This is interesting. I would have thought this was one of the factors dragging down math and science test scores in many western countries. The latest OECD rankings of 15 year olds in math and science put the UK at 20th and US at 28th. Seems pretty poor considering a country like Vietnam which was ravaged by war only a generation ago ranks 12th.

FYI Top 10 [1]: 1.Singapore 2.Hong Kong 3.South Korea 4.Japan (joint) 5.Taiwan (joint) 6.Finland 7.Estonia 8.Switzerland 9.Netherlands 10.Canada

[1]http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-tops...

I think the Western poor performance is a result of (a) terrible disorganisation in the education bureaucracy and (b) a lack of belief by people at the low end in the value of education for social mobility.

It's very easy for someone who didn't get educational opportunities to believe that making their kids do well will go better for them. In the West, there are a noticeable minority of people who did OK in the standard education, did badly in the search for work, and now have kids.

There are claims that sampling errors for the best known one hurt the US. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu... for more.) I have heard anecdotes that suggest some Asian countries (notably Singapore) pick unrealistically good students for their sample to make themselves look good. And also there is a question about mismatch between the test and the curriculum - certainly the US does better on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema... than on PISA.

None of this is to say that the US actually has a good education system. But it is not necessarily as bad as people think.