Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No

the 2020s swoon is happening everywhere and worse in many places, we've never done well in international comparisons, and our problems have always been profoundly bottom-heavy

you may live to see man-made horrors beyond comprehension

A pervasive narrative in American discourse and media holds that the nation’s education system has suffered a catastrophic decline from a fabled “golden age.” This conventional wisdom suggests that American students once led the world in academic achievement but have since fallen behind due to failing schools and lowered standards. Both sides of that narrative are untrue - we never were a global leader in average educational outcomes, and we have not suffered any kind of a unique recent stumble that peer nations have not. The reality is an old one: our “average” students perform respectably compared to international peers; our top students are among the world’s very best; the curriculum taught today is significantly more advanced than in the past. The true crisis is not a general decline, but the ongoing, persistent, and specific failures of relatively small groups of disadvantaged students, who have been the policy obsession of the educational establishment for half a century. This inequality has been exacerbated by a global15ish-year downturn that has affected every nation, not just the U.S., but precisely because it’s global, talk of an American crisis is strange and unhelpful. Also, everyone knows that it’s the phones.

Preliminary: Pre-Compulsory K-12 and Pre-Rigorous Testing

A good deal of this debate depends on reference to an entirely vague “before,” ye olden days when things were good. This is particularly frustrating because the time horizons we’re dealing with here are actually quite brief from a historical standpoint: the last state to adopt a compulsory schooling law did so in 1918, and those laws were riddled with exemptions and often not enforced, such that a general expectation that kids below the age of 12 or so should definitely be going to school only really developed post-World War II. Meanwhile, the rise of rigorous educational assessments (as distinct from intelligence tests, which are older) is even more recent. Often, the 1960s are used as a benchmark for when reliable international comparisons started. That decade marked the establishment of permanent organizations dedicated to national and international measurement, fundamentally changing assessment’s role from merely classifying individuals to evaluating entire educational systems. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement was founded in 1958, while the first administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP took place in 1969, effectively bookending the decade. It’s not that much of a stretch to say that these two institutions defined the subsequent landscape of modern comparative educational measurement.

Even after that period, the collection of quantitative data was paltry compared to the 21st century. If you take an average 17-year-old from the United States in, say, 1975, you’re talking about a student who likely never received any educational assessment or benchmarking besides the grades on their report card, which they likely received twice or four times a year. Those grades might not even have been averaged together into a GPA. We just don’t have data to compare to. Personally, I find it powerfully unlikely that if you could pull aside the average American in 1975 or 1950 or 1925 or 1900 or 1875 and give them an academic exam, they would produce results that suggest a past golden age of academic preparedness. But we really just don’t have data, and besides, for the large majority of the history of humanity, most people weren’t getting any education at all - and the introduction of large-scale compulsory K-12 education in the United States has actually contributed to the never-ending crisis narrative.

Why? Think about what universal free compulsory school really means: we now offer education to all children and thus parts of the ability curve that used to be excluded are now in our data and within our perception of the system. This is about race and gender, sure, but it’s far broader than that - for the vast majority of human history the average farmer’s kid was not receiving any schooling and the idea that they would was perceived as fanciful. Formal education was restricted to the upper classes, and the academically-inclined among them, for a much longer portion of human history than it’s been available to all. So of course it now appears that we’re always in crisis, because only in the last 100ish years have we seen anything like the performance numbers of most every child. There were surely many bright students who were excluded from education prior to the rise of free public school, but on balance, we’d expect that an education system that catered only to the academically inclined and affluent would produce less conspicuous failure. That’s precisely what happened in this country: we started putting every kid through school, which means that far more marginal students were pushed into the system.

Free compulsory K-12 education is the best thing this country ever did, but of course it had the consequence of average student performance looking far worse than it did when only the brightest children of the richest families were ever educated to begin with.

We’ve Never Looked Good in International Comparisons

Whenever we’re asking these big-picture questions about educational outcomes, we also have to ask “Compared to what?” You need a benchmark to compare against. One natural way to do this is against students of the recent past, and we’ll get to that. The other way is to look at other countries, preferably peers in some sense. And the foundation of the declinist narrative is the belief that there was a time when American students dominated international rankings. We were once great, we stopped being great, and that’s why China builds the best electric cars now. But this golden era simply never existed. In 2011, the Brookings Institution released a report explicitly aimed at debunking this “myth of glory days.” The report highlighted results from the First International Mathematics Study (FIMS) conducted in 1964. In that assessment, the United States ranked 11th out of 12 participating countries, beating only Sweden. Far from leading the pack, the U.S. was already trailing nations like Japan and the UK well before the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s or the educational reforms of subsequent decades. As the Brookings report noted, “The United States never led the world... it was never number one and has never been close to number one on international math tests.”

