Shanghai Students Again Top Global Test

Students from Shanghai have once again outscored their peers around the rest of the world in reading, math and science, according to the newly released results of an international standardized exam.

The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, is given every three years to more than half a million 15- and 16-year-old students from 65 countries. It was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based research group that includes the world’s major industrial powers.

When the test results were last released in 2010, Shanghai students also topped the world charts, triggering a wave of anxiety among parents, teachers and politicians in the United States. Many saw the scores as an indicator that the United States was falling behind China in educational competitiveness.






The results released Tuesday, which were based on tests given in 2012, will likely renew some of those concerns. Shanghai students’ math scores put them three years ahead of their average peers from other O.E.C.D. nations. American students, on the other hand, ranked 36th, performing below the O.E.C.D.
average in math, and average for reading and science. The gap between Shanghai and American students may lead more in the United States to look across the Pacific for successful education policies and practices.
It has also raised old questions about the reliability of the test in its assessment of China. One of the main criticisms is that in China the PISA test focuses on Shanghai, a city with a per capita gross domestic product that is double the national average and that has one of the country’s highest college enrollment rates.

Andreas Schleicher, who directs the O.E.C.D.’s international educational testing program, says Shanghai’s status should be taken into account when making comparisons. “You cannot consider the result from Shanghai representative for China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “I don’t think it would make sense to compare, for example, Shanghai to the United States. But you can compare Shanghai to Massachusetts. You can compared Shanghai with many European countries that have a similar size.”

Massachusetts participated in PISA for the first time in 2012. It ranked fourth in reading, seventh in science, and 10th in math, still trailing behind Asian academic heavyweights like Shanghai, Hong Kong and South Korea, though by a narrower margin than the United States as a whole.

Some critics of PISA scores from China have questioned the test’s sampling process in Shanghai. While the city is home to many middle- and upper-class residents, who lavish extravagant sums on their children to give them a leg up in China’s cutthroat education system, it also has around 9.6 million migrant workers, whose children are often relegated to lower quality private schools.

Such variation in school qualities is taken into account by the testers, Mr. Schleicher said. The consortium that carried out the test globally, led by Australian Council for Educational Research, also administered it in Shanghai. It randomly sampled 6,374 students from over 200 schools in Shanghai, covering both the city’s elite public schools and its private migrant schools.

“The samples have been very carefully validated,” Mr. Schleicher said. “We have no indication of any bias in the samples from Shanghai. The migrant students were included in 2009, as well as in 2012.”

Mr. Schleicher argued that criticism of the test and how poorly American students fare distracted from the significance of Shanghai’s achievements. The city’s teachers foster collaborative learning, he said, and as a result students have shown remarkable ability to make creative use of textbook knowledge.

“Shanghai has a highly meritocratic system in which success in education brings status,” he said. “It’s also been very successful in attracting talented teachers into disadvantaged schools.”

Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America and the chief executive of Teach For All, an international network of educational nonprofit organizations, said that while there is a wide gap between the opportunities provided students in China’s poorer regions compared with cities like Shanghai, government officials and teachers across the country show a remarkable level of commitment to education.

“Clearly, China has a long way to go,” Ms. Kopp said. “But to me, the PISA scores show us what is possible. They show us it’s possible for a country to improve its outcome significantly in an incredibly short number of years.”