Borat is beating us

The Dom Post reports:

Primary school children’s science achievement has plummeted to its worst level in 14 years, sparking urgent action by the Education Ministry.

An international study shows New Zealand year 5 pupils are doing worse in maths and science than children in more than half the other 36 countries surveyed. …

Kiwi children’s maths and science results were significantly worse than other surveyed English-speaking countries, including England, Australia and the United States – though we fared marginally better than Scotland.

They also did worse than Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Hungary and Kazakhstan.

So Kiwi kids are doing worse in maths and science than kids in Kazakhstan, despite their GDP per capita being only US$6,748 compared to US$30,390 for NZ.

And this is year five students. Just one more reason why we need national testing to detect at an early stage those kids who are not handling basic literacy and numeracy.