI will bring. At this time, America has no real plan to prepare all our students and educators with anything close to the consistency and urgency this moment requires.

Our country’s patchwork system of state-led educational approaches and requirements is a big reason why. A student’s experience with advanced technology like AI depends largely on their ZIP code, their school district and whether educators have been given the training and support to teach this material well. In some schools, teachers are moving forward with thoughtfulness and energy. In others, staff are frozen by uncertainty, lack of training, or fear about what could go wrong. Many districts still have no clear guidance at all.

Local control has long been one of America’s strengths. But in this case, local control may be becoming a liability. When it comes to AI literacy, our system is both inefficient and inequitable. It means some students will graduate fluent in the most consequential technology of their generation, while others will be left to their own devices. In the future of work, that gap will matter.

I do not believe AI will replace teachers. Teaching is built on human relationships, trust and the ability to motivate young people. But I do believe people with AI skills will replace those without AI skills. Industries will shift. Some jobs will disappear, others will emerge, but one thing is clear: The students who can use AI responsibly and effectively will have a distinct advantage in the future economy.

That is why AI literacy is not a luxury. It is both an economic issue and an equity one.

So what should we do, and why now?

Let’s use the 2029 PISA timeline as a collective spark to give our kids the best opportunity anywhere in the world. Three years is not a lot of time in education. Curriculum adoption takes time. Teacher professional development takes time. Building sensible policies takes time. Let’s embrace this moment in time to instill urgency in everything we do. 

It’s time to shift off the path we too often do in education: scramble, improvise and widen the very gaps we claim to care about closing. Instead, let’s work together to develop a true national AI literacy framework, paired with a basic shared approach to assessing progress.

That does not mean federalizing classrooms or punishing schools. A national framework is about consistency and responsibility. It ensures every student learns the fundamentals, regardless of where they live, and it helps educators know what good looks like across grade levels.

AI literacy also needs to be defined clearly. Young people must understand what AI is and what it is not. It is not a human. It is a prediction machine. That distinction matters, especially now that many students are interacting with AI companions. Some of those tools have already been linked to serious harm. Kids deserve straightforward education that helps them navigate this technology safely.

If that sounds like a lot to teach, it is. But we’ve done something similar before with other powerful tools, like computers in classrooms and use of the internet. Those things helped us be more efficient, and more importantly, they helped educators focus on the critical job of teaching.

This is critical, because we must also provide support for our educators if we expect students to be ready for the 2029 PISA test. AI has real potential to improve teaching and learning, but only if educators are trained and given clear guidance on how to use it responsibly and effectively. Without that preparation, we cannot expect consistent outcomes for students.

The same is true for families. Students’ use of AI does not stop at the schoolhouse door, and parents need the tools and understanding to support responsible use at home. Schools and families must be aligned if students are going to develop the skills and judgment this technology demands.

The encouraging news is that this should be common ground. Regardless of politics or geography, we share a responsibility to prepare young people for the world they are entering. What’s needed now is a shared national commitment to AI literacy that creates urgency around implementation and ensures that by 2029, students and educators alike are prepared, confident, and competitive on a global stage.

America invented this moment. Now we need to teach our children how to lead in it.

To gauge the magnitude of global learning loss during the pandemic, a team at the World Bank examined data from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds in math, reading and science, from 2018-22. is a counterintuitive finding about outcomes: In countries with the longest closures, high-achieving students experienced larger learning losses than their low- and medium-achieving peers.

Harry Anthony Patrinos, one of the authors, explained it like this :

In countries with school closures of average duration — about 5.5 months — learning losses were similar for low-, average- and high-achieving students. However, in countries with shorter closures, the best students experienced minimal setbacks, with the learning losses mostly being incurred by average- and low-achieving students. In countries with longer closures, the largest learning losses were experienced by high-achieving students.

And these achievement drops were sizable. “In countries with the longest closures, the low-achieving students lost around 16 to 17 points,” , “while those at the top of achievement distribution lost 25 points or more.” 

