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I hope that intro copy was meant ironically. EVERYONE thinks things are "so much worse" now than when they were in school. Of course if you look at math alone, the US is going to lag behind other countries. This is because the US is one of the few countries that believes in wholistic, liberal education that puts equal stock in the sciences and humanities. We educate the individual, not the next number pusher. And the juxtaposition of the foreign students and the American students answering the president question was a perfect exercise in propaganda. I could go ask 100 people any question I want right now and just clip together the five dumbest answers to prove a point. What's the point of the continual "bad schools" message? Well, for starters it's predominantly directed a public schools to scare parents into sending their kids to private schools or to support voucher programs, et al. I don't know what Oprah is getting out of sending this message. Since you can't access test results from private schools (if the kids take them anyway) you have know what of knowing whether they are better off than the public ones. They do succeed at segregation based on wealth and race, though.
