The United States' Deteriorating Education System

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Despite recent attempts to reform, there is no question that the United States' education system is falling behind the education systems of other developed nations. The Programme for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, is an international organization which measures performance of high school students throughout the world (United States, Highlights from PISA iii), and the results of its most recent series of examinations have shown that high school students in the United States are desperately trailing behind their peers in the rest of the developed world (United States, Highlights from PISA 12). Recent initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act have attempted to improve the state of our deteriorating education system through the emphasis of standardized testing (United States, NCLB Executive Summary), despite the fact that countries which consistently get high marks on the PISA tests have a drastically different approach to public education than the one laid out by No Child Left Behind. PISA top performers tend towards using educational systems which provide incentives for students to perform well, rather than depending on impartial tests, the results of which serve to measure the school's performance rather than performance of the individual. Thus there is little reason for students, who have little stake in the outcome of an school's assessment, to strive to perform well on these standardized tests.

While standardized testing is a useful means of measuring improvement within an education system, a system which fails to provide incentives for high performance will inevitably produce mediocre results. Japan and Finland are two counterexamples of such a system. Both countries have done well in PISA ...

... middle of paper ...

...a reason to achieve in school rather than forcing teachers to teach students who have little intrinsic motivation to perform well on standardized tests.

Works Cited
Finland. Ministry of Education. The Finnish Matriculation Examination.. n.d. Web. 24 February 2010.

Gamerman, Ellen. "What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?" Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, 29 February 2008. Web. 24 February 2010.

Okano, Kaori, and Tsuchiya, Motonori. Education in Contemporary Japan: Inequality and Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999. Print.

United States. Department of Education. Highlights from PISA 2006: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Science and Mathematics Literacy in an International Context. December 2007. Web. 24 February 2010.

United States. Department of Education. No Child Left Behind Act Executive Summary. January 2002. Web. 4 March 2010.

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