Vanderbilt Political Review Winter 2014 | Page 10

DOMESTIC VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW Paper v. Practice The controversial Common Core curriculum U .S. students have continued to show lackluster performance in math, reading, and science on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares the educational achievements of sixty-five countries across the globe. According to the OECD, the United States scored below the PISA average and well below what Education Week calls “traditional high fliers” like China, Singapore, Japan, and Korea. Even more concerning, according to an analysis by Education Week, while the U.S.’s scores have not necessarily dropped in the three years between PISA tests, more countries outperformed US students in 2012 than in 2009. It is indisputable