[boringuser2]

What metrics would you prefer? Feelings?

Regarding France, my understanding is that their scores are some of the lowest in Europe and below the OCED average on the PISA exam (comparatively, the United States is above the OCED average), though there might be demographic considerations.

[ykonstant]

>What metrics would you prefer? Feelings?

If that is the only alternative you can imagine (or rather, pretend to be able to imagine to form a bad faith response), there is no point in continuing this conversation.

> that their scores are some of the lowest in Europe and below the OCED average on the PISA exam

Exactly! And yet they consistently produce some of the best engineers and scientists in the world, and have a stellar pure and applied mathematics tradition. So tell me, does this say something about the French schooling system, or about metrics like the OCED average?

Nevermind, don't tell me; your first paragraph above already demonstrated what kind of response to expect.

[dagw]

they consistently produce some of the best engineers and scientists in the world

All countries are capable to turning out a handful of amazing engineers and scientists each year from their top percentile students, almost no matter how terrible their school system is overall, so that in itself is pretty uninteresting. Is there any evidence that they are turning out significantly more of them that the rest of the OECD?

The other, more interesting, metric is how are their 50th percentile students doing, or their 25th or their 10th percentile students.

Sure PISA might to be a great metric, but just focusing how well the very brightest students in the country do is a far worse metric.