alt Hacker NewsIt’s not clear to me PISA scores mean anything, because they’re not uniformly administered in the U.S. And if the scores are reliable, they point to distributional issues outside the educational system. For example, Asians in the U.S. perform comparably to Singaporeans: https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/us-asians-scored-.... White Americans perform comparably to Japan and South Korea, and ahead of all of Europe.
Since there’s no test which currently compares the best American 15-yos with the best other OECD 15-yos, we can’t assume anything about potential results. The best we can do is look at the data which exists and learn from that.
In general, I’d caution that presumptuous ideas like “best Americans will always be best” create cultural rot, and then something like DeepSeek happens. The cultural rot deepens when the elites run around trying to save face instead of admitting an opponent’s ingenuity, and aiming to do better. But I am not sure if that’s what you’re trying to imply (that best American students will out compete best students from other countries) but that’s the sense I got from your comment. America is resting on a lot of built-up wealth and power, so even objectively mediocre elites do well here.
I think everyone already knows this, but success in American society is predicated on intergenerational wealth and/or charisma, which is how people like George W. Bush or Trump become presidents despite being academically mediocre. People who make promises of meritocracy would never appoint some natural genius person-of-color as Barron Trump’s boss, for example. How likely do you think that is?