The US ranks 29 among the community of nations insofar as it relates to the academic performance of the nation's public school students. This showing is down from America's academic performance 4 years ago. Even as the US spends far more on average than most every other country on earth our public students continue to rank far behind much of Europe, Canada and East Asia.

Ranking:

1. Finland
2. Hong Kong
3. Canada
4. Taiwan
5. Japan
6. Estonia
7. New Zealand
8. Australia
9. Netherlands
10. Liechtenstein
11. S. Korea
12. Slovenia
13. Germany
14. United Kingdom
15. Czech Republic
16. Switzerland
17. Macao-China
18. Austria
19. Belgium
20. Ireland
21. Hungary
22. Sweden
23. Poland
24. Denmark
25. France
26. Croatia
27. Iceland
28. Latvia
29. United States
30. Spain
31. Slovak Republic
32. Lithuania
33. Norway
34. Luxembourg
35. Russian Federation
36. Italy
37. Portugal
38. Greece
39. Israel
40. Chile
41. Serbia
42. Bulgaria
43. Uruguay
44. Turkey
45. Jordan
46. Thailand
47. Romania
48. Montenegro
49. Mexico
50. Indonesia
51. Argentina
52. Brazil
53. Colombia
54. Tunisia
55. Azerbaijan
56. Qatar
57. Kyrgyzstan

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-FINN080229-sort.html?s=1&ps=false&a=up

Yet, what are our esteemed political leaders telling us? They tell us that our system works, that its the best in the world and so on and so forth. This of course is a lie, indeed not only is America's public school system not working, but we are continuing to fall further and further behind. As the emerging economies of China and India continue to move forward, US students will find themselves less and less capable of competing on the world market. If this trend continues it won't be long before American children aren't qualified to do much more than clean up after their foreign supervisors. This trend should come as a surprise to no one, such studies have regularly demonstrated the continued failings of our monolithic, state-centric, monopolistic educational system.

Those who suggest alternatives, such as school choice, vouchers, charter schools and home schooling are often chided with derision by those who apparently have no problem with America's 29 ranking (i.e., the American Left, Teacher's Unions and Statists). Here America these opponents of choice are staking steps to outlaw homeschooling (as in California) and derail choice initiatives (as in Utah), meanwhile in the world's best performing nation (Finland) state-centric No Child Left Behind style mandate are non-existant. Indeed, students don't even enter the classroom until age 7 and when they do, politicians don't flood the classroom with billions to pay for unnecessary technological destractions, they focus on academics.

In several of the planet's top performers like Belgium and Hong Kong school choice is the norm, where school funds follow the child and parents are free to send their children to a state school, private secular school or a parachial school and the results are pretty obvious. Yet here in America we cling to our philosophy of a command style approach to academics, with our children as the victims.