The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.

Maybe you should actually prove him wrong. Making a claim without evidence doesn’t help anyone.