Slovenians, with almost no money for education, managed to take enough time out from a full blown civil war to educate their children and to land them in 10th place, while the US, spending 3 times as much as almost everybody else as a percent of GDP, with no civil war, with the SAME racial composition as 3 decades ago when SAT scores were 77 points higher -- BUT with 4 times as many single mother households as then -- barely made it into 28th place. We scored only 7 points higher than Latvia which has been under Russian rule for half a century. We scored more than 100 points lower than the top three nations, whose teachers are primarily males and whose students attend single-sex classrooms.