One thing to remember when preparing countries is that American students accept ALL of their students. Other countries do not. Special education for students with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and mental retardation for the most part doesn’t exist – especially in the same school. Other countries also require parents to pay (big motivator for parents to pay attention to their kids & an economic divider to weed out poor families) and students are often required to PASS tests to move on to the next level. Until No Child Left Behind came along, this was not the case…kids were passed on without much though.

In other words, students in other countries taking these exams are motivated (by parents if not intrinsically) and these exams are only given to the top 20 percent or so. Our exams are given to any in pursuit of a high school diploma…which is statistically speaking 98 percent or more of a school’s population. (Less than about two percent are in pursuit of a certificate of attendance due to a more severe disability.)

They are applying expectations . . . It’s amazing what a child will learn if the parent’s expect them to . . . It starts when a child is young . . . if a parent expects a toddler to behave, then he does . . . if the child is expected to eat vegetables, then he does. . . if a child is expected to speak a foreign language before graduating elementary school then he will. Our standards are entirely too low!

i think Israel is slightly above avrage but not by much