Media: States Fare Badly In International Comparisons

It's not just the US education system as a whole that sucks in comparison to other countries -- individual states even some of the most highly touted ones look bad by comparison, too:

"Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17...  On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden." (The Atlantic "How Your State Rates")

I don't know if this is really all that new information, but here it is anyway.