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Why America's School "Lag" Has Never Mattered
The Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum of the top 34 developed economies, has released an annual education report, and guess what? The U.S. has once again ranked poorly in relation to many other developed countries. An article at TechCrunch argues that we needn't worry because it doesn't matter: "However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.
'The results suggest that years of rigorous training of physics knowledge in middle and high schools have made significant impact on Chinese students’ ability in solving physics problems, while such training doesn’t seem to have direct effects on their general ability in scientific reasoning, which was measured to be at the same level as that of the students in USA,' wrote a team of researchers studying whether Chinese superiority in rote scientific knowledge translated into the kinds of creative thinking necessary for innovation."
AMERICA IS AWESOME!!!!!! We're #1! We're #1!!!! WHOOOOO!
American advantage boils down to 4 things
1) American't honestly think they are special. True competition would kill this. If you are the 10th smartest person in a class and you don't have head to head competition that tells you differently you can think you are the smartest. In asian you know you are number 10. This allows Americans to believe they are capable of great things. That means we try far more often and THAT is why we succeed more often in innovation.
2) Americans have more wealth. If you want to program buying a computer is not a big deal, or a milling machine for $10,000. In many countries the milling machine is impossible. Business takes money and living in a country with money and free time really really helps.
3) This is an advantage against Europe etc. America values success. Its a virtue. If you hate the 1% then doing something that causes you to be part of that 1% can actually be discouraged. Australia is a good example, there the most successful are mocked while in the USA the most successful are giving special privilege.
4) Americans can always go back to school. Many countries set in stone if you are smart or dumb with test scores and you have a much harder time going back to school for a premium education if you screw up your youth. This lack of class structure both in terms of education and in terms of inherited wealth makes for a more competition based economy.
And thats why I think we are not totally outclassed by the better education systems around the world.
I blame those Japanese minorities, always bringing down our math scores.
Anyway, a rat race of artificial scarcity is a stupid way to run the world. What matters is not that we're the best, but that we're good enough - to maintain nutrition, health and shelter. Everything else can be done at leisure.
Is that they report the mean result, when they really should focus on something like the mean of the uppermost quartile, or somesuch.
You don't need the whole herd to drive innovation - you need just need to make sure you have a critical mass of sufficiently creative and intelligent people.
I wonder how that will work out? Seriously, since at least a century, we often had the best and brightest immigrants and I wonder how much that is skewing results? Something that MAY NOT continue. Especially if our fortunes go down, or our IP laws appear too restrictive.
Perhaps it's too early to measure China, or they suffer from too rigid a school system, or like Japan, their language is cumbersome it takes up a significant portion of schooling to just learn it, or as the one Ted Talks suggest - normal schools built on the factory model kill creativity, and so the asian ones must be doing that to an even greater degree.
But at least, like the fast food model, they ensure a minimum standard coming out. But that is public school's entire downfall. One size fits all. The person who wants to become the next doctor or scientific researcher is forced to do the same basic schooling as the person who just wants to fix cars until a ridiculously high grade.
I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are. But that's 6th grade and still 3-4 more years are wasted on keeping everyone more or less the same. I'm pretty sure gymnastic teams or iceskating coaches need that long to spot who will be the talent and who will be the also ran.
But this is more than spotting stars in order to nurture them. Not everyone who does bad in school does bad in life. But the answer for them isn't always perpetually more years of school. We bought into the hype that formal education is the answer to everything that HR departments are requiring degrees for every little job and totally ignoring education outside the classroom that may be much better suited for training towards the work at hand. (I.e. the German model of apprenticeships).
There's this common perception that throwing money at education will solve the problem. History has shown that this isnt true. Why is it that charter schools get better results with fewer resources? It's simple: they don't have teachers unions. Teachers unions allow them to get high pay for doing a shit job.
