Re:Cannot compare a city to a country (Score 1)

your information is not correct for Shanghai. Shanghai's policy is to allow all the kids below 10th grade to join local school regardless their hukou status. Beijin probably has more restrictive policy. For people not living in China, Shanghai is a city with population of 23 million. This is larger than population of a lot of countries. If Shanghai's system is good enough to get this kind of result, I think on state level, US should also be able to achieve better performance.
From local news, There are 6374 students from 155 school who took the test among population of over 90,000 15-year old.