Initial Writing for Educational Policy

The YouTube video, 'Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School,' provides a brief overview of the relative performance of U.S. students on international tests. Write a short response to the video describing the issues raised, the lessons you took away from the video, and how it fits (or doesn't) with your thinking on education politics and policy.

The teaser video for Endangering Prosperity takes a look at how kids in the United States rank 32^nd on the worldwide PISA tests started in 2000. And even ten years after our initial poor showing in the PISA results, the US is still in the middle of the international pack. The video doesn't go into much specific detail about why we're 32^nd or what might change our ranking, but it does point out that spending more money is not necessarily the answer. Other countries (and specific states within the US) get better results while spending less money. The video states that if we want to have a strong economy and be solving the big problems of the world, then we need some deep change in education – we've seen deep changes in how technology affects our home and work lives, but not yet in education.

The biggest lesson/reminder I took away from the video was about the money – while we certainly need some money to educate children, just throwing money at the issue won't help. We need to spend the money wisely on programs and systems that work. This is especially relevant to my interests in early childhood education, as universal preschool is gaining support currently. Federal and state governments are looking to spend many billions on early ed, yet while small high-quality preschool experiments have shown tremendous results, larger scaled-up programs often haven't shown significant results. What change needs to happen in the classroom, in the school, in the system, in order to produce the results that we know are possible? What insights can we take from other countries, as well as from within our country, about what works?

One issue that the video doesn't mention, but that I think about when looking at international comparisons... Are the higher-ranked countries smaller/less populous than the US? From a pure statistics perspective, the law of large numbers states that the larger the population, the more likely we'll be close to the mean. And from a scaling-up-programs perspective, it's easier to implement reforms with fewer students. We're dealing with a larger and more complicated issue than most countries.