I know this is anecdotal, but in the movie Waiting for Superman, they covered a teacher who was filmed by a student reading a magazine while his students were playing craps. The principal fired him. Because of his union, a year later he got his job back and received back pay for all of the time that he was off. They also showed a room that they would have all of the teachers who broke the rules just sit in and do nothing all day while getting paid a full salary, just because the unions prevented them from getting fired.
There was also that story on slashdot a while back about how teachers unions were trying to block online education in the name of their job security; education be damned. And of course, that famous video of a speech of a union bigwig saying that the union isn't about the students or about education, but about power, and he was cheered on by the audience.
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What matters is not that we're the best, but that we're good enough - to maintain nutrition, health and shelter. Everything else can be done at leisure.
Was it Finland or some other Scandinavian country where the goal of their education system was sorta like that? Just teach the kids, let the kids be the kids and the learning will come.
As a result, not only do the kids actually learn but the kids are happier and more creative because they are allowed to let their minds roam and just be kids and NOT BE FUTURE WORKERS IN TRAINING.
School is to have an educated electorate: not for free training for business.
If businesses can't find people who are trained well enough for them, then they need to go all old school: train them. D'uh!
Again, socializing the costs (in this case job training) and privatizing the profits.
"I don't want America to be like Europe!"
Famous Presidential candidate.
Indeed.
The ratings you see in the OECD summary are averages. The thing is that the US has a much more diverse population and spread in economic status than most other, often much smaller countries in this measurement.
Results in US suburban schools are generally as good as the top rated countries, and the results of the top students in these schools ranks very highly indeed.
In any society you don't really need that many innovators to propel growth - and the US has a good population of high achievers due to the broadness of the distribution of educational results it gets.
The real problem with US society is the size of the tail on the other side of the curve. This represents a real drag on the US economy.
Isn't it odd how the most socially and economically advanced production powerhouses like Germany tend to have strong unions?
Isn't it interesting how desperate, fallen empires like the UK and the US are to demonstrate that unions don't work?
Also a union is not "about the students or about education", in the same way that you don't take your paycheque home at the end of the day "for your company". The purpose of a union is to address the interests of the workforce, not the customer / service user. It can do that well, by resolving differences between labour and management, or it can do that badly, running the organisation into the ground. IOW "power" is exactly what a union is about - strength in numbers.
... is that if you click through to the graph, on page 2, you can see that the US is stagnating, whereas pretty much every other country is bettering itself.
The US started at a relatively high position on the graph, so the educational issues haven't been too much of a problem, but the US is being rapidly overtaken by a whole host of other countries. It is disingenuous (see one of the articles between the summary and the graph) to claim that it has never mattered that the US's educational system is poor, so everything is peachy. Sure, it hasn't mattered *until* *now*... How does it go ? Past performance is no guarantee of future success...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
In many ways, it hasn't changed tin the last fifty or so years. In the 1960's, about 5% of engineering graduates actually got to do any engineering. The other 95% were engaged in 'highly skilled" activities such as finding the cheapest resistor/capacitor combination to build the gizmo that one of the 5% got to design. And because the defense industries were operating in a system where their bids got extra brownie points for the number of BAs MAs and Phds in the company, the companies were willing to hire a graduate engineer to push a broom. It improved their chances of getting the next contract.
It was similar in programming. About 5% got to work on the unique innovative stuff. The rest were assigned to program maintenance. At one point, Johns Mannville corporation almost self destructed because they hired an entire IT department of brilliant talented software engineers. Corporate politics takes on a whole new dimension when 95 really smart guys are all fighting to position themselves to be in charge of one of the two or three really interesting new projects schedules for the following year. And no, doing a really good job on your current project didn't count - (see Dilbert for guidance.)
