The latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are public, and already some pundits are declaring it “a Sputnik wake-up.” Others shout back that international comparisons aren’t valid. Rather than wade into that debate, I’d rather look more closely at the questions in the PISA test and what student responses tell us about American education. You can put international comparisons aside for that analysis. Are American students able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Have schools been forced to sacrifice creative problem solving for “adequate yearly progress” on state tests? PISA provides some answers to those questions and offers an insight into the type of problem solving that rarely turns up American state testing. Here’s a sample PISA question that gives some insights into what American students can (and cannot) do.

Schools have been turned into factories. But they don’t produce students, they just work there. In truth, schools are factories that harness the labor of students to toil at a bubble-test assembly line producing “achievement” data.