'Achievement gaps' in United States schools cause trillions of dollars in economic loss, a McKinsey report finds.

The report finds large gaps between:

• the United States and other nations
• Black and Latino students and White students
• students of different income levels
• similar students schooled in different systems or regions.

The report found that if the United States had closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher.

Similarly, if the gap between students of different racial groups, different income levels and different schooling systems had been closed, this would have significantly increased GDP.

"The recurring annual economic cost of the international achievement gap is substantially larger than the deep recession the United States is currently experiencing," the report says.

"These educational gaps impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.

"Important performance gaps exist at every level in American education," the report says.

"This confirms what intuition would suggest and research has indicated: differences in public policies, system-wide strategies, school site leadership, teaching practice, and perhaps other systemic investments can fundamentally influence student achievement."

Even within schools, student achievement could vary dramatically by classroom, with more variation in student achievement within schools than between schools – confirming other research that held that access to a consistent quality of teaching is key for student achievement.

However, the report said the wide variation in performance among schools and school systems serving similar students suggested the "opportunity and output gaps related to today’s achievement gap can be substantially closed".

The United States lagged significantly behind other advanced nations in educational performance, according to the rankings of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, which placed the country 25th out of 30 for maths, on a par with Slovakia and Portugal rather than more internationally competitive nations such as Korea, Canada and New Zealand (ranked 7th).

The gap between students from rich and poor families was much more pronounced in the United States than in other OECD nations. In Finland, socioeconomic standing was far less predictive of student achievement.

Resources

The report is downloadable as a PDF document.

A companion document containing McKinsey’s full analysis, Detailed Findings on The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, is available at this web page.