Scores on international tests show American teenagers have made no progress on reading and math in nearly 2 decades
has been missing from our decades-long reform efforts.
Theories about the failure of those efforts have abounded—school segregation, poverty, too little school choice—but one thing that has generally been overlooked is curriculum. According to, countries that outperform the U.S. on international tests have a detailed national curriculum, along with essay questions on tests based on the curriculum. Because the American education system is highly decentralized, we can’t have a national curriculum.
But even without a centralized education system, there’s a lot we can do to improve outcomes. And while the fundamental reasons for the lack of progress in reading and math are different, in both cases they relate to how we approach these subjects in elementary school.than our ranking on reading and science—30th among participating education systems, as opposed to 8th for reading and 11th for science. On the surface, that may seem surprising.
On the reading side, the problems are in some ways more obvious. Elementary schools may spend as much as half the school day on reading, especially in schools were test scores are low, but a lot of that time is wasted. When it comes to teaching the “decoding” aspect of reading—how to sound out words—many teachersof the need for systematic phonics instruction and haven’t been trained in how to do it.
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