Atrios Nails It: Teachers Are Sick Of Being Dumped On

[TheKentuckian]

42. Back when the whole effort started, it was a big push in math

with a secondary push in science.

We had slipped out of the top 5 or 10 and had fallen a couple of notches in hard science.

The slippage that was there was probably due to advancement of other countries in rather than actual loss of ground and the inability to maintain ahead of the curb were probably investment and curriculum flaws.

Ancient books, catering to religious fuckwits, anti-science noise in textbooks, little early development on those subjects at early and more developmental ages while our kids were doing adding and subtraction others were entering advanced mathematics because they started school earlier and got beyond the shapes and colors stages much quicker.
Our kids (us) started late and then seldom would catch up in hard sciences and maths unless they were naturally gifted or at least heavily inclined because most critically due to lack of exposer, repetition, materials, access, and development.
This was exacerbated by differences in fundamental structure of education that doesn't compare apples to apples. Many countries weed kids out of the field and move them to different tracks others had many excluded for many other reasons, particularly the ability to pay eliminating the most difficult demographic.

We also cannot ignore that even the absurdly dealt with solutions were to a fake problem based on cooked numbers due to a world wide education shock doctrine beyond national structural differences. There has been a lot of just what we see here going on for a long time, particularly in emerging economies with the testing and sample cherry picking to reach predetermined results, I believe in pursuit of controlling that chunk of resources globally and dictating the flow of knowledge and opportunity to the masses among other beneficial to a few considerations.