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
If you take away the ones with the least financial backing, making it less likely their offspring will attend post-secondary and more likely that they have to get jobs as students and have less time to compete with others, you'll see a huge difference in any country. Sadly, removing the minorities will remove most people with poor socioeconomic status, but they are not equivalent actions. There are brilliant and productive members of every minority I can think of, as well as members of the majority who detract from their country's performance as a whole. One of the reasons your statement is unpopular is because it is focused on skin colour, and not the actual root cause: racist members of society or racist past policies that denied millions of capable individuals the opportunity to capitalize on those capabilities.
Even so, doing this will still not produce a "fair" comparison unless this is done with every country in the study. If those of us in North America want to make our part of the world better, we need to find a way to make sure each school age student has no undue concerns. Once every student has caring and supporting home environments, no apparent risk of starvation or lack of other needs, no abuse from any source, no problems with racism, etc. then the country's performance (assuming the school curriculum is properly designed) will improve dramatically. If those conditions are met world wide, I would expect to see little or no variation in studies like this one.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Probably because unions in Germany are altruistic, whereas American unions are greedy self interested asshats. Don't take my word for it:
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#unions
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So kick the asshole students out of public schools. They were the reason I hated school. Not only do they cost more to educate, but they drag down the other students. If they want to be janitors when they grow up, so be it, we could use more janitors, garbage men, and cotton pickers. Reform is always possible later in life, they can change later if they want to, but don't allow them to fuck everybody else early on.
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How about we roll back that premise first, because they don't.
Yes they do. And they don't. It all depends on how you interpret the statistics. Charter schools tend to be located in poor and minority areas (because there is more demand for them there), which lowers their average results. On the other hand, more motivated parents are likely to choose charter schools over public schools, which raises their results. By correcting for one of these factors, but not the other, it is easy to skew the results either way.
From what I can see, charter schools don't make much difference in student performance, but they do tend to give comparable results at significantly lower cost. So they still offer some advantages over traditional public schools.
The Chinese education system is great for rote memorization at the high-school level. If businesses could be developed from the fact that you can pass high-school algebra or geography, then China would have us beat. But unfortunately for them, businesses happens through people that push the state-of-the-art, instead of just getting by with a passing grade. And the state-of-the-art is still at a very high level only achievable by few. Maybe post-grad linear algebra or combinatorics would be useful, but at this point China competes against the US university system, of which there is no peer.
And it's not necessarily through engineering that pushes the state-of-the-art, but through the other fields as well.
For example, can anyone name a single high-end chinese fashion designer, or a movie director? LOL.
They are more well-functioning than American unions, but it's nothing to do with their being altruistic - on the contrary, they give power to their members. Indeed, German unions are far more powerful than American ones. But German unions tend to handle themselves better, partly thanks to a government which understands the need for (i.e. provides law for) management and labour to cooperate for the good of both sides of industry.
Neither the UK nor the US get this - even though unions create a low-turnover workforce interested in productivity and self-improvement because workers know that, in return, they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment.
I sense a little fallacy behind first comparing American education to the developed countries and then comparing them to China on scientific reasoning.
What makes you think Germany is doing better than the USA?
Per capita GDP? USA: $48K, Germany: $37K
Human Development Index? USA: ranked 4th. Germany ranked 9th
Quality of the education system (since that's what we are talking about): USA 60+ universities in the top 100. Germany: 5 in the Times Higher Education Rankings
Where is German innovation? Compare the number of US high tech companies with German. Compare the ease of obtaining capital for entrepreneurs in USA v. Germany. For that matter compare the popular culture where Germany almost completely copies the USA.
Even with big geographic and demographic advantages, Germany is still lagging behind the USA and the reason is that the burden of the heavy regulation, taxes, welfare state and the unions is too much even for the German worker to carry on his back.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I'll bite. In simplest of terms to increase the chance of you being able to digest it.
<quote><p>What makes you think Germany is doing better than the USA?</p></quote>
Quality of life.
<quote><p>Per capita GDP? USA: $48K, Germany: $37K</p></quote>
Buying power.
