At the very top, the US excels at math. We consistently place at the top or near the top in the IMO for instance (https://maa.org/news/usa-first-at-imo/). Yes the team is largely children of immigrants, but they are Americans, too.
Did you assess every other school system "at its very top" and compare? This seems to be very clearly a double standard. Consider that IMO numbers are going to be biased due to the US's larger population compared to other highly developed countries.
It's ironic that your comment includes immigrants to show that America is great, while other comments exclude immigrants to show that America is not so bad.
Aren't those prodigies who get identified and given special education that is not available to most? They may not be all the useful for judging the quality of math education in general in the US.
Yes, but the ability to identify prodigies and give them the resources to realize their full potential is part of an education system, too. I don't know the full details of the IMO participants, but the team is geographically diverse.
Of course, another aspect of the education system are the resources given to the average student, and I don't think there is much debate that the US could do better here.
From 2022 stats:
Roughly 4 million students in each grade in the US.
8th,9th,10th,11th & 12th graders = 20 million.
So 20 million students are eligible for AMC10/AMC12
Of them, only 300K took the AMC10/AMC12
Of them, only 10K were invited to take the AIME
Of them, only 500 were invited to take the USAMO
Of them, only 50 went to the MOPs
Of them, only 6 went to the IMO & won.
The article is about 4th & 8th graders, of which we have 8 million.
Now, suppose those 4th graders get to 8th grade, then the 8th graders would be in 12. That makes both cohorts eligible for AMC10/12. At that point, they become 8 million out of the 20 million. So 120K of them take the AMCs, 4K take the AIME, 200 get into USAMO, 20 get invited into the MOPs, and best case 2 kids make it into the IMO.
So from this grand experiment, 2 kids will emerge the victor, and we are supposed to back-extrapolate that 8 million kids do ok. Aaalright then.../s
