While American students have high levels of educational achievement and decent test scores, they may also experience high levels of social stress and poverty.
A new report out Tuesday from The Horace Mann League, a public education advocacy group, and the National Superintendents Roundtable, a community of school administrators, argues that more than just test scores should be taken into consideration when comparing countries’ education systems. In the report, researchers look at 24 indicators in six categories — student outcomes, school system outcomes, social stress, support for families, support for schools and economic inequity — in order to evaluate the educational success of nine countries.
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“First, we should stop judging national school performance here or anywhere else on the basis of a single test score,” said Harvey. “The second is we need multiple measures for what’s going on in complex societies to understand what’s going on in our schools.
“The third finding is, here we are, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and we have a shocking rate of relative poverty for children,” he continued. “The existence of those levels of child poverty in the midst of plenty is really something to embarrass our country.”
