While recently poking around some reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), I was reminded of two key facts about national education systems and performance. First, contrary to what the school-reform debate in the U.S. might lead one to believe, America is more reliant on government monopoly to deliver public education than are most developed countries. At the high-school level, only about 9 percent of American students are enrolled in non-government schools, compared to an average of 18 percent in Europe. The differences are even starker when considering only our major OECD competitors:

Britain-75 percent Korea-49 percent Japan-31 percent France-30 percent Spain-22 percent Australia-21 percent USA-9 percent Germany-8 percent Italy-5 percent

Now, take a look at the latest average scores from international math tests:

Korea-547
Japan-523
Australia-520
Germany-504
France-496
Britain-495
Spain-480
USA-474
Italy-462

And science tests:

Japan-531
Australia-527
Korea-522
Germany-516
Britain-515
France-495
USA-489
Spain-488
Italy-475

The correlation may be eye-catching, but it isn’t sufficient. Some apologists for the American education monopoly attribute the test-score differences to other factors, and are right to do so up to a point. Fortunately, however, there is good evidence for the proposition that, adjusting for these population and policy differences, school choice does help explain why some countries outperform others.

(By the way, Canada is left out because of unavailable data. So are the Low Countries, because of a lack of data from the Netherlands, which would have made the case even stronger given its private-school majority.)