BobL, you seem to have a mystified high opinion of Russian school system for some reason. What you imagine is not reality. There is an international study measuring the skills of 14 year old school children and while the USA gets a rather bad average score then white American kids are not doing so badly. Russians kids are not doing well at all scoring the same average as Florida (481 points). Average for white American kids is 518. What brings the overall score of USA down is African Americans only getting 434 points on average.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/graph-of-2012-pisa-scores-for-65_4.html
