From an article in yesterday’s New York Times:
America’s education advantage, unrivaled in the years after World War II, is eroding quickly as a greater proportion of students in more and more countries graduate from high school and college and score higher on achievement tests than students in the United States, said Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world’s richest countries.
… and lax local standards and poor curriculum choices are part of the problem:
America’s system of standards, curriculums and testing controlled by states and local districts with a heavy overlay of federal rules is a “quite unique” mix of decentralization and central control, Mr. Schleicher said. More successful nations, he said, maintain central control over standards and curriculum, but give local schools more freedom from regulation, he said.
