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What people don't realize is that most foreign school systems are not set up like those in the US. A decision is made by the age of 14 or 15 whether you are going on a college track or into a trade school, so when you compare the average scores, you are comparing apples to oranges.

That's a very important point that is never brought up when tests are shown comparing "high school seniors" in the U.S. to other countries. For instance, in Germany, a decision is made at about 14 as to whether a student will go on an academic pre-college track ("Gymnasium") or not. Almost half don't go to Gymnasium. In England, only the college-bound stay in school past age 16 (for "A-levels").

In the U.S., you have a small minority of kids who "drop out" before finishing high school. But in most other countries you have large percentages (40% in many countries) who branch off into non-academic tracks and are thus not included in comparisons to our HS seniors.

I'll bet if you just compared U.S. kids who take A.P. or Honors classes (which is probably a similar percentage of the U.S. high-school age population) to the academic-track, college-bound kids in other countries, U.S. kids would not fare any worse.