I'll chime in here to say that indeed we don't treat our brightest minds quite well. For one, by trying to let no child be left behind, and raise average test scores, our schools are spending most of their time trying to raise the bottom half to the standard. Kids who can easily pass the tests are left to languish. And I mean this literally. My son has been relegated to the corner of the classroom to spend hours poking around in the meager classroom library while the teacher worked intensively with the laggards. Programs for "gifted" kids are unpopular with parents because they seem "elitist" so schools have to go to crazy lengths to obfuscate them and make them as low-profile as possible. You're unlikely to even hear the term "gifted" in a school nowadays. They have to use euphemisms like Early Learning Program. Even in high schools where it finally becomes politically workable to sort the smarter kids into AP classes, the "best" schools use those classes and the bright students as a factory farm of AP credits earned, which raise the rankings of their school system, and make it easier to justify continued budget increases. So rather than encouraging critical thinking, writing, and creativity, they're teaching to the test.

I actually agree with many of the facts that the article lays out. I actually don't think that there's much point in getting heartburn about the US's standing in the ratings, because a lot of the ratings are probably useless or easily-gamed metrics. And it's critically important for US interests that we make it easy for the world's best and brightest to continue to immigrate. The big problem with the article is that, as other readers point out, it's a self-defeating argument. The reason that our poor education outcomes don't matter is that we import the top performers from other countries? Well, it's a good thing that we import the top performers (in a selfish way of seeing things). But that's beside the point.

I think that one of the factors contributing to our education challenges is that we have a large and diverse population, but we also have naive notions of what equality means, and we too often think that correlation equals causation. Going to college correlates with success later in life. That's because smarter, harder-working kids tend to go to college. It does not mean that sending dumb lazy kids to college you'll make them successful. If you send dumb kids to college, you end up with dumb kids with no college degree and $40,000 in student loan debt the incurred before they dropped out. I'm using the term "dumb" to make a point, but the truth is that there's nothing wrong with not being cut out for the academic life. In fact, if you are prepared in childhood to be determined, hard-working, and creative, you can become a very successful person without having ever been an academic type. I spent three years doing carpentry, and I got to know a lot of tradespeople who did important things, enjoyed their work, and lived comfortable middle class lives, and sent their kids to college. But we're allergic to the idea that people are cut out for different kinds of life purpose because some people are more academically oriented than others.