Comparing Education Around the World to the States

At least some states do pretty well. [Link]

We do okay, indistinguishable from the mean among OECD countries and better than the average of all countries, but substantially worse than Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, England and a few others. Eighth grade scores look much the same.

But the tricky thing about looking at average performance in the United States is that our education system is unusually large, diverse, and decentralized. Parts of it are really good. Other parts are shamefully bad. And in a number of important respects, we can only improve the system part by part. So it's worth knowing just how well those parts are doing. Thankfully, Gary Philipps of the American Institutes of research has done a service by converting state and city-level scores on the NAEP to TIMSS equivalents. Here's what he found:

Turns out that a few of our states are on par with the world's highest performing countries when it comes to educational achievement. Massachusetts in particular stands out, and four other states--Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kansas--received grades of "B," up there with the likes of Japan. On the flip side, there were a bunch of C's and one D+ in, of course, Washington, DC, where fourth graders learn math at the same level as Ukraine.