Americans and Mathematics
Every couple of years, I always look at PISA's* rankings of math around the world. When I first saw the rankings a few years ago, I was so surprised that America's ranking was around 26th. I wondered how this was even possible with globally leading universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford being here in the US. What didn't surprise me was Asian nations topped the charts for each subject. I had heard of cram schools, as well as the very stressful life of being a student in countries such as Korea, Japan, or Singapore. Also the higher rankings of countries such as Finland weren't surprising to me either since their methods of working very hard in school instead of bringing home thick stacks of homework seemed to work among the student population. Flash forward to 2015, the most recent pool of data from PISA, and the United States had dropped from 27th in 2012 to 41st in 2015. The question has to be asked, "Why does the US rank so poorly when it comes to mathema