Yes, there are pockets that deviate from the mean (like HN for instance) but as a society, the US is pretty anti-intellectual. For me, that's the scariest thing about this country (that I love).
It's hilarious to start a post this way and then complain about anti-scientific attitudes.
As someone who's attended high school in both the United States and South Korea, I'm also not seeing how the Korean society is any less anti-intellectual - we have moronic interest groups, we believed in fan death for generations, our public schools are absolutely horrid, and we enjoy censoring large swaths of the internet (although admittedly a lot of that is pornography).
The only "leg up" I can think South Korea has is their focus on Hakwons (basically after school tutors).
The reality is that there's a large percentage of the US that is quite dumb, and it drags states with good education systems down.
How does poor-quality education in one state adversely affect better-quality education in another?
Of course, many of the countries in the study have populations smaller than some states within the USA. Perhaps the comparisons should be conducted at state level?
If the honest purpose of the study is to compare the results of various educational methodologies, I don't see that there'd be a useful unit of analysis any larger than an individual school, and even that might be too coarse. It's true that American states have de jure authority over public schools, and that there isn't any singular "American educational system" to speak of, but even within the individual states, there's still a great deal of variation from district to district and from school to school. Plus, there are plenty of schools outside the conventional public education systems, whose methodologies aren't determined by policy from any government.
"American 8th graders significantly better at science than European 8th graders."
I went to the actual data set ( http://nces.ed.gov/timss/idetimss/dataset.aspx ), selected the 8th grade science tests, and asked for the average score from the European nations. The result was 501 +- 0.9. The American score was 520 +- 2.9.
Now, I'm a bit concerned about their averaging methodology, since I don't think that it's accounting for population density (adding the scores for each country and dividing by the number of countries gives the average returned by the dataset). Still, if we assume that the results are correct, then the United States is doing significantly better than Europe in science education.
Of course, the English and the Hungarians, with scores of 542 and 539, respectively, have nothing to fear for the average American, while Turkey, at 454, should be pretty concerned.
Which brings us back to the diversity of educational quality in the US. While the average might be 520, I wouldn't be surprised, as a Hoosier, to find Indiana down near Turkey's 454. On the other hand, I'd expect Massachusetts to compare favorably with England's 542.
US primary education is governed state-by-state. If you compare Massachusetts to the world leaders, you'll discover we have an excellent educational system. If you compare Alabama to the world leaders, you'll see that we are a third-world nation.
States fund education differently. They establish different standards for what children are going to learn, subject by subject. In almost all cases, the basis for these standards is more political (and frequently religiously inspired) than scientific.
Useful reading: http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/the-state-of-state-...
http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_22168278/states-8th-g...
I am going to go out on a limb and say controversially, that it's because education falls under state rights. You just have too many different philosophy of education across all the states. For something so important it should be at a national level.
Could you elaborate on this? To me, the conclusion would seem entirely opposite: a single, homogeneous educational policy would prevent meaningful variation, and thereby make the status quo all but immutable.