Despite recent attempts at reform, there is no doubt that the United States education system has lagged behind the education systems of other developed nations. The Program for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, is an international organization that measures the performance of high school students around the world (United States, Highlights from PISA iii), and the results of its most recent series of exams have shown that high school students in the United States fall desperately behind their peers in the rest of the developed world (United States, Highlights from PISA 12). Recent initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act have attempted to improve the state of our deteriorating education system through an emphasis on standardized testing (United States, NCLB Executive Summary), despite the fact that countries that consistently achieve high test scores PISA have a drastically different approach to public education than that outlined by No Child Left Behind. High-performing students on PISA tend to use education systems that incentivize students to perform well, rather than depending on impartial tests, the results of which serve to measure the performance of the school rather than that of the individual. There is therefore no reason for students, who have little interest in the outcome of a school's evaluation, to strive to perform well on these standardized tests. While standardized tests are a useful means of measuring improvement within an educational system, a system that fails to provide incentives for high performance will inevitably produce mediocre results. Japan and Finland are two counterexamples of this system. Both countries performed well on the PISA test…halfway there…a reason to perform well in school rather than forcing teachers to teach students who have little intrinsic motivation to perform well on standardized tests. Works Cited Finland. Ministry of Education. The Finnish matriculation exam.. nd Web. 24 February 2010.Gamerman, Ellen. “What makes Finnish children so smart?” Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2008. Web. February 24, 2010. Okano, Kaori and Tsuchiya, Motonori. Education in contemporary Japan: Inequality and diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.United States. Department of Education. PISA 2006 Highlights: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Science and Mathematics Literacy in an International Context. December 2007. Web. 24 February 2010. United States. Department of Education. Executive Summary of the No Child Left Behind Act. January 2002. Web. 4 March 2010.