Ohio 3rd graders who fail state test not promoted. But they CAN be promoted by not taking test.

[HiPointDem]

44. we aren't sinking in comparison to other countries. i've posted multiple times on the problems

with those international tests and the misrepresentation of results.

1. The US was never a leader in international test comparisons, not even when it was leading the world in science and technology. We have always been middling on them.

2. The tests in part compare apples to oranges.

For example, Shanghai is a high scorer on those tests. Except it's a Chinese city, not a country.

And a city with some unique characteristics, to wit: it's a very wealthy city, far more so than china as a whole, and academic elites are actively recruited to live there. Most of the grunt work, though, is done by migrant workers from the sticks, whose children until recently (and by recently, I mean a couple of years ago) were BARRED from attending school there through the hukou (family registration) system, and who still have difficulty accessing any education at all.

Similar situations obtain in many asian countries.

3. Another apples to oranges element is the difference in mandatory a/o free education. For example, in china education is mandatory only to 9th grade, and even then, it's not free, though there are some subsidies for the poor. Twenty percent of chinese students don't even complete 9th grade, and only half of chinese students even *enroll* in their equivalent of high school. So already you've got a sample biased for wealth, social position, & urban residence.

4. So far as western europe goes, we're comparing between countries where child poverty is (or was, before recent financial difficulties) basically in the low single digits to one where it's about 25%. Poverty *always and everywhere* = lower academic performance, ergo when 5% of one sample comes from poverty and 25% of another sample does, all else being equal the second sample will score lower.

These are just a few of the problems with those international comparisons.

They do not represent any evidence that the us is 'falling behind' the rest of the world.