Best American students far behind their foreign peers

[Taboo]

I couldn't help laughing at Portugal doing better than the US and almost as well as Norway! We have been accused of being the typical Mediterranean dunces who are in trouble because we are lazy, underachievers and ignorant! And therefore we deserve being in trouble and having other countries punishing us for our sins!... Well, maybe there are other reasons for our present difficulties, as I have mentioned before. It is interesting to notice that five years ago our trade balance was negative and the deficit was close to 10% of our GDP, and in 2013 it is expected to be positive with surplus equal to 3% of GDP. Either we became a lot smarter and efficient in five years, or there is another explanation...

Actually, Portugal is 9 points below the US Median in the link Hux provided. Were we reading the same list? LOL however for the Romanians doing worse than the most disadvantaged US group (African Americans) -- that's another tool to pop pretentious Romanians going on about Math olympics.

I think the aim of Steve Sailer's list was to (correctly) point out that on average White Americans outscore their peers in their European homelands, and that Asian Americans (on average) match or outscore all of their respective homelands as well.

The problem is not necessarily with the system, per se, as with the input, i.e., the American people, as Demon remarked.

If you look specifically at Maths achievment, and do pairs study matching for income and other variables (which I did) you'll see that even rich-as-Crassus US counties severely lag in Maths their peers in many parts abroad. US maths education is too undemanding, probably because badly educated maths and science instructors themselves think that maths are hard and scary. My sister's kid moving from one of the best schools in the UK to one of the best in the US found himself about a year ahead in maths.

maybe america is ahead of the curve and you cant trick kids into wasting years of their lives building up debts for jobs that dont exist as easily as you can other places.

this is a wishy washy handwaving opinion for the secular progress religion.

Well, you can either program our future robot overlords and watch them go rampaging among the poor neigborhoods, laughing from your rejuvenation pod in orbit on Elysium, or you can be the guy at the pointy end of the robodog's titanium claws.

My 2 cents is that Americans are too taken with Football and Pompons and Prom and lots and other lavender in highschool to actually give a damn about studying. When I tell people in Asia and Europe that 50% of American highshoolers spend about 10-20 hours a week on sports, they laugh incredulously.

[Huxley]

If you look specifically at Maths achievment, and do pairs study matching for income and other variables (which I did) you'll see that even rich-as-Crassus US counties severely lag in Maths their peers in many parts abroad. US maths education is too undemanding, probably because badly educated maths and science instructors themselves think that maths are hard and scary. My sister's kid moving from one of the best schools in the UK to one of the best in the US found himself about a year ahead in maths.

Interesting, and I'm not surprised. As a product of a "good" public school in the U.S., I feel significantly undereducated in maths and sciences compared to my peers overseas. As another point of comparison, Chinese students who take the SAT to apply to American colleges think the math section is a complete joke. Speaking of which, students in China get 5 years of physics courses before graduating high school; Americans get 0-1. That's got to mean something.

Can you say more about the pairs study you did? I'm curious. What other variables did you match?

My 2 cents is that Americans are too taken with Football and Pompons and Prom and lots and other lavender in highschool to actually give a damn about studying. When I tell people in Asia and Europe that 50% of American highshoolers spend about 10-20 hours a week on sports, they laugh incredulously.

Agreed. American high school culture is totally cretinous and alienating to the academically inclined.

[Endovelico]

I couldn't help laughing at Portugal doing better than the US and almost as well as Norway! We have been accused of being the typical Mediterranean dunces who are in trouble because we are lazy, underachievers and ignorant! And therefore we deserve being in trouble and having other countries punishing us for our sins!... Well, maybe there are other reasons for our present difficulties, as I have mentioned before. It is interesting to notice that five years ago our trade balance was negative and the deficit was close to 10% of our GDP, and in 2013 it is expected to be positive with surplus equal to 3% of GDP. Either we became a lot smarter and efficient in five years, or there is another explanation...

Actually, Portugal is 9 points below the US Median in the link Hux provided. Were we reading the same list? (...)

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Actually it was from here. But you are right that the US did a little better than Portugal in Reading and Science. These scores concern only Mathematics.