<quote><p>Quality of the education system (since that's what we are talking about): USA 60+ universities in the top 100. Germany: 5 in the Times Higher Education Rankings</p></quote>
Divide by number of people in the country.
<quote><p>Where is German innovation? Compare the number of US high tech companies with German. Compare the ease of obtaining capital for entrepreneurs in USA v. Germany. For that matter compare the popular culture where Germany almost completely copies the USA.</p></quote>
See the automobile industry, clean energy industry and national debt share per capita.
You are a blind moron and people like you are exactly what keeps the US from becoming a leader again.
"Hey, China beat us again!"
"Aw, that ranking doesn't matter anyway . . . who cares . . . ? We're better, like, at, you know, stuff that you can't measure . . . got it . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
lol
Allow me to elaborate. It's the culture, stupid. While the older generation has a tendency to proclaim that the younger generation is somehow in decline, I think that the objective truth that it may just be the case here is made a bit more real to TechCrunch's reaction to these numbers.
So, essentially, the OECD is saying once again, "Hey, America, you're still hopelessly behind." Now, we have TechCrunch taking a teenage attitude about it. Absolutely amazing.
What are these mystical "gainful market skills" anyway? How are those measured? I've met more than enough HR bunnies and management majors who can't reason their way out of a paper bag. They got their job because they're an alumnus at blablabla university and know so-and-so, not because they even understand basic principles of even keeping an accurate employee roster on file. But hey, solving their asinine problems makes me money, so why am I complaining?
It's clear that the USA is running on little more than momentum anymore. Maybe it's true that all you need is a few innovators, but for every Elon Musk who got lucky and made it big, there are 10 rent seekers who got lucky and made it big and 100 "innovators" who are of the same caliber as Musk but just didn't make it big. All that talent is wasted working meaningless jobs where the only innovation they may do is to innovate how to take a broken, unorganized spreadsheet of employee info and somehow feed it into a computer system for tracking absentees.
Where's a job where I can actually put my talents to some gainful use for the human species? They aren't there, because the market wants someone who can talk buzzwords, foresee "what if" scenarios while being wise enough not to confuse the client by discussing contingencies in a rational manner ahread of time, and somebody whose talents are wasted on reorganizing spreadsheets for arrogant, egotistical figureheads who only have their position because they knew somebody.
Most people call me the arrogant one, and I'm sure I'll get more than enough flames agreeing. For a long time, I worried that I actually was arrogant. What I learned though is that I'm not arrogant; I'm merely talented. It's the figureheads who are arrogant, who confuse their 6 figure income with having talent. Instead, what I've learned to do is to stroke egos. What a waste. But hey, it pays the bills.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Ah, but the inequality adjusted HDI (you know, the one that measures the quality of life based on the median, not the mean) has Germany at #7 and the US at #23, according to this. We're only 3 spots above Greece, and their economy has completely collapsed. It's great that there's a bunch of total wealth in the US, but if I never get any of it it doesn't do me much good.
Inequality-adjusted HDI puts the US between Italy and Estonia. Not very far from Greece. Also cost of living comparison are shit: a German citizen will have better retirement and has access to a generous system of socialised medicine throughout their life. Basically, a random German will in general have a better life than a random American.
But the topic is innovation and schools. And something must be said in favour of the US system: it has a remarkably high proportion of very highly achieving students. This seems to be at the cost of a pretty poor average. There is a reason for that: it give a greater emphasis on creativity, at the cost of structure, and this benefits the brightest.
In turn, this is could be good idea from the point of view of the economy: when progress is fast, the winner takes it all, and generating more winners is a good strategy. However, the computing revolution is finishing, and there might not be much innovating left to do. If it turns out that a well-educated workforce (on average) is paramount in the future (as opposed to highest proportion of geniuses), then America's strategy will be a losing bet.
