The internationally recognized gold standard for comparing education performance among high school students is the Program for International Student Assessment. On the 2015 PISA test, China ranked sixth in mathematics while the United States ranked thirty-ninth. China’s score was well above the OECD average, while the US score was significantly below. Even the highest-rated American state, Massachusetts, would stand just twentieth if it were measured as its own country in the rankings—a drop from its ninth-place rating when the test was last conducted, in 2012.48
