With a sample size of 500,000, it studied student learning in science and mathematics at fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade levels in more than twenty countries. Up through the fourth grade, U.S. students do well in international comparisons. After that they do not. The only countries performing worse than the US at the twelfth grade level were Cyprus and South Africa. The intuition of so many college professors that the first two years of university are spent making up for what high school missed seems to be correct.
Broad averages conceal an increasing disparity between rich and poor school districts.
Even rich U.S. districts rarely do well in international comparisons, but they do vastly better than poor districts, where the percentages of uncertified teachers are much higher and where instability in attendance, turnover, and resources often hamper program improvement. The academic journal, Physical Review E, is splitting. Instead of once per month, it comes out twice, each issue containing around 800 pages in double columns, small type, dense arguments, complex mathematics, and diagrams summarizing years of experimental work. The facts accumulated by science grow at such a rate that a human lifetime no longer suffices to understand all the scientific knowledge developed every two weeks. One answer is to view the goal of education as developing the power to learn.