Educational Variance - A hardship!

 "The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

 - Aristotle.

The more I research into the United States' complex educational system, the more I question. The most outright current problem with it is that none of it is unified. Going over from California to Nevada may result in a change on any given test of up to 15 mean percentile points, according to the Economics of BA Ambivalence, by the University of Minnesota.

Each state - in terms of education - seems to function independently of its neighbors, with Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia having the lowest median standardized test scores, while Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland have the highest median scores.

This variance proves to be a major problem in my research because when research papers often compare the United States to other countries, it allows for the extremely low scoring states to bring down the overall average and therefore adds a large error to the results. From now on, I must keep this in mind in order to accurately compare other country's results to the United States. On the other hand, I think this educational variance is what speaks for itself in terms of the United State's overall educational performance.