Assessing the educational level of an entire country is no easy task, but the folks at Pearson – an education company – have found a way. For the last 10 years, they have been benchmarking the United States’ progress, as well as 49 other countries’ progress, with assessing education levels.

Of the top 50 countries in its database, the U.S. ranked 20th in education at the eighth-grade level in 2009 and ninth in overall literacy in 2010. While the U.S. is not the worst, it is certainly not the best, and much can be learned from the data obtained.

According to Pearson, these benchmarks act as a way to analyze where each country stands on the global stage and how to advance toward successful educational outcomes. The data is a representation of how students perform in reading, mathematics and science literacy. As it stands, countries in the East dominate the top 10 spots with China at No. 1.

However, there are intangible factors like culture and the way a country might perceive educators, which can contribute to a country’s success. While the testing is universal, every country operates individually to meet the needs of its citizens and takes different approaches to education.

“Transferring that information to the public school setting is often times a challenge,” said Department Chair of the bilingual/multicultural education department Susan Heredia. “Even though when we find the best practices in some countries, the question you have to ask is, ‘Is this practice portable to the U.S.?’  The educational settings in Australia are very different than perhaps the setting in California.”

The U.S. approach to education prior to the Bush administration, Heredia said, was very student-centered and focused on the child’s needs as a whole.  

“We tend to promote a lot of critical thinking skills. We tend to promote a lot of interaction, where we want the students to be constructivist learners,” said Assistant Professor in the bilingual/multicultural education Margaret Beddow.

Today, we see a standardized approach to teaching and testing throughout all grade school levels after the implementation of No Child Left Behind.

“I think we grow up with an education system that forces us to memorize terms,” said senior business major Dustin Snyder. “It should be based around projects that actually put you in the workplace.”

To compete on a global scale, we need to present more incentives to the educators in this country. In the classroom, a teacher can be responsible for a few individuals to a small auditorium – that’s a lot of minds to shape.

“Being a teacher has become so complex that I don’t think a lot of people truly understand the role and responsibility of teachers,” said Heredia. “There are not a lot of people clamoring to be teachers. They think there is more prestige going into business or engineering.”

The United States is not the shining example of education, but no country has perfect academia either. What our country can do is assess and adjust accordingly, because even a perfect score wouldn’t produce perfect students.