Madison & US School Districts vs. The World

The Global Report Card, via a kind reader's email:

Ever wonder how your public school district stacks up when compared to the rest of the world? What about how your district compares to your state or even the nation?

Tap or click on the images to view larger versions. Learn more about Madison & Wisconsin versus the world at www.wisconsin2.org.

How Does Your Child's School Rank Against the Rest of the World?

If your kids are in a good American public school, chances are you know it. (In fact, it's probably the reason you traded in that urban loft for the property taxes of the suburbs.) But what if you woke up one morning and found that a Wizard of Oz-style tornado had dropped your entire district down in the middle of Singapore or Finland? How would your children's test scores measure up then?

That's more or less what the Bush Institute wants to you to imagine as you click through its Global Report Card, an interactive graphic that lets you rank your district against 25 other countries. "When you tell people there are problems in education, elites will usually think, 'Ah, that refers to those poor kids in big cities. It doesn't have anything to do with me,'" says Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas and one of the lead researchers behind the Global Report Card. "The power of denial is so great that people don't think a finding really has anything to do with them unless you actually name their town."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 10, 2012 7:58 PM
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