If the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent report had been an international comparison of test scores, the media would have gone berserk. Negativity certainly erupts when ODEC releases the results of their Programme for International Student Assessment test, since it generally shows U.S. students performing poorly compared with their peers in other industrialized nations. The PISA tests invariably get lots of press, with experts making dire predictions that our under-skilled kids and lackluster schools are taking us down to economic ruin.
ODEC is a Paris-based organization that collects and monitors statistics on 30 industrialized countries.
But ODEC’s most recent report, “Doing Better for Children,” examines child well-being, not test scores. Education data are included, but the focus is poverty, teen-parenting, environmental quality, and telling measures like whether kids have desks, calculators and other basic tools to do schoolwork at home. (Forty-eight percent of U.S. children do not. The ODEC average is 35.)
In short, by ODEC’s measures, the U.S. does a wretched job of caring for its children. The statistics are appalling. So why wouldn’t the press care?
Rhode Island Interfaith Coalition 