Is the Sky the Limit to Education Improvement? Comparing Your School to a Neighboring School Is No Longer Sufficient; You Must Compare Your School, Your District, and Your Country to the Best Performers in the World

In the global economy, where all work that can be automated, digitized, or outsourced can now be done anywhere by the people best qualified to do it, national standards are no longer the yardstick for measuring education success. Instead, the new metric is the best-performing education systems internationally. By showing what's possible in education, the best-performing systems can: * Demonstrate how to optimize policies and help countries consider alternatives to existing policies and practices. For example, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows Canadian 15-year-olds, on average, to be almost a school year ahead of American 15-year-olds in key subjects such as mathematics or science. PISA results also show that socio economically disadvantaged Canadians are much less at risk of poor educational performance than similar U.S. students. * Help countries set measurable goals by viewing what's been achieved by other systems and help identify policy levers and establish trajectories for reform. * Help gauge the pace of education progress and review the reality of education delivery. For example, Portugal, Poland, Israel, and Chile raised the performance of their 15-year-olds in PISA reading by the equivalent of between half and a full school year in less than a decade. * Support the political economy of education reform, which is a major issue in education where any payoff to reform almost inevitably accrues to successive governments if not generations. So, where does the U.S. stand in comparison with the principal industrialized countries, and what policy levers for education improvement emerge from international comparisons and transcend economic and cultural settings? U.S. IS LOSING ITS ADVANTAGE Among the 30 OECD countries with the largest expansion of college education over the last decades, most still see rising earnings differentials for college graduates, suggesting that having more knowledge workers doesn't necessarily lead to lower pay as is the case for low-skilled workers (OECD, 2010b). The other player in globalization is technological development, but this also depends on education. Tomorrow's knowledge workers and innovators require high levels of education, and a highly educated workforce is a prerequisite for adopting and absorbing new technologies and increasing productivity. Together, skills and technology have flattened the world. That means that all work that can be digitized, automated, and outsourced can now be done by the most effective and competitive individuals, enterprises, or countries--wherever they are. But no country has been able to capitalize on the opportunities of this flat world more than the U.S. The United States can draw on the most educated labor force among the principal industrialized nations, at least when measured by formal qualifications. However, this advantage accrues largely because of the first-mover advantage, which the U.S. gained after World War II by massively increasing enrollments. That advantage is now eroding quickly as more countries reach and surpass U.S. qualification levels. In fact, many countries are now close to ensuring that virtually all young adults have at least a high school diploma (OECD average 80%). OECD calls that a baseline qualification for reasonable earnings and employment prospects. Over time, this will translate into better workforce qualifications in these countries. In contrast, the U.S. stood still on this measure (76%). Among OECD countries, only Turkey, Mexico, Chile, Luxembourg, and Spain now have lower high school completion rates than the U.S. Two generations ago, South Korea had the economic output of Afghanistan today and ranked 24th in education output among today's OECD countries. Today, 98% of an age cohort obtain a high school diploma. In college education, the U.S. slipped from 2nd position in 1995 to 14th position in 2009--not because U. …

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