Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children

by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

President Bush and his team were well-intentioned, but even Ravitch, in her 2010 book titled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, apologized to the nation for being wrong.8 Alas, the reforms continue. NCLB was a colossal failure. Reforms continue in the meantime. Children who were 4 years old and in preschool in 2001 when NCLB was introduced took the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests 11 years later as high school 15-year-olds. How did they do? One might think that with all of that educational preparation, they would outclass students from other industrialized nations. America’s math score ranks at a paltry 30th, a full 13 slots behind Slovenia. In reading, we are 20th, behind Finland, Poland, and Japan. And in science we are only 23rd!9 Memorization of factoids will not get you a good score on the PISA, nor will it prepare you for real success in the 21st century.

Pisa program for international student assessment