Did you ever wonder how our $16,000 per-student public school education system is doing as compared to the rest of the industrialized world?

The scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.

The PISA test, given every three years, measures the ability of 15-year-olds to apply math and science knowledge in real-life contexts. About 400,000 students, including 5,600 in the United States, took the 2006 exam.

On the science portion, U.S. students, most of them 10th-graders, received an average score of 489 on a 1,000-point scale, 11 points below the average of the 30 countries. Canada, Japan and Korea were among the countries in which students outperformed U.S. counterparts.

In math, only four countries had average scores lower than the United States. Students in 23 countries had a higher average score, and those in two countries did about the same as the Americans.

Did Brighton 10th graders take this test? If they did, how did they do?

For more information on this testing, click on: http://www.pisa.oecd.org