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U.S. Lags in Student Achievment

Most well educated American parents believe that their children are being well educated. The general thinking is "Yes, American children in general are not well educated, but my child's school is excellent." The graphic above shows that's simply not true for the top 5% of the population, let alone the rest. If your child is in the top 5% of his or her class, the above graphic shows you how your child fares when compared with the best educated children abroad.

The very brightest American children are under-served

The horizontal bars represent how the top five 8th grade populations fared on the math portion of the 1999 Third International Math and Science Study. For comparison, the United States, which ranked 19th out of 38, is shown next to the top 5 countries. Looking at the right edge of the United States bar, you'll see by scanning upwards, that the top 5% of the United States children barely reach the top quartile for most of the populations and do not reach the top quartile of the Singaporan population.

The performance disparity between the United States children and the best educated children abroad has been known for decades. The disparity has not been addressed primarily because parents of the brightest children do not realize how far behind all American children are.

What you can do now

Raising the bar takes time and if you have a young child just entering elementary school, help may come too late. So what to do? First, recognize that college begins in first grade. The work habits they'll need to succeed in life are taught early on. A child with excellent study and organizational skills will learn far more than a child without them. Then, supplement their public education by:
  • Enrolling them in a supplemental math program.
  • Reading to them every night. A love of reading begins very early.
  • Giving them music lessons.
  • Enrolling them in a sport.
  • Giving them art lessons.
  • Making sure they practice their lessons on a daily basis. Buying them lessons doesn't help much if they don't practice the lessons.
  • Starting and staffing a math/art/music/sport group in your local elementary school.
  • Limit TV to a couple of hours per week. A child without TV is forced to invent their own entertainment.
Sound like a lot? It is! But it's what parents of academically successful children do.

How to read the chart

The thick purple line alludes to the missing countries between the U.S. and the top 5 countries. The United States children ranked 19th in the study. The left edge of a bar represents the bottom 5'th percentile of a group. The shaded portion ranges from the bottom quartile to the top quartile. (The bottom quartile is the median of the bottom half of a population. The median is the value in the middle - half a population is below the median value, half is above.) The black bar represents the mean, or average, score of the population. Finally, the right edge of a bar marks the top 95th percentile of a population.