Students in Japan and other countries, it is said, have a longer school year.
American students watch too much television.
American teachers do not assign enough homework. Virtually all of these popular explanations have now been discredited by a massive new comparative study of educational achievement in 41 countries. Our problem is not merely the amount of time U.S. students or teachers spend on mathematics and science but what they do with the time they have,'' commented Richard Riley, the U.S. secretary of education. Researchers collected data on the mathematics and science knowledge of half a million students. They also looked at curricula, textbooks and teaching methods in each country in order to look for a correlation between the way countries organize instruction and how much students learn.