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By Tom Norton
Fact Check Reporter
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President Donald Trump held his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, during which he said his administration has made progress on immigration, energy production and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump has packed his Cabinet with picks to oversee the delivery of his election promises, one of which was to dismantle the Department of Education.
Speaking on Wednesday, Trump decried the performance of the U.S. education system, claiming it was "ranked at the very bottom of the list."
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The Claim
On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, during his first Cabinet meeting since becoming president, Trump said: "We want to move education back to the states where it belongs. Iowa should have education, Indiana should run their own education. You're going to see education go way up. Right now we're ranked at the very bottom of the list."
The Facts
Newsweek did not find evidence to support that the U.S. is as low in education standards as Trump claims.
Trump mentioned later in the Cabinet meeting that the U.S. was ranked 40th,but it isn't clear to what list he was referring. Newsweek has contacted a White House media representative via email for comment.
To assess his claim, Newsweek looked at the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), widely considered one of the most comprehensive data sets for educational performance.
In 2022, PISA, an initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), had more than 80 countries test students on reading ability, math skills and performance in science.
Its 2022 report found that the United States ranked higher than the OECD member nation averages for reading and science skills but lower than average for mathematics.
The same report showed the U.S. PISA score for math and science performance had fallen since surveys conducted in 2009. Reading performance grew slightly in that time.
The report observed that fewer U.S. students attended pre-primary education compared to the OECD average but that a lower proportion of students reported having to repeat a grade at least once.
During the same Cabinet hearing, Trump also made the false claim that the U.S. spends the most money per pupil than any other country in the world.
As Newsweek's Fact Check team found, available comparative data suggests this isn't true.
The OECD also reported that the U.S. spent less than Norway and Luxembourg in expenditure on educational institutions per full-time equivalent student, based on data from 2021. The U.S. ranked sixth on cost-per-pupil for primary education.
The Ruling
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False.
Evidence conducted by the OECD, examining performance among pupils found that in 2022, the United States ranked above average for reading and science among OECD member nations but below average for mathematics. It did not rank last in these results.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
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