Please note the year of that comparison: in 1964, Americans successfully launched the first Saturn I booster rocket, invented the BASIC computer language, and performed the first angioplasty. We were the world’s dominant economic power and we had a level of military might and diplomatic muscle that would be the envy of almost any country in world history. Poor math performance by average students made no difference to our scientific and technological advantages; the performance of the most academically gifted and inclined are what matter in the world of high-stakes science and technology. Which is fine.

A piece by David E. Drew released the following year in The Washington Post - and scrubbed from their archives under somewhat mysterious circumstances - went into considerable detail about the long history of American poor performance in international education comparisons. Here are some tidbits:

In 1965, the Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducted a study of mathematical achievement in 12 countries. Students were asked to solve 70 problems. Among math students, the top scoring countries were Israel (a mean score of 36.4 correct items), England (35.2), Belgium (34.6), and France (33.4). U.S. students placed last, with a mean score of 13.8.

The IEA conducted an international assessment of mathematics during the 1981-82 school year. Twelfth-grade students were assessed on six topics: number systems, sets and relations, algebra, geometry, elementary functions and calculus, and probability and statistics. Hong Kong students scored best, Japan was second, and the United States ranked last among advanced industrial countries….

In 1989, a dozen countries and Canadian provinces participated in a mathematics assessment conducted by the Educational Testing Service. Korea, French Quebec, and British Columbia were the top three. The United States ranked last.

An international study in the 1990s tested 13 year olds in mathematics in 15 countries. The United States placed next to last, above Jordan.

Here are the results of science assessments of high school students: In 1973, the U.S. rank was 14 out of 14 countries. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. rank in biology was 13 out of 13 countries; the U.S. rank in chemistry was 11 out of 13 countries; the U.S. rank in physics was 9 out of 13 countries. In 1991, the U.S. rank in science was 13 out of 15.

We have never, ever done well in international educational comparisons. Now, we have to note that these are comparisons to other developed countries; if developing/third world nations were included in these rankings, the United States would surely look much better. But compared to our OECD peers, the countries we should be comparing ourselves to? We’ve always sucked, more or less. The perception of a fall from grace is a psychological phenomenon, not a statistical one. The problem is the same old same: we have pockets of just unfathomably bad performance in our country, yes in heavily Black and Hispanic inner cities but also in certain dominantly-white rural and post-industrial communities, and they make our headline numbers look bad. Our average kid does just fine. Observe.

Median Competence vs Elite Excellence

There’s this consistent polling finding that people sometimes talk about in education debates. If you poll American parents, in consistent majorities they say that the American school system is doing a bad job - but when asked about their child’s school, they give it high marks. Is this just irrationality or bias? I would argue that it’s not. Instead, it’s a perfect rational take on a central fact: contrary to the “failing schools” trope, the median American student performs quite well on the global stage, and our top performers are world-class. But our debates are dominated by a set of outlier schools that do truly terribly.

The results from the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test administration, in 2022, is the best information we have about how our students compare to international peers right now. And this data simply does not support the notion of a United States that’s falling uniquely behind. While the U.S.’s math scores aren’t inspiring at 34th out of 81, American 15-year-olds actually scored above the OECD average in Reading and Science. In fact, the U.S. ranked 6th among OECD countries in reading and 12th in science, hardly the profile of a widely-failed system. The people who spread the declinist narrative will rush to say “not good enough!” and point to how much we spend per pupil. Well, it’s true that we spend a lot per pupil - but since there’s no relationship between school funding and school performance, this is a non sequitur. Oman spends four or five times what Iran does per pupil for worse results, etc etc etc. You just can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from there.

Furthermore - and this I take personally - the U.S. produces a peerless cohort of elite students. For starters, we simply have more top students than most developed nations. The OECD’s PISA country notes for the U.S. highlight that a larger percentage of American students were “top performers” (achieving Level 5 or 6) in Reading and Science than the OECD average. In Science, 11% of U.S. students were top performers compared to the OECD average of 7%. In Reading, 14% of U.S. students reached the top levels versus an OECD average of 7%.

