It’s PISA Day, meaning that the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment  have just been released, and — brace yourself – the average scores for U.S. students were not very much different from any of the previous comparison years. They were generally in the middle of the pack of 65 countries and individual school systems.

PISA, developed and organized by the  Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,  is an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-old students in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy. It started in 2000.

In the newly released 2012 results, Shanghai was on top  in reading, math and science — as it was in 2009 — with Singapore, South Korea and Japan not far behind, again. Vietnam, participating for the first time, did better than the United States in math and science.

Why can’t our schools be more like those in Shanghai (where most students attend after-school tutoring, teachers get extensive training and Chinese officials are worried about too much standardized testing), or Singapore (where officials are reforming schools to help kids become confident, moral, analytical thinkers with a “zest for life”), South Korea (famous for its after-school cram schools) and Japan (also known for its cram schools)? We wouldn’t really want them to be.

Many U.S. schools surely need to be improved and curriculum in American schools has long needed to be overhauled. (Supporters of the Common Core State Standards say that initiative will do improve the curriculum; critics say it won’t.)  But you will hear some people warn, as a result of the new PISA scores, that the sky is  falling and America’s economy and national security are at risk.

The sky, however, is not falling, at least not because of the PISA scores. For one thing, U.S. students have never scored at or even near the top of international assessments. Not ever.

Though it is often said that international test scores tell us something important about the future of American’s economy, the fact is that countries that have much higher unemployment and more troubled economies have higher PISA scores than the United States.