Personally, I think that the US is a terrible case to study the value of education right now: it has been propped up for a large part of the 20th century by massive immigration of very highly qualified immigrants from Europe, and now from China and India. These fluxes are drying up, and the current political mood is set against immigration. So we will know with some certainty only in 20 or so years whether the US system of education is a disaster or a great design.
GDP is not a measure of purchasing power.
HDI measured by mean couldn't be more stupid, and is just the sort of parameter I'd expect from someone educated in America.
University ranking needs to stop confuddling undergraduate education quality with research output. The US and the UK still come out on top at the top for academia, no doubt, but any average high school or university graduate in the US/UK is ignorant as pigshit.
German innovation tends to be in manufacturing, energy, etc. i.e. stuff people need to live. And one does not solve problems by throwing more money at them.
Even with big geographic and demographic advantages, Germany is still lagging behind the USA and the reason is that the burden of the heavy regulation, taxes, welfare state and the unions is too much even for the German worker to carry on his back.
--
Socialism is slavery.
Lame. I see you're not here for an argument, but to preach. Go back to America - your dying empire needs you.
You know, while I understand the problems inherent in racism, it makes me wonder how racism itself is the cause of economic hardship over a long period of time. While it is certainly true that slaveowners and whites would have had a hugely disproportionate amount of power at the end of the slavery era, and certainly Jim Crow would cause some practical difficulties with education and advancement, I wonder how long it actually requires for a former slave group to finally turn things around.
Probably every race on Earth has had members of itself enslaved at one point in the past. Wealthy Romans tended to be taught by educated Greek slaves. Egyptians enslaved their own kind and others. Muslims in the medieval period enslaved Christians who ended up becoming Janissaries and other court officials. Although slavery itself is a violation of human rights, from everything I have seen, it has been no bar to the eventual rise of the slaves to at least a parity position, despite the inequity of their positions.
This is not a new argument, but I'm just going to come out and say it. The reason racism is more than a problem of a generation or two is because the former slave populations have internalized their disadvantage, and even made it part of who they are. We feed this sense of them being "owed" something because we feel guilty about people in the past having enslaved their ancestors. Well, that hasn't happened in well over a century, and even segregation ended over a generation ago. No one alive today has enslaved a black person in America, and the people who thought it was okay to remove their ability to have an equal opportunity before the law are dying off too. The excuses are starting to show up as just that, excuses.
With all of the programs, anti-racism laws and education out there, there's still racists and still minority poor, and there always will be. Former slave populations didn't end their enslavement by ending racism, they took responsibility for their own actions and made of their lives what they could. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't right, but even if it was, no population can do anything while they wait on someone else to right the balance. If they won't do it themselves, who will?
Being a disadvantaged population over the long term is something that comes from inside that population. It's a permanent inferiority complex that is mistaken for culture. It is cutting their own legs off. It's something the blacks in America do, and its something that the Palestinians do in their own country. They define themselves by what makes them weak and by their failures. When you are proud of your gangsters and terrorists, you are proud of your failure as a population to rise up on its own and you will always be a dependent, slave society while you allow that to continue.
There's nothing that makes a white person smarter or better than a black. What has turned the tide is the cultures that happen to have come out of the European struggle to not be second-best to the guy over the hill. While you denigrate people for "acting white", when in reality "acting white" is merely dismissive for humans doing what it takes to be successful, white or black, you are enslaving yourselves.
I'm tired of this tired notion that people can be "kept down" if they have the will to succeed. The type of person who does have the will to succeed will do what it takes, even eschewing their own retrograde culture, if needed, to make a better life for themselves. If I was an American black today, I'd be ashamed to be called African American. Africa in general, is the equivalent of a failed state, its own cultures frequently based on the the taking of their own kind as slaves. How do you think most of the black slaves got to the slave ports to begin with? They were brought in by their own people first to the Muslims, and then to the Europeans for their slave trade. Today, they're a culture that is perpetually under the thumb of this or that dictator, and the democracies that do exist are rotten
It is usually called alternative education & it has shown very good results for those kids. They do graduate, maybe a bit later. The bonus is getting them out of regular school.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
...even though unions create a low-turnover workforce interested in productivity and self-improvement because workers know that, in return, they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment.