More than just the number of really smart kids, though, there’s just how well our very brightest students perform. American students are currently enjoying a run of dominance in the world’s most prestigious academic competitions that would be the envy of any nation. In math, the U.S. team took first place overall at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and followed it up with a stunning performance in 2025 where they secured five gold medals and one silver, cementing our status as a perennial superpower. At the 2025 International Physics Olympiad, the American team achieved a historic sweep, becoming the first country to win five gold medals, effectively placing first in the world. Similarly, the U.S. Chemistry team brought home four gold medals from the 2025 International Chemistry Olympiad, and the Biology team continued the streak with every single member earning a medal (three golds and one silver) at their 2025 international competition. Beyond the sciences, American teens are crushing it in robotics, with U.S. high school teams taking home top awards at the VEX Robotics World Championships. Even in chess, a game historically dominated by Eastern Europe and Asia, American prodigies are constantly on the podium, with young talents like Abigail Zhou and Stella Xin recently capturing silver and bronze medals at the World Cadet Chess Championships.

Of course our top performers are awesome. This is the fucking United States of America. I’m no patriot, but I know that this country produces a vastly disproportionate number of the smartest people in the world. When was the last time you heard about them from the declinist Cassandras?

Curriculum Inflation: Doing More at Younger Ages

Another critical factor often ignored is that the bar for what constitutes grade-level proficiency has been raised dramatically over the last 30 years. Students today are attempting complex mathematics at ages where their parents were doing basic arithmetic.

The most clear-cut example is Algebra I. Historically, Algebra was a 9th-grade high school course. In 1990, only 16% of American 8th graders were enrolled in Algebra. Following a policy push for “Algebra for All” - which I think is misguided for reasons you’re already familiar with, but that’s tangential right now - that number skyrocketed. By the early 2010s, enrollment peaked, with some estimates showing nearly half of 8th graders taking the course. While there has been a recent slight pullback (to around 24-30% post-pandemic) due to concerns about rushing unprepared students, the rate remains nearly double what it was in 1990. Constantly judging student performance against grade level risks obscuring the fact that curriculum grows more ambitious over time, meaning that “7th grade math” or similar constructs are not useful for meaningful comparison.

There’s plenty of evidence that the work being tackled by the kids who are taking these higher level classes is more rigorous and comprehensive than that of past generations. Today’s middle schoolers are routinely exposed to mathematic concepts (linear equations, functions, geometric proofs) that were once the exclusive domain of high school freshmen; K–12 science standards reformed by the Next Generation Science Standards and related analyses require integrated, three-dimensional science learning (like “phenomena-driven inquiry” and engineering practices) that is deeper than older topic-based approaches; reading expectations and common metrics (like Lexile and Guided Reading) show higher-grade benchmarks for comprehension and complex text analysis across elementary grades…. It’s perfectly fair to say that higher expectations don’t mean much if they aren’t being met. But you do have to factor that into any narrative of decline; attempting harder material over time is a fundamental part of the advance of education. To say students are “doing worse” ignores that they are attempting much harder material much earlier.

Hey, Have You Heard That the United States Has a Massive and Entrenched Problem with Inequality?

If the average is decent and the top is excellent, why does the U.S. often look worse in aggregate rankings? Because of our worst performing schools and districts. The U.S. educational system looks bad because of the effects of extremely deep underperformance concentrated in high-poverty areas. You are well aware of these dynamics.

As you know, I do not believe that these problems can be solved on the policy or pedagogy side, and I would suggest that the decades of effort and mountains of treasure we’ve spent trying to do so is pretty strong evidence that we need a paradigm shift in how we conceive of education. But set that aside for now: the depths of our lowest-performing schools and students makes us look far worse at school than we actually are. Data from the Economic Policy Institute has shown that when U.S. scores are adjusted for socioeconomic inequality, the U.S. ranking jumps significantly - for example, in their analysis of 2009 data, the U.S. moved from 14th to 6th once results were adjusted for inequality. The U.S. has a higher rate of child poverty than many of its peer nations in the developed world, particularly in Europe or Asia. We also have the ongoing and vexing issue of From the EPI report:

Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.

If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.

A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics, substantially higher).

More recent data confirms that this gap is not only present but growing. A 2024 report by the conservative American Enterprise Institute analyzing TIMSS data found that the U.S. has “uncommonly large and consistent achievement gap growth.” Between 2011 and 2023, the gap between the 90th percentile (top students) and the 10th percentile (struggling students) in 4th-grade math grew by over 50 points. This bifurcation means the “average” score effectively hides two different school systems: one that competes with Finland and Singapore, and another that is being left behind. Of course that’s a problem. But the inequality this all reflects is as old as the United States, and it’s bizarre and unhelpful to think that the downward pressure of this entrenched failure is somehow an indictment of recent pedagogical and policy decisions.

