Bracey, author of Final Exam (1995), contends that the picture painted is far worse than the general reality.

Take reading skills, for instance. In a major 31-nation study in 1992, American students finished second. Only students from Finland, a small, homogeneous country, did better. If only the top 10 percent of students are compared, young Americans come out the best in the world. Yet reformers are only interested in calling press conferences when there is bad news to report, Bracey notes.

What about math and science? A muchpublicized finding from a 1992 study by University of Michigan psychologist Harold Stevenson and his colleagues is that only the top one percent of American students score as high in math as the average Japanese student. But that study was flawed, Bracey maintains: the samples were not representative. The American students, for instance, included a disproportionately large number of children from poor and non-English-speaking families.

There is a U.S.-Japan gap, Bracey says, "but Stevenson’s data exaggerate" it.

Larger, more methodologically sophisticated multination studies have provided a more reliable picture, Bracey contends. In a 1996 study, American eighth-graders got 53 percent of the math questions right, just two percentage points under the international average among 41 nations. They answered 58 percent of the science questions correctly, scoring two points above the international average. At the fourthgrade level, American students ranked 12th in math out of the 26 nations tested, and third in science. (It’s true that only about 15 percent of American students scored as high on math as the average Japanese student. The difference, Bracey speculates, may be due to the extreme pressure put on Japanese youngsters from an early age to get into the right high school and college.)

"Aside from [Japan and three other] Asian nations at the top and a slightly larger number of developing countries at the bottom," Bracey points out, "the remaining roughly 30 countries (including all the developed countries of the West) look very much alike in their [1996 study] mathematics scores." The story is much the same with the science grades.

In any event, Bracey argues, emphasizing average scores obscures the enormous differences among American students. In the 1992 international assessment, for instance, pupils from the top third of American schools had average scores as high as those of the top two countries (Taiwan and South Korea), while the lowest third of U.S. schools did not even do as well as the lowest-ranking nation (Jordan).

Educational reformers talk as if the typical American school is in need of major repair, Bracey concludes, but the schools that really need it are those with the least resources and the worst social environments.