Education in America - Part III: ExxonMobil Wants to Solve This (problem)

This is part three of a six–part series. See or .

Some who are enamored of our current president have attributed much more to him than he deserves and one of those titles is the Education President. President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address was (again) rated at an 8th grade reading comprehension level—the third lowest since 1934. In fact, Mr. Obama’s three SOTU addresses to date received the lowest grade average of any modern president. Of our modern presidents, Obama came in 13th of 13 and George W. Bush was at No. 8. I’m not here to argue the intelligent quotients of our presidents; rather it is my intention to help make my point by understanding what this information is actually telling us.

ExxonMobil is currently airing television ads promoting a national initiative aimed at improving science and math scores in the U.S. It is helpful to investigate this to help understand exactly what is going on.

Some might dispute the numbers that follow, but given a point or two they’re probably as close to correct as we need to be given the nature of the point that ExxonMobil is trying to get across.

So, the ExxonMobil site informs us that in 2009 the Program for International Assessment ranked U.S. students 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. Pretty shabby, and ExxonMobil says as much.

I think it is of interest to add that a ranking, in this case, is not as helpful or revealing to our understanding of the numbers as quoting actual numbers or percentages, which I have done and will do again. The reasoning for the foregoing statement is that someone could come in second in a race, one second ahead of the rest of the pack and yet 12 seconds behind the first-place finisher. That’s a pretty poor finish so, looks, or numbers in this case, can be somewhat deceiving.

Granted, 25th place in math is already a pretty sobering statistic but consider that while U.S. students overall scored at a 32 percent proficiency level in math, Shanghai students had an overall 75 percent proficiency score in math. That’s a very big difference; actually, Shanghai students did almost 2.5 times (234 percent) better than American participants in the testing. Again, while Shanghai scored 45 percent proficient in advanced math, South Korea scored at 20 percent, Japan, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Canada scored at 15 percent, and the United States came in at 7 percent. Again, Shanghai students did almost 6.5 times (634 percent) better than Americans.

You can see all the numbers I gathered in my blog of Feb. 25, 2012, “,” if you can stand ruining your day any further.

I should point out at this juncture that the public school systems reside in the hands of the "state" and our illustrious teachers’ unions, so what is it that private enterprise is suggesting? And what is it that evoked such ideas out of the evil empire of ExxonMobil? (FYI: As stated in the Global Fortune 500’s 2011 rankings, ExxonMobil was one of the world’s top three largest corporations.)

Stay tuned for part four, where I look at ExxonMobil's plan to improve Advanced Placement test scores by 138 percent.