The difference between &quot;good schools&quot; and &quot;bad schools&quot; is much more about the kids that go there than anything about the school itself. You&#x27;re seeing this starkly in D.C. where gentrification in certain neighborhoods is shifting the student demographics from 90% low-income to 20% low-income over just 4-5 years. Test scores are shooting up, but it&#x27;s not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary.<p>American schools are fine. Our problems are social. For example, the U.S. has the second-highest rate of single-parent families along with one of the highest gaps in PISA scores between single-parent and two-parent households: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationnext.org&#x2F;international-look-single-parent-family" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationnext.org&#x2F;international-look-single-parent-fa...</a>.<p>The U.S. also has a larger fraction of children in the lowest income distribution than comparable countries: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epi.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;us-student-performance-testing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epi.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;us-student-performance-testin...</a>. Accounting for that eliminates a lot of the supposed gap in U.S. student performance:<p>&gt; If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.