This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 19th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

International comparisons are painting a poor picture of student performance in the United States.

But parents across the country would insist that while the rest of the school systems are poor,

the schools that their kids attend are doing just fine.

Andrew Colson, the director of the Cato's Center for Educational Freedom suggests that parents should pay closer attention to how American kids stack up against kids from around the globe.

Well, there were two different international studies released.

The first was Pearls, which is an acronym,

I'll spare you, a test of literacy

among fourth grade students.

And on the Pearls's test the United States score in

absolute terms declined but by a statistically insignificant amount just two

points between 2001 and 2006, the last two times it was administered.

And the other test that was released just this week is called PISA, the program on International Student Assessment,

and PISA tests 15-year-olds in science, mathematics, and reading.

And the results in PISA are even more troubling than those in PISA. In the PISA test, we actually suffered a significant statistically significant decline in mathematics achievement between 2003 and 2006.

And we either had insignificant or possibly significant declines in science and reading.

As a result of these declines in our actual performance, relative to our earlier earlier performance we've also fallen in the

rankings. So for instance in math back in 2000 we were 18th out of 27 countries. Today we're 25th out of 30 countries and that's

among our 15-year-olds and then in science in 2000 we were 14th out of 27

countries and very close to the international average.

Well now we are 21st out of 30 countries and in fact we suffered the fourth biggest

...