You'll Be Shocked by How Many of the World's Top Students Are American

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. Which is a bit of a cop-out - that economic inequality needs fixing

What we could do is take the proportion of a country achieving at least a certain level in the test. While there is significant poverty in the US (though it's not alone in that in the highest developed countries), we could see how many get to at least Level 3 - which, for the whole OECD, is 52.6%. Most children in the US aren't in poverty (even when defining poverty as relative to the USA; define it as relative to the OECD overall, and even fewer are), so a measure of how many achieve what over half of the whole OECD do shouldn't be that excused by poverty. Here it is (from the spreadsheet I gave the link to earlier):

Finland 82.3
Canada 70.9
Japan 69.5
Korea 67.6
Australia 66.9
New Zealand 66.6
Netherlands 65.9
Germany 63.3
Belgium 62.2
Switzerland 62.2
Austria 61.9
United Kingdom 61.5
Czech Republic 61.1
Ireland 60.5
Hungary 58.9
Sweden 58.5
France 56.0
Denmark 55.6
Poland 55.5
Iceland 53.6
Spain 53.0
OECD total 52.6
Luxembourg 52.5
Slovak Republic 51.8
Norway 51.7
United States 51.4
Italy 47.1
Greece 47.0
Portugal 46.7
Turkey 22.2
Mexico 18.3

So, what we see is that the US does OK (but not especially well) for the top level - but that's only 1.5%. As soon as you look below that, the US performance drops off.