Learning loss estimates depending on student achievement quantiles and the length of closures

The U.S., at least as a whole, avoided this outcome, despite very lengthy closures in some places. U.S. learning losses by achievement group match the average of countries participating in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the PISA exam. Patrinos told me this means low achievers lost more than high achievers. But perhaps that’s because decisions were so locally determined and politically charged, with, for example, big red states like Florida and Texas keeping kids in classrooms far more than big blue states like California and New York. 

Indeed, because of this state autonomy, the U.S. was only one of three countries in the report that had zero “full closures,” per UNESCO, as “government-mandated closures of educational institutions affecting most or all of the student population” and tracked them worldwide throughout the pandemic.

Whatever the causes are, however, they’re beyond the scope of the report and my powers of divination, and speculation has limited value. Some takeaways and consequences, however, are worth exploring.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that being in school appears to be quite valuable for high achievers’ learning. This runs counter to cynical assumptions that these students attain their level of achievement primarily because of out-of-school factors like household income, parent education level and various forms of evening, weekend and summer enrichment. Of course, these things play a significant role, but the report’s findings suggest that classroom instruction is integral to the magnitude of these students’ achievement.

If what happens in school matters for high achievers even more than for others, it follows that these students will not be fine regardless of the type of instruction they receive. If formal schooling benefits high achievers this much, then the quality of that schooling — teachers, curriculum, rigor, etc. — likely matters greatly as well. This is another way of saying that advanced education programs designed to maximize the achievement of these students are worth pursuing, and efforts to curb or scrap them are quite damaging.

Think of what these learning losses among high achievers mean for them, their nations and the world.

First, the students themselves. All children deserve an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures. They have their own legitimate claim on leaders’ consciences, sense of fairness and policy priorities. When ill-considered policies and adult preferences led to pandemic-related school closures in many countries that were far longer and more numerous than necessary, all students were harmed, but none worse than those who had been high achievers.

Other significant costs were levied against countries’ (and perhaps U.S. states’) long-term competitiveness, security and innovation — which translate to global impacts, too. High achievers are the young people most apt to become tomorrow’s leaders, scientists and inventors, and to solve current and future critical challenges. Most economists agree that a nation’s economic vitality depends heavily on the quality and productivity of its human capital and its capacity for innovation. While the cognitive skills of all citizens are important, that’s especially the case for high achievers. Using international test data, for example, economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann that a “10 percentage point increase in the share of top-performing students” within a country “is associated with 1.3 percentage points higher annual growth” of that country’s economy, as measured in per-capita gross domestic product.

Recall that the World Bank’s PISA analysis focused on math scores. that “math skills better predict future earners and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school,” , “math proficiency in eighth grade is one of the most significant predictors of success in high school.” This suggests that the huge drops shown in the PISA data may reverberate through the rest of these students’ lives, their countries’ futures and even the fate of the globe.

Bottom line: Leaders must not minimize the importance of formal education and, by extension, the value of advanced programming for high-achieving students. At a time when , , the costs are much too high.

Only 7% of U.S. students can do advanced math, and affluence is no guarantee of student performance.

These disappointing stats will be examined in the next online panel presented by the Progressive Policy Institute and The 74 at 1 p.m. ET Thursday. Panelists will put the PISA outcomes into perspective and offer answers to the inevitable, “Now what?” moment of reckoning.

The speakers include Dr. Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics; Andreas Schleicher, Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; and Jonathan A. Supovitz, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Go Deeper: Explore more coverage surrounding America’s math crisis: 

• PISA Exam Tests Real-World Math Skills. But That’s Not What U.S. Schools Teach

• American Math Scores Fall on International Test — But Many Other Countries Suffered More
• As Test Scores Crater, Debate Over Whether There’s a ‘Science’ To Math Recovery
• Advanced High School Math Classes a Game Changer, But Not All High Achievers Have Access

Oh, and they’re fun.

