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Evidence Matters | An Examination of Standardized Testing in the United States – Are We Passing the Test? Part II
April 28, 2025
As we highlighted in our last post, the U.S.’s PISA scores demonstrate a significant gap between its students from impoverished backgrounds compared to higher socioeconomic students, and this gap is larger in the United States than it is in other countries.
Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) releases its global education rankings, sparking predictable headlines: the United States lags behind East Asia, Finland remains a model, and low-performing countries search for solutions. In the most recent results, U.S. students performed around the international average in math, above average in reading, and near the top in science among OECD countries. But these scores tell only part of the story. Closer inspection would suggest that the U.S. doesn’t necessarily have a student achievement problem—it has a socioeconomic inequality problem.
On the surface, it sometimes seems as though, despite frequent calls for redirection or disruption within the U.S. education system, the U.S. remains destined to fall somewhere in the middle. Countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Estonia consistently outscore American students. However, when U.S. performance is disaggregated by socioeconomic status, a different picture emerges. Students from affluent American schools often perform at levels comparable to or better than top-performing countries. It is the students from low-income backgrounds who fall drastically behind—and they represent a far larger portion of the population than in many of the countries the U.S. is often compared with.
Finland, often held up as the pinnacle of educational success, is a commonly recognized example. Students in Finland regularly score higher on the PISA than students in the U.S., but Finland also has one of the lowest child poverty rates in the developed world. In contrast, approximately 15% of American children live in poverty, and schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods often face funding challenges, teacher shortages, and limited access to high-quality early childhood education opportunities.
Critics often argue that the U.S. spends more per student than many higher-performing nations—more than double the average of other OECD countries—and while that is technically true, this fact alone neglects to highlight how those funds are distributed. American school funding is heavily reliant on local property taxes, leading to vast disparities between districts. In many high-poverty schools, funding is often insufficient to provide the same resources that are available to students in wealthier communities.
While scores on the PISA and other tests can provide us with important information about academics, it is important to remember that such assessments can also be seen as a harbinger of the stability and support systems students experience outside the classroom. When comparing nations, we’re not just comparing schools, we’re comparing entire societies.
In our final post in this series, we’ll take a closer look at one country that is not only outperforming many others on the PISA, but is doing so while demonstrating a smaller gap between the haves and have nots. Because while measuring the gap is important, it is important that we also attend to how we might close it.
Kelly Gregory is the Riley Institute’s Director for Public Education Projects and Partnerships and previously taught for 11 years in South Carolina public schools. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a master’s degree in Special Education. She also holds a National Board certification as an Exceptional Needs Specialist. She can be reached at [email protected].