"US high schools lag significantly behind international averages"

This is a red herring - to the point where it is misleading.

A) Start with US 'students students' are behind maybe instead of schools. Because the comparison scores are PISA and they measure people not institutions.

But more importantly:

B) It's ethnicity. (And I'm not attributing anything to race here).

'European Americans' have been doing the same for the last 40 years. They are doing a little bit better than Europeans from Europe.

'Asian Americans' have been doing the same since we've measured them as a group, they do a little bit better than European Americans, and tend to do a little bit better than Asians from Asia.

African Americans fare the worst, Latino Americans fare better, but both groups have been doing a little bit better over time. They do a little bit better respectively than Latinos from South America and Africans from Africa.

Demographically, there are considerably more Latinos, and a few more Asian and African Americans in the country - which tilts the data.

So you see: any group from anywhere in the world actually fares better in America than they would in their place of origin. Which is really a different way of looking at it, no?

Because of the social and economic disparity between these groups, it lends well to the notion that it's about the students and not the schools.

Small but slightly less relevant note: the top American students tie the top UK students as being among the best in the world. The US/UK have a little bit of an elitist function going on.

So consider this: I'm Canadian, always proud that 'we fare better than the US' on PISA testing, but really, once you normalize for ethnicity (we don't have large groups of Latinos and African Americans) - then we do about the same.

And of course I should add I don't think this is racial issue at all, however I do think that the social + economic status of any group is tied to things like outlook on education, history of literacy in the family yada yada.

All of this is based on PISA scoring which is available on their site and other places.

I saw something like this years before, but have absolutely failed to come up with the source of the data. Do you know how I can get my hands on it? If it's true and honest then we need to focus on the real problems- at least the aspects that we can solve.

Other than the PISA scores comment - I agree with everything you've said. It's a multifaceted problem and, in many ways, the problems of schools are not strictly educational problems but the broad problems of society.

That said, educators are the tip of the spear - and I do believe that there is opportunity for additional technological mediation in improving the teacher's professional practice. It could also obsolete significant chunks of our multi-billion dollar standardized testing industry (a benefit to both the operating enterprise and the budgets of school districts).

The way we measure educational attainment across cultures is by PISA scores.

The whole basis of 'US is doing worse than OECD or Greece' or whatever is based on PISA scores.

It's very crude, but it's what we have.

My concern is that without some form of broad standardized testing, we won't have proper metrics to measure the success of programs and/or teachers against.

I agree (though I challenge the utility of current standardized testing to fulfill that job-to-be-done). My position is that we are already paying tens of thousands of teachers to assess the ability level of their students everyday while maintaining a secondary assessment industry that is able to exist because teacher's assessments are not able to be trusted. If we can make teachers' assessments trustable (for ranking/sorting/certification of skill & knowledge) then we won't need the very expensive secondary assessment industry to nearly the same degree. Likewise, many of the negative externalities of standardized testing could be mitigated by ubiquitously assessing student ability rather than relying on traditional "snapshots" as is the status quo.