PISA Scores, Broken Down by Poverty Rate, Indicate U.S. is Failing to Educate Low-Income Children

The Obama administration called the release of the 2009 PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) results “a Sputnik moment,” lamenting the middling scores, compared to students in other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for U.S. students in reading, math, and science. However, some education leaders and experts have offered a more nuanced view, one that acknowledges problems raised by the scores but also reveals an astonishing underlying truth: the United States does not have a broad-based educational crisis; rather, it is failing to educate at high levels only one significant part of its student population – its low-income children.

An analysis of the latest PISA scores by Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), indicates that nonpoor U.S. children do well in international comparisons; the problem is that the United States has by far the highest rate of child poverty of any of the advanced industrial countries, and it is these children who perform very poorly on the international tests. For example, U.S. students in schools with less than 10% poverty rank number one in the world, while students in schools with greater than 50% poverty score significantly below average.

For a more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students, Tirozzi aligns the scores of American schools with those of other countries with comparable poverty rates. He shows the ranking of schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate compared with ten countries with similar poverty numbers:

He then matches schools with a poverty rate of 10-24.9% with ten comparable nations. 

No other country tested had a poverty rate approaching 25%. However, compared with other countries, the U.S. average of 502 for schools with poverty rates between 25-49.9% is still in the upper half of the scores.

Mel Riddile (Associate Director at NASSP), reporting on Tirozzi’s figures, concludes that “the real crisis is the level of poverty in too many of our schools and the relationship between poverty and student achievement. Our lowest achieving schools are the most under-resourced schools with the highest number of disadvantaged students. We cannot treat these schools in the same way that we would schools in more advantaged neighborhoods or we will continue to get the same results.”