According to a recent report, “math skills better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school.” So how does Minnesota compare with the other states and countries around the world?
We get some answers in “U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective” (PDF), published by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.
Minnesota does well compared with other states, coming in second. Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson and Ludger Woesssmann rank the states by the percentage of their students who score at an “advanced” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The authors also use an international test known as PISA to compare the performance of U.S. states against 56 leading countries that include most of Europe, leading countries of East Asia, the most populous countries in Latin America, and a smattering of countries in North Africa and the Middle East. While Russia and Brazil are included, China and India are not. Each test is taken by students who are either in 8th or 9th grade.
While Minnesota is outperformed only by Massachusetts among the 50 states, it is outperformed by 16 countries:
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Canada
- Czech Republic
- Finland
- Germany
- Hong Kong
- Japan
- Korea
- Liechtenstein
- Macao
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Taiwan
It has a similar performance to:
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Iceland
- Slovenia
- Sweden
The top 3 countries/economies are Taiwan (28 percent); Hong Kong (23.9 percent) and South Korea (23.2 percent). Singapore, which might have bested all three, was not included in the report. The bottom 3 countries were Kyrgyzstan (0 percent), Jordan (0.2 percent), and Indonesia (0.2 percent).
The top 3 states were Massachusetts ( 11.4 percent), Minnesota (10.8 percent) and Vermont (8.8 percent). The bottom 3 were West Virginia (1.4 percent), New Mexico (1.4 percent) and Mississippi (1.3 percent).
The report also ranks states according to how well two “advantaged” groups of students do. The first is white students; the second is students who have at least one parent who holds a college degree. The alternative ways of ranking states do bring some differences in the rankings, though not for Massachusetts and Minnesota. Vermont, which ranks 3rd when all students are considered, drops to 11th when only scores from white students are considered. Among the top 15 states, only South Dakota sees a significant drop when it is ranked only according to students with at least one college-educated parent, dropping from 14 to 21.
Another noteworthy finding is that even among children with a college-educated parent, only 15.7 percent of Minnesotans can do advanced math at the eighth-grade level.