Sunday, April 5, 2009

Short Sighted and the Economy

Alliance for Excellent Education - Policy Brief - March 2009
http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/pdf2html.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.all4ed.org%2Ffiles%2Fshortsighted.pdf&images=yes

Short Sighted: How America’s Lack of Attention to International Education Studies Impedes Improvement
(March 2009)


According to one recent analysis, if the United States had managed to improve students’ science and math skills during the 1990s—enough to match top-performing countries on the 2006 PISA assessment—then the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have increased by 4.5 percent by 2015, a dollar amount equal to what the U.S. federal government currently spends per year on K–12 education. Even if the United States takes twenty years to reform and become globally competitive, its GDP could eventually realize an increase by a substantial 36 percent.

Source: E.A. Hanushek, D.T. Jamison, E. A. Jamison, and L. Woessman, ―Education and Economic Growth,‖ Education Next 8, no. 2 (2008): 62–70.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eric Hanushek (Alliance for Excellent Education) is another reference you should seriously question before using since it has been controversial to say the least.

For instant, his findings are used to show class size reduction does not improve student achievement. It is likely, that you will be evaluated in the near future using his 'value-added' teacher input model.

Just to give you a sense of the scope of Hanushek's work - Variations in growth rates across countries can be explained by the level of cognitive skills acquired through schooling.

I remain skeptical since the advice given so far (after 2 decades) has proven quite the opposite of outstanding.

dan dempsey said...

Anonymous,

Always great to have your thoughts that is why this stuff is put up.

Again thanks for your contributions.