The Wall Street Journal headline is entirely too upbeat for the actual content of the article. Study Finds Sharp Math, Science Skills Help Expand Economy:
Increased years of education boost economic growth — but only if students’ cognitive skills, as measured by math and science tests, are improved as a result, a new study says.
Mangus takes a different tack — Terrible American education costs us $900 billion a year — emphasizing the next few paragraphs of the original article:
The study, released in this spring’s issue of Education Next, an education-policy journal, concluded that if the U.S. performed on par with the world’s leaders in science and math, it would add about two-thirds of a percentage point to the gross domestic product, or the total value of goods and services produced in a nation, every year.Those findings diverge from other research that links economic growth to the number of years of students’ education. The problem with that research, say study authors Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University professor, and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich, is that it assumes that a year of schooling in a country like Ghana, for example, is equivalent to a year in the U.S. Instead, it is more important to emphasize “what people know, not how long people have sat in the classroom,” Mr. Hanushek said. [...]
Nearly two decades ago, the National Governors Association called for U.S. students to sharply improve in math and science by 2000. If the U.S. had managed to achieve the goal, and joined world leaders like Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea, GDP would be two percentage points higher today and 4.5 points higher in 2015, the study calculated. “Had we figured out some way to improve our schools, or do what we could to improve the learning of our students, we would be a lot better off today,” said Mr. Hanushek.