Coverage of the new Global Report Card (GRC) that Josh McGee and I developed is gaining steam. The GRC allows users to compare student achievement in virtually every one of the nearly 14,000 school districts in the United States against the achievement in a set of 25 developed countries.
There are an endless number of interesting stories that could be told with this information, but the one that really stood out to us is that achievement in many of our affluent suburban public school districts barely keeps pace with that of the average student in a developed country. People who flee from urban education ills thinking that their children will get a top world-class education in the suburbs may be disappointed. The suburban education is usually better than in the city, but it would may not be preparing students to compete for top paying jobs in an a globalized jobs market.
Here is a current list of coverage:
Global Report Card Results and Article
Op-eds
Interviews
Wall Street Journal (video)
Education Next (video)
Education Next (podcast)
Dallas Morning News (Q&A)
Choice Media.TV (video)
News
Dallas Morning News (subscription required, although a version can be read here)
Arkansas Democrat Gazette (subscription required)
Roll Call (article by Morton Kondracke)
East Valley Tribune (Arizona)
Blogs
Criticism
The last blog post contained some criticisms about whether the assumptions for the analysis were reasonable. Josh McGee replied in the comment section of that post. And NCES Commissioner, Jack Buckley, told Education Week that “The methodology in this report is highly questionable.” This assessment is a little strange because what we did was similar to what the U.S. Department of Education has done in several past reports linking international test results to state NAEP results. (See for example this.) We just bring the results down to the district level. If ours is highly questionable, then the U.S. Department of Education’s own efforts must also be questionable.
(UPDATED 12-19-11)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I noticed the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland doesn’t seem to be listed in global report card? I’m curious hoe their very high API scores translate
Hi Bob — Unfortunately, if a charter was not treated as a “district” by its state, then we do not have them in our data set. We rely on AIR for the state testing results and sometimes (although remarkably rarely) information is missing.