That sophistication — and a bit of that fun — may soon be coming to school assessments.

Educators and developers are increasingly looking to the digital world of games and simulations to make tests more stealthy, playful and, they hope, useful. In the process, the new assessments may also push schools to become more creative.

“The idea is: Can assessment be more embedded?” said Y.J. Kim, an at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Can assessment be more exciting? Can assessment be more flexible?”

In November, NWEA, which publishes the widely used , unveiled a 3D digital assessment on the popular that tests how well middle-schoolers have learned Newton’s .

The game, called Distance Dash, requires two students to work together to launch vehicles of different sizes and payloads. The goal: Get both to the finish line in perfect sync.

Students pick a skateboard, a bike, a grocery cart or an automobile, load each with different items, then collaboratively fine-tune the forces placed on them. The whole time, the game covertly measures several objectives, including whether students understand the principles of acceleration and how to apply optimal force.

Tyler Matta, NWEA’s vice president of learning sciences engineering, said the assessment grew out of the , which require students to analyze and interpret data and understand patterns.

He said helping design it was a stretch for NWEA test makers, who hadn’t previously worked with game designers. “We got to see what goes into building educational games, which was all very novel for us. We learned a ton.”

The organization is working with developer , which has produced . 

“As an assessment, it’s important that you actually have the ability to fail,” explained Filament’s Kenny Green, the project’s producer. The data it generates — for instance, how many times students tried and what modifications they made — are all important for teachers to see. 

The new exam appears as Roblox, the popular gaming platform, moves further into schools. Last October, it said it’ll to expand educational experiences on its platform, two years after an initial $10 million outlay. 

Rebecca Kantar, Roblox’s head of education, said physics lends itself well to such collaborative simulations. Distance Dash, she said, is “representative of the kind of team-based problem solving real scientists do when they’re working through a physics problem in real life.” 

Another recent development: In 2022, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development assessed creative thinking for 15-year-old students in more than 60 countries via the assessment, which boasts interactive items that allow students to submit drawings with a . 

The test also includes open-ended tasks with “no single solution but multiple correct responses,” organizers said. The first results are expected this year.

Advocates hope to someday make tests more personalized and, in many ways, indistinguishable from games, said Bo Stjerne Thomsen of the . “What we hope is that playfulness becomes a serious part of assessment,” he said.

Better still, more playful tests, he said, could open the door for schools to offer more creative, inquiry-based learning. 

He and others who are support the new tests don’t mince words: They envision a world where the kind of high-stakes, multiple-choice tests we all grew up with give way to assessments that for the first time allow teachers to capture a broader array of “non-cognitive qualities” such as teamwork and creativity, while keeping students focused on learning.

“Every time you try to pause an experience or stop a learning experience, it actually stops the engagement,” said Thomsen. It’s the same with play: “As soon as you start measuring play, the play stops.”

‘It’s about you engaging with someone else’

Tests can also be demotivating, even though they’re designed to help students show what they’ve learned, said Yigal Rosen, who led the creation of the PISA test.

He recalled interviewing fourth-graders who had taken NAEP science exams: At least one-third of the questions, according to students, were “super boring” and not engaging.

“They will skip them,” Rosen said. “They will just select ‘Whatever.’”

Now the chief academic officer at , the learning software company, Rosen recalled that when his team tweaked the NAEP test with a “playful version” that invited students to work together, he said, scores rose by 50%. “It’s no longer about you just responding to this dry prompt,” he said. “It’s about you engaging with someone else.”

When they think of playful assessments, most teachers probably think of digital tools like the popular learning platform , which allows teachers to create game show-like quizzes and polls that engage students on mobile phones and other devices. Louisa Rosenheck, Kahoot’s director of pedagogy, admitted that testing, for all its progress, is “still an underdeveloped, untapped area.” 

