"Relative value" in terms of education can be explained by thinking of the possible "absolute value" of an education and the questions that go along with this idea. What is the very most (the absolute value) that a student can gain from an education? What is the value that American students are getting out of their education? What is the value that students in other countries are getting out of their education? How does our value line up relative to the values of education in other countries? How does the value of an education in a low-income, high-minority school line up against that of a middle-class, suburban one? Looking at it this way, we have stark differences of relative value on a global and a domestic scale. We can measure this in various ways, but, naturally, I come back to standardized test scores, a common indicator of academic success. .
According to the most recent scores of the Program for International Assessment, an international standardized test that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in mathematics, science, and reading, the United States placed 26th in mathematics, 21st in science, and 17th in reading. With 65 nations participating in the PISA testing, these are hardly numbers to write home about. If we go off of these numbers, the United States has a low relative value of education when compared to foreign countries. There are also large disparities of value within the United States, one of the results of education here being a positional good. I will use Denver as an example. According to the Denver Post interactive database of the 2014 Transitional Colorado Assessment Program scores, the higher percentage of FRL (free and reduced lunch) students in a school is usually associated with lower scores on mathematics, science, and reading. For example, the Denver School, which has a low percentage of FRL students, has 14% of its students who scored "advanced" on the mathematics section of the TCAP test.