The U.S. continues to lag behind other nations in math and science, but no one wants to accept responsibility. The parents blame the teachers, the teachers blame the parents, and the students, well they blame anything and everything.

Could it be the U.S. has become a "blame somebody else" society? Afterall, we see it in politics, at work, and at school. While the blame has continuously shifted directions, students academic performance has not. As shown in the table below, U.S. students are still lagging behind in their math skills. The table below compares the math abilities of U.S. 15 year olds with 15 year olds in other nations.



According to an Education Week report,"U.S. 15-year-olds scored, on average, significantly lower than their counterparts in most OECD nations in both math literacy and problem-solving on the 2003 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA."

American business leaders are also concerned about the performance of U.S. students. I think Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, adequately summed up the situation in the following statement:

"When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm travelling aborad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow."

So what is the excuse for the nation's teenage math failure? Most often, the biggest excuse for any academic failure is money. However, that is probably the worst excuse. Why? Because the country has in the past, and in the present, continued to pump more, and more, and then more money into the schools. Private industry has even become a partner in the education process, and added even more money to the equation.

However, more money hasn't solved the problem, and there doesn't seem to be any relevant mathematical theory to support a correlation between the amount of money spent on education, and the academic performance of the children. So, scratch money off of the list.

There are however, three common factors to academic achievement. They are teachers, parents, and students. And believe it or not, but the state and federal government are certainly not the answer. Because if you examine any bureacracy in the U.S., you will find they are not quite an example of effectiveness and efficiency, no matter how much money we put into them.

So in the end, it's a matter of Americans accepting reponsibility, expecting accountability, and working together to make the children of today the greatest American success story of tomorrow.