This data comes from the Program for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in nearly 80 countries, typically every three years, a long-running, unimpeachable, near-global standardized test to measure student achievement among the 15-year-old students of the world. -olds in math, reading and science.
And what it shows is quite revealing. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the the data says. Some countries fared better than the United States, and the U.S. results show some areas of concern. But American school policies do not appear to have pushed American children into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans fared better relative to their peers after school closures than before the pandemic.
Performance seems even better once you get a little into the weeds. In reading, the average score in the US fell just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. In the rest of the world OECD, the average loss was 11 times greater. In Germany, which at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to have given an enviable good government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Great Britain, the country most compared to the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many measures, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the favorite country of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.
In science, the United States lost three points, about the same drop as the OECD average and still above the level Americans achieved in 2016 and 2013. On the same test, German students lost 11 points and British and Swedes lost five; Student performance in Iceland fell by 28 points.
In mathematics, the United States had a more significant and worrying drop: 13 points. But in the rest of the OECD countries, the average drop from 2018 to 2022 was even greater: 16 points. And in historical context, even America’s 13-point drop isn’t all that notable—just two points more than the drop the country experienced between the 2012 and 2015 math tests, suggesting that long-term trajectories in math They can be more worrying than short ones. -Long-term pandemic setback. Split the scores to see the trajectories of the highest and lowest performing subgroups, and you can barely see the impact of the pandemic.
