RALEIGH – Here’s a shocking news flash: according to the most recent international comparison, American 15-year-olds rank near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in mathematics performance.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a set of scores from schools in 29 member countries. American students ranked 24th in math, just below the educational powerhouse that is Spain. On a normalized scale in which 500 was the OECD average, the U.S. score was 483. Top-ranked Finland had an average score of 544, followed closely by Japan’s 542. The good news is that when the math study was expanded to include 10 additional countries, many of them in the developing world, the U.S. no longer outranked just five participants. We outranked six, having tied for 27th with Latvia.

I was just kidding about the shocking news part. American educational performance has languished near the bottom among our peers for quite a long time. Let me be more specific, actually: among younger students, such as 4th-graders, U.S. scores are often at or above the international average. But by the time our kids get into high school, their international ranking sinks.

There has been a lot of debate about the phenomenon. Some have argued that the situation isn’t really bad news for the U.S., that it is a consequence of American high schools being more inclusive and youngsters not being shunted off early into non-college-bound tracks that keep them out of the testing pool. The international tests thus compare American apples to other folks’ oranges, the argument goes.

But it doesn’t go very far. As Dr. Pascal Forgione, a former U.S. commissioner of education statistics, explained a while back, careful analysis suggests that the test-taking population in America isn’t much different from test-takers in other participating countries – and indeed, it turns out that average performance typically goes up, not down, with high-school enrollment rates so the selectivity argument doesn’t wash.

In short, the comparison really is apples-to-apples, or about as close to that as you can get in international testing. Ours just aren’t getting ripe enough.

Then there are those who attribute America’s weak performance to insufficient resources, large class sizes, or inadequate early-childhood intervention. How can I put this diplomatically? Bull… market. U.S. public schools are among the best-funded in the world on a per-pupil basis. Our average teacher salaries ranked fourth among the OECD countries, and our class sizes are at or below average. We spend more on preschool programs than most comparable countries do, as well.

The OECD report noticed the lack of correlation: “a number of countries do well in terms of ‘value for money’ in their education systems, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands, while some of the ‘big spenders’ perform below the OECD average.” The U.S. is one of the “big spenders,” in case you didn’t get the point.

So what does explain the underwhelming American performance? There are no doubt a number of explanatory variables, including family structure, that don’t have a lot to do with education policy per se. But it is also evident that many nations outperforming the U.S. have 1) more competitive testing and accountability programs, 2) much stricter discipline policies, and 3) a larger role for private and religious schools in the K-12 market.

Sounds like we have a lot to learn – as do our mathematics students.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.