A couple emails on my assertion that our best students are as good as their best students:

You mentioned that you’d put the top 5% of American kids against the top 5% of Europe and Asia any day. That’s a little hard to find, but we do put around the top .000002% in competition every year. Check out for the US Physics team , which blew the rest of the world away last year. The US tends to do similarly well in the Chemistry and Math Olympiads.

And…

We do pretty darn well. Send more people to college than any other country on earth — you don’t see anyone clamoring to get into Korean colleges. We’re winning a war that is mainly being fought by kids who graduated from high school in the last four years.
Not to mention more school spirit, baggier pants, way cooler Slipknot T-shirts, and let’s face it, our high school football teams rule — did Tokyo High even makethe playoffs last year?

And….

On your corner blog:
I don’t think your excuse works. These are not college results, but high school results. Universal education is still universal education. Asian peasants? You won’t find that many peasants in South Korea, one of the most urbanized populations around.
I think you will find some controversy behind math education related to this. See mathematicallycorrect.com, where they argue that “new-new math” has ruined US math education. That site also has a bunch of older international comparison links…