American Kids Lag in Math, Science

W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 5 -- America’s eighth-graders still are largely outperformed by children in industrialized Asian and European nations, scoring only at average levels on the latest round of international math and science tests.

Despite more than four years of efforts to improve American student performance in science and math, a report released today shows little improvement for the middle schoolers from the first set of uniform tests in 1995.

U.S. educators generally blamed a lack of follow-through on improvement plans developed after the 1995 tests, which also included fourth- and 12th-graders. The earlier tests showed not only that U.S. students made average scores but seemed to do worse as they grew older. The latest tests, conducted in 1999, covered only eighth-graders.

“It’s not surprising that in four years we haven’t seen real changes,” said Christopher Cross, of the Council on Basic Education, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington. “We’ve gotten the message. We just haven’t taken it to the classroom level.

“What would be really upsetting is that in another four years we would see things looking exactly the same,” Cross said.

12 Nations Top United States

The testing, organized by the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement and conducted by individual education authorities, showed that in 1999 math and science testing, a dozen nations out of 38 participating in the study outperformed of the United States.

They are Australia, the Flemish (Dutch) part of Belgium, Canada, Taiwan, Finland, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Singapore, Slovakia and Slovenia.

U.S. students shared the average field with Bulgaria, Latvia and New Zealand; American children did better than those in 17 other countries in both science and math.

Students were asked questions about algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry and other topics that children would have been expected to have covered at their grade level.