We regularly hear people bemoaning the ranking of the US on such exams. In the past various people have pointed out a number of problems with placing too much weight on such rankings. For example, in some past administrations of TIMMS some nations exempted non-native speakers of the primary languages. Others eliminated questions on coastal biology on the grounds that their nation lacked a coastline (something the US did not do for students in the middle of our vast nation).
Often in recent years we have been held up and compared to the countries that did best, most notably Finland, more recently also South Korea, Singapore, Shanghai, and Canada. Singapore is largely a city-state, and Shanghai is very much unlike the rest of China.
Carnoy and Rothstein decided to do their explorations including matching US performance against that of Finland, South Korea and Canada as high-performing countries, and three large post-industrial countries with a number of similarities with the US economically: the UK, France, and Germany.
To provide further depth to their analysis of US performance, the authors also examined data from various versions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often describe by educational researchers as the nation's report card. Like TIMMS and PISA, it uses a random sample of students from across the nation.. . .
Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared.
--From a report, released by the Economic Policy Institute and co-authored by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein.
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