In Slate, Alexander Starr weighs in on the low test scores of US students:
You could conclude from these exams that American high- schoolers are ill-taught and ill-prepared for the competitive global economy. But what if you look at these tests like a capitalist rather than an educator? Nothing is at stake for kids when they take the international exams and the NAEP. Students don't even learn how they scored. And that probably affects their performance. American teenagers, in other words, may not be stupid. It could be that when they have nothing to gain (or lose), they're lazy.
Put another way, these students are being rationally apathetic. Educators ask them to expend cognitive effort on the achievement tests, but provide no incentive for them to strive to achieve. Consistent with the predictions of the r ational choice model, students engage in a cost-benefit analysis and reach the logical/rational result. In this sense, our kids may be smarter than the foreign kids scoring higher on comparable tests. On the other hand, if you dug around foreign educational systems, you might discover that they have some mechanism for incentivizing their youth.
