The purpose of government education is to create compliant citizens. Ours is working well enough for that.

I had a discussion a few months ago with the principal of my son's high school about this topic. Lies damn lies and statistics.

He told me that many of those numbers are like apples and oranges for our US students. We test every student. No exemptions. Some of those other countries select their top tier of students for testing. They do not bother testing the lower half to two-thirds of their student body.

And since (by definition) half of all kids are below average, we get results that are expected. Not that there isn't room for improvement, because there surely is.

When you use similar selection criteria, USA students test results go up. Way up.

Of course I haven't got any facts to back this up, it was just an interesting convo with a principal. I wonder if the data is available?

Laura, you have a good point. However, Japanese students have been out-performing ours for a good while now, and I'm pretty sure that in Japan they test every student.

Here's a graph of the results:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/12/07/education/07education_graph.html?ref=education

This Program for International Student Assessment test was supposed to be given to all students aged between 15 years 3 months & 16 years 2 months in each OECD country. The Chinese results don't mean much, as this was China's first year of participation, and the test was only administered to students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, & Macao. But I doubt that all the other countries that outperformed the US cherry-picked their students.

The PISA website is here:

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/

To be fair... the Chinese have been wiping the floor at the Math Olympiads for a long time, but top mathematicians are generally not Chinese. (Tao, while of Chinese descent, is Australian). These sorts of tests tend to favor calculation and the ability to do it fast, rather than the creativity required at the top of the field.

I agree that these other countries are probably cherry picking their results, but we started my dd on Singapore Math this year and she is leaps and bounds ahead of the other kids in her classroom. The way they teach math is not really a mystery, it is just a much more structured approach that links the abstract to the concrete. Anyone can do it, but our current infrastructure doesn't allow for this approach. If any of you have a student who struggles with math, or just wants to do better, I really suggest looking into the Singapore Math program and Math U See. Totally worth the money. Whatever you do, don't leave it to the schools to teach your child math, bc they don't do it anymore.