Obviously not good news...

American Teens Trail Peers in Science, Math - washingtonpost.com

American teenagers have less mastery of science and mathematics than peers in many industrialized nations, according to scores on a major international exam released today.

Education experts say results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment highlight the need for changes in classrooms and in the federal No Child Left Behind law. The average science score of U.S. 15-year-olds lagged that of students in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world's richest countries. U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.

[...]

On the science portion, U.S. students, most of them 10th-graders, earned an average score of 489 on a 1,000-point scale, 11 points below the average of the 30 countries. Canada, Japan and Korea were among the countries in which students outperformed American counterparts. U.S. students were on par with eight countries and outperformed five.

In math, only four countries had average scores lower than the United States. Students in 23 countries earned a higher average score, and those in two countries did about the same as the Americans.

The ranking of U.S. students in math and science is about the same as it was in 2003.

1+1=? | Posted December 4, 2007 01:30 PM by John Irons