Digital tools like Kahoot that help teachers do informal assessments as they teach are helpful because they “feel more low-stakes” than traditional tests. “It’s very quick, it’s informative. You can get feedback very, very easily,” she said. “But the question types, the formats, often are still kind of discrete items.”

In that sense, she said, they don’t take advantage of what good games can do: Collect extensive data on students’ thinking and decision making — much more important indicators than whether they got the correct result. But that’s expensive, so many educational games simply assess how far a player gets and how many tasks or levels she completes.

‘Stealth assessment’

Researchers have been toying with the idea of more playful assessments for decades. Nearly 20 years ago, researcher began looking at ways to seamlessly weave tests directly into the fabric of instruction.

Shute devised the idea of “stealth assessment,” a system that discreetly tests students’ learning in interactive and immersive environments such as digital games. 

Aside from offering a less obtrusive way to measure learning, stealth assessment aimed to help with “flow,” the mental state in which a person is so engaged and exhilarated by a task that they forget they’re working. 

For most students, any exhilaration melts when test time nears.

“Assessment is inherently about power,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Kim. “Assessment is inherently about evidence and rules.”

By contrast, the new kinds of assessments empower students to challenge and question rules. In one proposed scenario, students in the PISA creativity test are asked to build a paper airplane, then come up with ideas to improve it.

In another, students design a “bicycle of the future,” suggesting three original improvements over standard bikes. Then they’re asked to tweak the design of a proposed anti-theft camera mounted on the bike. Finally, since the future bicycle is automatically powered, they must suggest “an original way to reuse or repurpose” the pedals.

“The idea should be original,” the test says, “in the sense that not many students would think of it.”

Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it “stealth assessment,” Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.”

‘It’s a mind shift’

Kim has lately been testing something she calls the , a free, printable card game for teachers that Kim describes as “Charades meets Telephone” to teach the process of drawing conclusions from a chain of evidence.

In the game, players take on one of three roles: Performer, Observer or Interpreter. They can only see one of the other two players, and gameplay proceeds as the performer silently acts out, in three movements or less, what’s on a card. The observer takes notes on what she sees and determines how to tell the interpreter what she saw. 

Like many in the field, Kim said a big roadblock to more playful tests is that so many school systems use assessments for teacher evaluations. “At the end of the day, we are obsessed with the idea that ‘Assessment is score: score about performance and proficiency.’”

Meanwhile, for most educators, play “is not something that is productive,” she said. “So for teachers to kind of switch their mindset in terms of, ‘Assessment can be fun, and this is an assessment,’ it’s a mind shift.”

The results of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are out, and the United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills. Across the globe, math performance declined significantly.

Unfortunately, these low scores mask a more troubling fact: Our country’s math performance has been mediocre for 40 years — a failure to mathematically thrive across much of the U.S. The nation will, if the past is a predicate for the future, continue to lag behind the rest of the world in the understanding and application of math, skills that are critical for citizens and employees.

But none of this is inevitable. Consider one aspect of the recent PISA exam, which illustrates why tangible math learning is so crucial. In contrast to other tests, PISA assesses math in the context of real-world problems and situations. Students must demonstrate an ability to use mathematical reasoning to make purchasing decisions, plan routes around a city and interpret data about smartphone use. Math is grounded in practical applications, and the test itself underscores why math matters to most students and adults. These are skills that parents want schools to focus on, but PISA suggests they are not. 

The stakes are exceptionally high. As education leaders, if we turn away from these results, we become complicit in casting away a generation of children who lack the math foundation necessary to function in and contribute to society. All students can learn math; now is the time for policymakers, district leaders and curriculum developers to work together to make math more relevant, engaging and rigorous for all U.S. students.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’re investing over $1 billion working with our partners over the next 10 years to transform K-12 math classrooms. One of the key areas we’re focusing on is improving instructional materials. We believe that there are tools at our disposal — right now! — to reverse the disheartening trend made so clear in the PISA results.

