But wait.
Those are the aggregate figures for the entire US. And the US is the most diverse society by far of all the top OECD countries. And it also has the most income inequality and regional disparities.
What happens when we parse the numbers and look at the US by race and ethnicity? It turns out that what we REALLY have in the US is a problem educating Black and Hispanic children. This is extremely well known and a problem that has been looked at inside and out and forwards and backwards for decades. You can find racist explanations for this phenomenon, you can find racism-based explanations for this phenomenon, and you can find class and geographic based explanations for this phenomenon. It is way too big of a subject to address here in this post.
But if you separate out performance by race and ethnicity we find that White and Asian-American children rank up with the very highest in the world. Among countries of 10 million or more, the US scores for white and Asian kids are the highest in the world in reading and fourth highest in math (behind Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea). Whereas Black and Hispanic students in the US are more or less in the middle of the pack
Elite Asian families know what they are doing when they send their kids to the US to be educated in American public schools instead of back home in Korea, India, or China. Which is something you see happening in upscale top rated districts around the country. Back in Texas we had a wealthy Korean family living down the street who moved there specifically to put their children in US schools. And here in Washington we have wealthy neighbors from India who are doing the same exact thing.
and
![Image](https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/blog_pisa_2022_math_by_race.jpg)