America: The Stupidest Country?

Several months ago, I was participating in one of my favorite past times: watching trailers of upcoming movies on iTunes, when I came across a movie the peaked my interest, a movie entitled Waiting For Superman.  My immediate reaction was, "Great.  The new Superman installment."  I clicked on the link, watched the trailer, and afterwards felt severely misled. 

Waiting For Superman had nothing to do with the heroic exploits of Clark Kent, aka The Man of Steel.  However, the movie was about a topic close to my heart; it was a documentary critique on the American education system.

A couple months later, the movie came out, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law surprised Kendra (my wife) and I and took us to go see it at the local independent movie theater.  The lights went dim, the projector began to roll, and I sat mesmerized for a couple hours, watching the cinematic version of American Educational reform’s progressions and regressions flash before my eyes.

One part of the movie states that America is ranked 25th in Math scores and 21st in Science according to PISA, an international assessment agency.  A statistic that makes America seem only slightly more academic than say Borat's fictionalized Kazakhstan.

However, the results of this test - and similar ones - are debatable.  The scores rank China as first in Math, but there is a inherent flaw in the numbers (as explained in the New York Times article on the PISA test).  Chinese students who took the test were from Shanghai, the academic and industrial Mecca of the country.  That is on par to comparing test scores from undergraduate students in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where Harvard and MIT are located) to undergraduate students from every other part of the state.  Of course the scale will be weighted in favor of Cambridge because of the resources that attract highly educated individuals to the city.

PISA Testing Results

In David Tyack and Larry Cuban's anthology of school reform called Tinkering Towards Utopia, the authors expose similar findings from other international assessments.  In one such international test noted in the book, analyst Iris Rotberg found that America tested more than 75% of a specific age ground and countries like Germany and the Netherlands tested only 10%.  Is it possible that the 10% of kids chosen to take the test represented an accurate cross-section of the academic capability of these nations?  Yes.  But it's also possible that these countries handpicked the top 10% of kids in the country to test.

So can we objectively say that America is one of the stupidest developed countries in the world?  I believe that would be a stretch.  It seems that there are a lot of rocks yet to overturn before we make such a judgment.