June 15, 2009

Monday morning began with an informational session on International Benchmarking in Mathematics. Since my undergraduate honors thesis focuses on education, I thought this session would be beneficial to me. It ended up having nothing to do with my project, but it educated me on how important International Benchmarking is.

Researchers compared the performance of American students to international students in mathematics. To put it simply, American students fell short. Hong Kong, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russia, England, Latvia, the Netherlands, and Lithuania all averaged better than the United States. Additionally, our average was lower than the mean for OECD countries. Another saddening finding was that American students' scores fell from Grade 4 to Grade 8 while other countries scores improved. I can confidently say after this briefing that International Benchmarking should be used to push us to better educate our children.

This educational briefing was followed by a briefing by CATO Institute on Restoring the Pro-Trade Consensus. I went into this briefing being pro-trade and left being more pro-trade. Some myths that I held about trade were busted and I am now more hopeful about the United States' trade position. First, manufacturing is only in decline because of the global economic slowdown, not from import competition or outsourcing. Performance records were reached in both 2006 and 2007 by the manufacturing industry. Second, imports are not bad and trade imbalances reflect savings patterns, monetary policy, and fiscal policy. In other words, the trade deficit resulted from more than less exports than imports. Lastly, even though some of our trade partners do cheat, the total effect unfair trade on our trade account is a tiny fraction.

More from this week will come later today.