A Global Swoon: It’s Not Just Us

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So here’s the nut of the whole thing: commentators often point to the recent decline in test scores (post-2020) as proof of a unique American failure. This ignores the global context: almost all developed nations have seen declining scores, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in fact in many countries these declines have been more pronounced than in the United States. The PISA 2022 results showed an “unprecedented drop” in performance across the entire industrialized world. On average, OECD countries saw math scores fall by 15 points. The United States did see a decline, of 13 points - which is less than the average drop. Because other nations fell harder, the U.S. world ranking in math actually improved from 29th in 2018 to 26th in 2022. Have you heard one word about that from the declinist crew? I can’t see any way to look at the full sweep of data we have available to us and conclude that the United States is doing particularly worse recently, relative to the international baseline.

When we look at specific nations often held up as educational models, the contrast becomes even starker. Germany, often cited for its rigorous technical education, saw its student performance crater, with scores in mathematics and science dropping below levels seen in the early 2000s. Roughly one-third of German 15-year-olds are now considered low performers, a significantly sharper decline than what occurred in American schools. Similarly, France experienced a “large and unprecedented” decline in mathematics after years of stability, and the Netherlands saw such a steep drop in reading skills that their average score fell below the OECD average for the first time. So what’s going on? (It’s the phones.) Are Germany and France also too “woke,” as is the increasingly-common framing of American educational decline? Did their teachers also become suddenly lazy? Were they overly influenced by internal American cultural politics? Can you blame French and German failures on American Departments of Education in big state universities? Was the American curriculum to blame for all of this? None of this makes any sense. It’s a bizarre, cherry-picked narrative designed to do one thing and one thing only: maintain the crisis narrative.

You might consider what happened to Finland, the country that dominated educational reform conversations for two decades. While U.S. reading scores held virtually steady between PISA administrations, dropping a statistically insignificant 1 point, Finnish reading scores collapsed, plummeting by 30 points - equivalent to losing nearly three-quarters of a school year. Too woke? Did they forget how to teach? Or, is it much more likely that policy and pedagogy are far weaker influences on test scores than people typically assume, and issues like demographic change and macroeconomics are far more determinative? As a contrast, consider the 2021 PIRLS assessment of 4th-grade reading, where U.S. students outperformed peers in 24 other education systems, with only three jurisdictions (Ireland, Hong Kong, and Northern Ireland) scoring significantly higher. Far from leading a race to the bottom, the U.S. has emerged from the pandemic years with an educational system that is, by many metrics, more stable and robust than those of the European nations we are so often told to emulate.

The narrative that American schools “broke” while the rest of the world flourished is factually incorrect. Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system. And the fact that this decline is so widespread makes efforts to blame American policy and pedagogy specifically very, very weird. Surely, an international decline in academic performance that’s strikingly uniform is not a reason to blame specific American policies! And yet that’s exactly what the declinists do. Part of what’s driving the relentless agita is that the United States has the NAEP, a truly excellent educational assessment, so we have more and better data than a lot of other countries. But that doesn’t mean we’ve done particularly poorly lately. In fact, compared to the industrialized world’s average changes, we’ve done well.

There’s a whole conversation about what’s driving recent international slumps in educational metrics. (No really, it’s the phones.) And I am indeed concerned. But the patterns of the data - the fact that the declines happened far earlier than the pandemic both domestically and internationally, the fact that they are happening fairly uniformly across many different demographic groups, the fact that there has been no major national American policy or pedagogical change that can explain it - strongly agitates against seeing this problem in terms of national, state, district, or school-level policy. It just doesn’t make sense to respond to a cross-cultural, massively-international phenomenon like this by yelling about what San Francisco’s wooooooke school board is up to.

(It’s the phones.)

The conventional wisdom of American educational decline is a zombie narrative that refuses to die despite being repeatedly killed by data. The reality is that the U.S. has never been a global leader in test scores, or even particularly close to being one; our median students are competent and our elite are exceptional, but our averages look bad because of truly terrible performance at the bottom, which has been a national obsession with little to show for it since before I was born; the average school curriculum is more rigorous than in the past; and our recent downturn in test scores is shared by almost every nation on Earth that participates in collecting data, and worse in many of our most comparable peers. The true challenge facing the U.S. is not a general lack of quality, but a profound inequality that leaves the most vulnerable students behind while the rest of the nation moves forward. And perhaps it’s time to admit that that problem can’t be solved with education policy, either.