incredibly high tuition. it s gone up five times the rate of inflation. incredibly high student debt in university. a lot of burdens. college educated. the kind of things they re testing are basic reading skills. now, it is true that many states are now adopting something called the common core which should at least in theory focus people on learning just these sorts of things. i want to bring in author amanda ripley. she wrote a book called the smartest kids in the world and how they got that way. a. amanda, what are the headline force you about this study? i think it s partly very depressing as you said. but partly there is some hope in here. one of the things that struck me is how much our adult skills mirror our kids skills. it s particularly true in math. we have a real challenge, a real deficiency in math. less so in literacy particularly among 15-year-olds. but we only have two countries that performed worse than we did in this test in math.