Where does the United States rank in education among industrialized nations?
The United States is no longer the world leader in secondary education, according to the rankings of an international organization. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development places the United States 18th among the 36 nations examined, USA Today reported Wednesday. Headed to the top of the heap is South Korea where 93 percent of high school students graduate on time compared with the United States where 75 percent receive their diplomas. The seemingly downward trend of U.S. education worries economists. “The United States has rested on its laurels way too long,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, told USA Today. “Other countries have increasingly caught up and surpassed the United States.” “We’ve been asleep for a good number of years as a country,” says Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard. “It’s not that we’re doing horrible. But the other guys are moving faster.” Sources:
Who’s No. 1? Finland, Japan and Korea, Says OECD Education Study By JACK LYNE Site Selection Executive Editor of Interactive Publishing PARIS — “We’re No. 1!” That refrain is relentlessly sounding out now through much of the United States, as bowl-bound college football teams (all 50 of them, no less) ready for holiday-season tussles. Things are a bit awry, however, in Bowlsville. The once vaunted BCS, designed to determine a decisive No. 1, has seen the “C” rudely ripped from its pretty little acronym. This year it’s the WCS – Worst-Case Scenario – with common sense slaughtered at the altar of the statistical crunch. Fifteen-year-old females outperformed males in reading in every country in the OECD/PISA study. All that means, of course, is that this year we’ll have even more chowderheads blabbering into TV cameras, “We’re No. 1!” At least some final rankings, however, are already in, when it comes to academic performance – a vital consideration in may site selection decisions. And t
