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ICYMI: How Does Your Child's School Rank Against the Rest of the World?

The Bush Institute's unveiling of Global Report Card 2.0 yesterday was featured in an article in The Atlantic, “How Does Your Child's...

Global Report Card

The Bush Institute's unveiling of Global Report Card 2.0 yesterday was featured in an article in The Atlantic, “How Does Your Child's School Rank Against the Rest of the World?”  The article details how the data in the Global Report Card (GRC) shows “it's not just urban kids who are struggling. Even wealthy suburbs are lagging behind countries like Singapore and Finland.” This is one of the most important messages the GRC is hoping to convey. Author of the GRC and Bush Institute Fellow Dr. Jay Greene tells the Atlantic, “When you tell people there are problems in education, elites will usually think, 'Ah, that refers to those poor kids in big cities. It doesn't have anything to do with me. The power of denial is so great that people don't think a finding really has anything to do with them unless you actually name their town." The article looks at the example of Santa Cruz, California to demonstrate: “It's a relatively affluent district, and by state standards, Santa Cruz City High scores in the 62nd percentile for reading and 59th for math. But when you rank the school against the rest of the developed world, it drops into the 50th percentile for reading and the 39th for math.” “Those lagging scores have real-world consequences, says Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist who was one of the first to rank American students against their foreign counterparts. He estimates that if America's high schools could match the math scores of our top competitors, our GDP could increase five to sevenfold.” Read more about the Global Report Card in The Atlantic and check out the new data to see how your school stacks up.

This post was written by Dr. Kerri Briggs, the Director of Education Reform at the George W. Bush Institute.