“Among schools in comparable countries, those in the U.S. on average make the smallest year-to-year gains in academic achievement,” writes Herbert Walberg, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a recent report analyzing what he calls “the largest, most recent, and most rigorous international achievement surveys,” which were conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In reading, U.S. students between the ages of nine and fourteen progressed at a rate that was only 78 percent of the rate of the international average student. In math, they progressed at a rate that was 73 percent of the international average. In science, the rate was 78 percent. There was one category in which the U.S. was above average: per-student expenditures were 75 percent more than the international average.
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Somebody’s been hunting and gathering with the spell checker again. The recently published Environment, Ethics, and Behavior, three of whose editors teach at Northwestern University, is being promoted by its publisher as “an unprecedented attempt to identify what is known about the psychology of global change, and to forage a new understanding of the behaviors that fuel environmental degradation.”