Oh, if that were the case. Right now, they know they're going to enjoy better treatment and security of employment, so in many unions, it's damn the productivity and self-improvement, it's all about senority...
Like any other monopoly, at leat in the US, the unions stopped caring after they formed a monopoly (e.g. through mega-mergers like the AFL-CIO in the industrial age). If the AFL-CIO was a bank, I'm sure people would be screaming bloody murder anti-trust. Of course they got a pass. Thus started a era of decline in US manufacturing...
Of course things are starting to changing in the US, some of the biggest unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella, the SEIU, the Teamsters, and the UFCW are starting to disentangle from the AFL-CIO (officially breaking ties forming the change-to-win federation), primarily because as the old-guard unions seem to stop caring about union issues and more about (Democratic Party) politics. Of course Obama and the Democratic establishment (which relies on their backing) are trying their best to rein them back into a monolithic block. Hopefully, this whole episode will bring about better union leadership in the US, but probably only if the Democratic Party can stay out of it...
The normal quoted newborn survival statistics are in fact from the CIA world fact book, which is quoted as "the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year", thus not really warped at all.
The US comes in at 174 from 222 (222 being the best), slightly better than Croatia, but worse than (say) the EU (by one-and-a-half lives per year, in this case). The US is still significantly better than Afgahnistan though, by about 115 lives/year.
You can lie with statistics easily enough, but sometimes what's in plain sight is just that.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I disagree with you on a few fronts:
1) Thinking that the #1 problem in education is anywhere on school grounds is provably wrong. The #1 problem in the US education system is at home where the majority parrents are not spending enough time teaching their kids that education is important, and that teachers are to be respected. Just look at the animosity that is spewing out of the Republican canidates right now. Just immagine you are a kid and are hearing your parrents spout off about how horrible teachers are, how much respect do you think those kids are going to pay their teachers?
Remember in the last 3 generations we have gone from a society where Mom was expected to stay home and raise the kids (including manage their education), to one where there is no way that the majority of households could afford to have either parent not working full time. This change has put a lot more GDP on the plate, but has come with its own costs.
2) Competition works best when people have the reasonable ability to say "no" to a product. But in areas such as education and health care there is never a supply-demmand balance, and saying no is not a valid option (insert hand waving here). Everyone always demands the "best" so prices are always going to spiral out of control.
3) Competition works well when you buy multiple of the product you are purchasing over the life of your purchasing it. For example if I really hate the food at one restaraunt then I will go to another one the next time. But for practical purposes it is silly to talk about third grade the same way.
4) Universal schooling is something I consider a fundamental building block of "the American Dream". It is how someone who is born into a poor family can have a fighting chance to make it in our society. But market forces ("competition") are always going to focus on where the money is, which is not in poor neighborhoods. And people from poor neighborhoods often do not have the means of trnasporting their children to schools in better off neighborhoods. So the only people who are going to benifit from voucher systems are the people who have enough money that they already don't need them. So all you are doing with that is to give more money into alredy well-off schools, and further starve schools that are never going ot be able to recover.
5) I have never seen any study show that privatizing schools has ever shown any cost or quality difference, when applied to the same populations as a similar public school. Remember a public school has to take all comers, it can not reject students because of bad grades, bad behavior, or phisical/menatal handicaps. Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
I know that many schools keep multiple lawyers on retainer (and often use them full time) to keep defending themselves from law suits from parents of needy kids who want more and more services to flow to these kids. Trying to compare the results of private schools to public schools is a comparison that has the public schools competing with one hand tied behind their backs.
The push to a voucher system is just the push to make sure the rich only pay for their children, leaving the poor with meager scraps.