Strong, research-based curriculum, for example, is one of the most important tools an educator has at her disposal. But it too often is of low quality and fails to ask students to apply math to complex, real-world problems, as PISA does. In places like California and Texas, which each will undergo a statewide process within the next two years to determine which curriculum schools can select, only 33% and 19% of teachers, respectively, report using high-quality curricula once a week. Nationally, according to the Center for Education Market Dynamics, a foundation partner, only 36% of sampled districts selected exclusively high-quality math curriculum for elementary school, and about 22% for middle school. As they said in an op-ed in The 74, “this means roughly 7.6 million K-8 students live in districts where the math curriculum is not high-quality, not rated or not known publicly.” States and districts can adopt better curricula and aligned supplemental materials.

Math can be more relevant and motivating. A whopping 45% of teachers responding to a this year indicated that their students fail to create any real-world math assignments or projects that are valued by people outside their classroom. Math for math’s sake is important and indeed beautiful. But, at the same time, materials can and should encourage students to use math in real-world situations, such as designing a budget, planning a trip and exploring issues like income inequality. Materials should help students see that math is critical for their future employment, citizenship and broader life in a global ecosystem.

Fixing this is within our control.

In fact, it is already happening. One of our longtime partners, , provides openly licensed K-12 core curriculum and aligned professional learning that engages students with real-world problems to help them learn math. Every lesson incorporates in which students learn concepts and procedures by sharing their thinking. For example, Math Talks build fluency by encouraging students to rely on what they know about structure, patterns and other math concepts and talk out their reasoning as they solve practical problems — whether that’s identifying the nutritional value of foods or computing how many tiles are needed to cover a bathroom floor. This and other high-quality curriculum should be the norm across the country. 

Much has been made of the possibilities of artificial intelligence for students, but it has real power to help math teachers. , a leading provider of educator coaching, created IMScaffold, an AI-powered tool that math teachers can use to create grade-level prompts and tasks unique to a student’s needs. For example, if a student requires a refresher lesson on adding fractions, the teacher can ask IMScaffold to design a 15-minute lesson that is aligned with, and maintains the rigor of, the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. It appears instantly for the teacher to use in real time. In this way, AI can provide teachers insight into the right next step, tailoring the student experience and saving the educator time. 

All students can and must learn math. But stagnant and declining outcomes on PISA and other assessments emphasize the need for urgency and action from education leaders to transform the math classroom to one where students are motivated and engaged and teachers are supported. Without this transformation, their future success and the nation’s economy is in real jeopardy. Everyone has a role to play. Let’s get to work. 

Correction: The United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Announced Tuesday morning, the scores represent more proof of steep learning loss in math during the pandemic and its aftermath. But they also provide the first international context for COVID’s impact on American children, indicating that many students abroad — including in countries that have previously ranked among the world’s top performers — may have experienced even worse setbacks.

Eighty-one countries participated in PISA in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental authority that administers the test. Among that group, average scores fell by 15 points in math and 10 points in reading since 2018, while science scores were not significantly changed. 

As in several other standardized tests conducted since COVID’s emergence in 2020, those declines are unprecedented; over 20 years of PISA testing, average math and literacy scores have never moved by more than four or five points between consecutive assessments. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Monday that even highly developed countries across Europe and Asia “suffered tremendously” from the learning disruptions triggered by the pandemic. 

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Carr said. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

But while American students’ 13-point drop in math fell within the international average, their relative stasis in PISA’s other testing domains of reading and science (minus-one and minus-three points since 2018, neither of which is considered statistically significant) provide surprisingly positive news. Indeed, while U.S. scores slumped across all three subjects, the ranking of the United States among PISA participants actually improved since 2018: from 29th in mathematics to 26th, from eighth in reading to sixth, and from 11th in science to 10th. 

Those shifts in relative performance result from even greater COVID-era slides in other countries. Among those seeing especially large reversals in math were Iceland (minus-36 points), Norway (minus-33 points), Poland (minus-27 points), and Slovenia (minus-24 points). Fifteen-year-olds in Finland, which has built for top performance on exams like PISA, saw a 30-point drop in reading skills over the last four years. 

