I read the first hour's worth of comments here before posting my own comment. I attended the official United States Department of Education webinar announcing these newly released results this morning before posting this news report here. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News four years ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

after earlier years of noticing that Paul Graham writes from time to time about education policy issues. I'm glad to see that so many HN participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. Plainly, the United States continues to outperform a lot of countries, as it has throughout my lifetime. The countries that have disastrous education systems seem to be especially concentrated among the countries of the Arab League, and to a lesser degree in Latin America.

On the other hand, the report reveals some examples of countries that have consistently outperformed the United States throughout the time that TIMSS testing has occurred (since the mid-1990s) and since PIRLS testing has occurred (since the turn of the current century). Most of those countries are concentrated among the newly industrialized countries of east Asia, with a few other conspicuous strong performers to be found in Europe.

A key difference between United States schools and schools in countries with better performance: American teachers show a method and then expect students to repeat applying the method to very similar exercises, while teachers in high-performing countries show an open-ended problem first, and have the students grapple with how to solve it and what method would be useful in related but not identical problems. From The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (1999):

"Readers who are parents will know that there are differences among American teachers; they might even have fought to move their child from one teacher's class into another teacher's class. Our point is that these differences, which appear so large within our culture, are dwarfed by the gap in general methods of teaching that exist across cultures. We are not talking about gaps in teachers' competence but about a gap in teaching methods." p. x

"When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by how different they were from the other country's lesson. When we watched a Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features of U.S. lessons--that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of cross-cultural comparisons. They allow us to detect the underlying commonalities that define particular systems of teaching, commonalities that otherwise hide in the background." p. 77

A great video on the differences in teaching approaches can be found at "What if Khan Academy was made in Japan?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHoXRvGTtAQ

with actual video clips from the TIMSS study of classroom practices in various countries.

We would reasonably expect a wealthy country, like the United States, to get return on its investment in education

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

but the United States somewhat disappoints that expectation compared to other countries, on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Noteworthy about the United States is that it lags compared to several other countries in how well the school system meets the needs of the most disadvantaged learners in the country.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

What jumped out at me from the report released today, as summarized in the official Department of Education webinar, is what a large gain in results on international testing is found among students in Iran. Iran is still poorer than many other countries, despite its inherent wealth from petroleum exports, but despite all that is dubious about current governance in Iran, it appears that educational provision there is improving, as gauged by the international testing programs. (I note too that Iran is becoming a consistent contender in the International Mathematical Olympiad,

http://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx

at a much higher level of mathematical performance.)

As usual, my home state, Minnesota, which is one of several states that participates in TIMSS as a separate statistical unit as well as in the aggregate national ranking of the United States, is outperforming the United States median score. Even at that, there is a growing market here in Minnesota for the services I provide, supplemental mathematics education at a more advanced level than the school curriculum of suburban school districts, which parents who are aware of international standards are happy to pay for out-of-pocket even after paying their taxes to the local school system. (More information about that appears in my user profile.)

I would sum up today's news by saying that the United States is by no means doing as badly as it possibly could, but policy makers in the United States would be well advised to develop curiosity about how to do better in education. Living overseas a decade ago opened up my eyes to what is possible. For the amount of resources invested in public education in the United States

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

(more than what is invested by India and China COMBINED, even though each has a larger school-age population than the United States), education policy makers should continue to look around the world for the best path to good results. Specifically, the idea that we do well by able students is directly disagreed with by scholars who have spent years studying the issue.

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

"Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world's industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The full reports just released today on TIMSS and PIRLS testing are linked at the United States Department of Education website.

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls/