biases

It's really true that once you start thinking in the ways encouraged by critical literacy, you look at everything differently. Today I was looking at the executive summary of No Child Left Behind, and was struck by what I saw. In laying out the reasons why NCLB is necessary, it said that high school seniors trail students in Cyprus and South Africa in math. I was appalled that the authors of this document thought that being worse than these countries was necessary to include. Are these the only countries where students scored higher than the US students? Why were those the countries they chose to reference? What does this say about how the authors viewed these countries?