In a somewhat curious turn, the index of four Chinese provinces where students have traditionally taken the PISA (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang) did not report scores for the 2022 round. In previous administrations of the test, those students on all three subjects — although those results were also criticized by international observers for allegedly being “cherry-picked” from China’s wealthiest and highest-achieving areas.

According to the OECD, the four provinces participated in the 2022 test, but their performance couldn’t be measured because schools were closed during the intended data collection period. Impressive scores were posted by students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Macau, though these will likely also be considered atypical of learning across that country’s vast mainland. 

Among PISA’s top-scoring nations in math were East Asian participants like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Korea. Singapore, Ireland, Estonia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan boasted the strongest readers.

‘I would have expected a larger drop.’

The scores will undoubtedly be used as an indicator of how learning was affected by COVID. Two-thirds of participating countries reported that they closed schools for longer than three months for the majority of their students during the pandemic. Students in countries that experienced briefer periods of closure did see smaller drops in math scores, the OECD reported, but Carr said the statistical correlation was “weak.”

A wealth of research conducted since 2020 has drawn close connections between virtual learning and academic harm. But prior standardized testing releases, such as that of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown that states that kept schools open also endured significant learning damage, muddying the argument over the ultimate impact of shuttered schools.

In surveys accompanying the test, large numbers of American students reported that they’d experienced particularly lengthy school closures. Twenty percent said their school building had been closed between six and 12 months over the previous three years (compared with 15 percent of respondents across all OECD member nations), while another 20 percent said their school had closed for over a year (compared with just 12 percent of respondents across the OECD).

Tom Loveless, a researcher who previously headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that America students’ math decline, while significant, was not “enormous.”

“Compared with the other OECD countries, we definitely had schools closed for a longer period of time,” Loveless said. “If you take this as a pre- and post-pandemic indicator, I would have expected a larger drop.”

Other learning observers were more bearish on the Americans’ showing, especially compared with comparable youths in countries far poorer than the U.S. Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, argued that the international averages concealed significant disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving test takers.

“The results are disappointing, but not surprising, and consistent with all of the other data we’ve seen post-COVID,” Khan added in an email. “In general, I think the state of math education is pretty bad globally — but there is less of an excuse in wealthy countries like the United States.”

Whatever the prevailing trends in other countries, some in the K–12 policy community will agree with that glum appraisal. Overall, 34 percent of American test takers demonstrated only basic or below-basic math skills — slightly higher than the OECD average of 31 percent. And while their reading and science scores held their ground during the COVID era, they are also not measurably improved from the years when PISA first assessed those subjects (2000 and 2006, respectively.)

The findings also raise the question of how school leaders in the United States and other countries will boost student performance in the long run. Local and state test data in the U.S. confirm that many students are still performing substantially worse than children of the same age four years ago. And with the imminent expiration of federal emergency funds that have underwritten extra staffing and programs over the last several years, authorities will need to move fast to effect a turnaround.

Bob Hughes is the director of K–12 learning programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has launched school reform and improvement efforts across the U.S. for over two decades. Last year, the organization over $1 billion to improve math instruction by making the subject more engaging and relevant to students.

While calling the PISA scores “upsetting news,” Hughes added that schools and school districts could jump-start significant progress in math by employing a host of evidence-based strategies: high-impact tutoring for struggling students, improved professional learning for teachers, and more rigorous curricular materials (the “Singapore math” approach, which has shaped elementary math instruction in that country since the 1980s, has spawned a legion of fans in the U.S. as well). 

“We actually have much better data than we’ve had in the past, and we have a clearer view of what the interventions need to be,” Hughes said. “We just need to get to the business of doing it rather than spending a lot of time wringing our hands.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Do you remember being graded on a curve in school? As students, we often welcomed this approach to learning because it was much easier. We didn’t have to excel and achieve proficiency; we just needed to not do as poorly as our peers. This relative scoring measures you against others, rather than an objective standard. Let’s run with this for a moment and see how America’s schools stack up compared to other countries.