I don't know where you come up with the idea that charter schools are mostly in poor and minority areas. I know that many of the ones I know of are in middle-class predominately white areas. But since neither of us has more an anicdotal information I think we can call that a wash.
But you are perfectly correct starting down the list of unfair advantages they have:
1) They can be selective with their students. Sudents with bad grades, poor discipline, or any sort of handicap are routinely excluded. Those kids are enormously costly in terms both of money (think special access equipment), administrative overhead (each one needs to have multiple meetings to decide their Indivual Education Plan, and those meetings regularly have school system lawyers in attendance), and teacher time. Getting rid of most of the overhead costs really makes them seem efficent. But that is not a meaningfull cost savings, unless you are going to exlude them from the final system.
2) In most areas charter schools are exempt from many regulations and almost all mandated testing. So many of the costly reporting and complicance areas are simply wiped off the map. That is great for an experiment, but the moment you add these back in (as you would have to do in a non-expeiment) then suddnly you are back at square one.
3) As you have indicated, the parents who went through the hoops to get their kids are generally more motivated. So there are volenteers in the classrooms, and engaged parents making sure their kids do their homework. And the parents generally aren't telling their kids how awfull teachers are. Not only does this benifit the school by having all of these engaged parents in one place, but it also starves all of the other schools of the best resources. How again is this then compareable?
What always fascinates me about this debate is how much cherry-picking of statistics is involved. In all cases, someone in the media or on a blog, cherry-picks some statistic out of the PISA test, then writes a headline like "Oh no! The US is falling behind and we're DOOMED!"
I've actually read the results of the PISA test. The results are surprising. The US is approximately average among the OECD countries, virtually indistinguishable from France, Germany, or the UK. Even the vaunted German education in science, is only modestly better than US education in science: 539 vs 502. Even Japan, which has a reputation for non-stop studying and cram schools and so on, scores 539 on science, vs 502 in the US. I'm using science as an example because it's the middle case: the US performs slightly better relatively on reading, and slightly worse on math, but not to any significant degree.
Most industrialized first-world countries are not very different from each other on the PISA test. China is much better, however China is widely known to cheat on this test, and they cherry-pick students from an elite high school in Shanghai rather than randomly from the population, so the Chinese results were prefaced by an asterisk on the PISA results until recently. Aside from the Shanghai Chinese results, most industrialized countries are not very different from each other. Take the science test as an example. Spain performs very poorly, at 489; and Japan performs very well, at 539. Almost all large, industrialized countries are within this range. There are one or two outliers (Finland is an example) but not many.
The only way in which the US educational system is demonstrably inferior to any other large, industrialized country is the proportion of students who score a 6 (the top score) on the math test. In this regard, a few countries (like Japan, Switzerland, and Korea) have ~7% of their students which score in the very top category of the math test while the US (and most other countries) has about ~2%. This is the only worrying statistic. China (Shanghai) has a fantastic score in this regard, but again it is cherry-picked.
The lesson of the PISA test is this: most rich countries are quite close together in almost all regards. However a few of them (Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan) have a small portion of their populations (less than 10%) who score very well in math.
America is a country of immigrants
Since its independence, the United States of America has been replenished with bright brains from abroad.
The fresh minds were either fresh from the boats (Example: Albert Einstein, Leon Chua ) or sons and daughters of those stepping down from the boats (Example: Thomas Edison).
In human society, it has always been the ones with brightest brains travel greater distance.
America has been the "land of choice" for those with bright ideas simply because they (those with brain ideas) are not appreciated, while on the other hand, in America they get more opportunities to try out their ideas.
If you go to any top research lab in America you will find 40% to 70% of the researchers were either fresh immigrants or sons and daughters of those who immigrated from foreign countries.
Without those imported brains, I am afraid the United States of America would fair no better than England, or Korea, or Italy, or Japan, or Spain, or China, or Poland, or India, or Russia.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !