[Jensson]

But those numbers are a lie, American whites scored 503, just look at the report page 34, it clearly says that white Americans scored 25 points higher than the average 478 at math. 478 + 25 = 503.

He must have taken the wrong graph.

Edit: Anyway, 503 is pretty average for Europeans, so it means that Americans are pretty average at math, as you'd expect for a large country. So it is still proof that Americans aren't bad, they are typical.

[slackerchews]

I didn't lie... Page 16 of my OECD link shows that the average was 505 for 2018...

EDIT:: Nevermind I'm a dumbass. that graph is for reading and literacy.... guess I know how I'd score...

[tstrimple]

We’ve all been there. At least all of us who care enough to argue about shit online and support it with sources.

[ipaddr]

Bad at math and reading?

[dmix]

Fair enough. Although being the median with such a large country is still pretty divergent from the popular narrative I was comparing to. Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone.

Similar to critiques of the GDP as a metric for success.

It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.

[simplotek]

> Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone.

What conclusions would those be?

> It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.

If you'd prefer you could compare whatever nation you'd like with individual US states. You have plenty of US states to pick and choose from.

Regardless, I don't see this sort of statistics rigour when comparing the US to "Europe" as a whole, in spite of the heterogeneous nature of the whole continent (some countries even have regions where people speak entirely different languages) and the fact that the population of "Europe" is well over twice that of the US.

But I guess the point might just be to shut down discussions to avoid conclusions and introspection.

[bandrami]

There is an entire education consultancy industry whose financial viability depends on convincing people that American public education is in some kind of crisis when it isn't; it's actually a little above average, as we see.

Now, would I like it to be way above average? Sure, and I'm willing to make the public investment to make that happen. But starting from the premise of "we're failing miserably" is going to lead to the wrong conclusions.