During the 1960s, scholars designed a methodology by which educational systems in different countries could be compared to one another. This ultimately led to the creation of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which in 1967 conducted the first large-scale international study to assess how well students in twelve leading countries fared in mathematics.

The United States of America came in eleventh place out of twelve — Germany, France, Japan, England, and others all scored higher. As the Washington Post wrote at the time, the United

States’ “poor showing … did not surprise the experts” because “teachers here are not as well trained, and that neither American students nor the society at large places as much value on mathematics achievement as do many countries abroad.”

Of course, that has since changed. Schools have been heavily pushing STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math — with “increasing attention over the past decade with calls both for greater emphasis on these fields and for improvements in the quality of curricula and instruction.” Since the absurdly-named No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, the federal government has required regular testing in math, giving it greater attention even in elementary school. And most states require at least two years of courses just in that subject. Suffice it to say, there’s been a lot of attention on the topic throughout K-12 education. Has it been enough to pull the country’s scores out of its comparative mediocrity?

In a word, no. The international academic rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluate 15-year-olds in 79 different countries to create a comparative score. The latest rankings place the US thirty-sixth among these countries in math with mediocre scores in the other tested subjects. This performance has remained fairly consistent since the first PISA assessment in 2000. As one education researcher noted, “What surprises me is how stable US performance is. The scores have always been mediocre.” Compared only against the United States’ largest economic competitors, the country ranks dead last.

Surely investing more resources will help, right? Wrong. As of 2018, American taxpayers were compelled to spend an average of $14,400 for every student in elementary and secondary education, an amount that is 34 percent higher than the average spent by other countries in the PISA assessment. (The amount spent on American students for higher education is $35,100 — double the average of other countries.) More money does not equate to better performance. To back up that point further, consider the recent trend of education spending in the United States alone. Since 1970, “the inflation-adjusted cost of sending a student all the way through the K-12 system has almost tripled while test scores near the end of high school remain largely unchanged. Put another way, per-pupil spending and achievement are not obviously correlated.” Indeed, while standardized test scores have remained mostly flat or have declined, spending has skyrocketed.

The money definitely isn’t going toward hiring more or better teachers. Despite the massive increase in spending on a per-student basis in recent decades, average teacher salaries have only increased by 8 percent during that entire time.11 Since 2000, there has been an approximate 8 percent increase in the number of students and teachers — but a 37 percent increase in principals and assistant principals and an 88 percent increase in administrative staff. American taxpayers now spend a sum exceeding a trillion dollars on schooling. The K-12 school system is flush with cash and flushing cash.

And the number keeps going up as education outcomes continue to go down. While $14,400 was spent on average per student in 2018, as of 2020 that amount has increased to $16,000. (Keep in mind that this is the average; in some areas, government schools spend well over $30,000 per student.) And in the wake of COVID-19 bailouts pumping nearly $200 billion into the school system, that number is likely far higher.

The school system is bloated with employed adults whose activities have little to no impact on educational outcomes of students. This problem is often made worse when considering how difficult it sometimes is to fire bad teachers. In 2015, the New York State School Boards Association reported that firing a teacher takes on average 830 days and costs $313,000 — that is students being “taught” for over two school years by an adult who shouldn’t be a teacher. In New York City proper, over the course of an entire decade, the largest school district in the country fired only a dozen teachers due to incompetence. The problems continue:

“Some teachers who can’t be fired due to the highly restrictive teacher union contracts are assigned to ‘Temporary Reassignment Centers.’ In 2009, more than 600 New York City teachers reported to the Temporary Reassignment Centers dubbed ‘Rubber Rooms.’ Important to note, these ‘teachers’ received their full salary as well as retirement contributions and accumulation of seniority.”

Here’s the takeaway: the public school system has become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for children.