Those are among the key findings from the latest version of the Programme for International Student Assessment or the PISA 2012 Results.
The report, released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, notes that 15 percent of the variation in student performance in the United States is “explained by students’ socio-economic background,” which is “similar” to the average student performance among OECD countries that are the focus of the PISA report.
However, this contrasts with less than 10 percent in a number of countries and economies that include Finland, Hong Kong-China, Japan and Norway, “all of which had higher or comparable math, reading and science scores,” the report states.
“In other words, in the United States, two students from different socioeconomic backgrounds vary much more in their learning outcomes than is normally the case in these other countries,” the report states.
While the link between the socioeconomic background of students in the United States and their performance on educational tests is nothing new, the PISA report goes further by highlighting how other countries with similar amounts of poverty don’t experience the same educational disparities, observes Aaron Pallas, a sociology and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University,
“What the report does say, or at least implies, is that we can’t attribute the U.S.’s overall middle of the pack performance to the fact that we have a lot of students in poverty because there are plenty of other countries that have lots of students in poverty and some of them are doing better than us,” Pallas said.
