In the 21st Century, we're told, our kids will compete globally for good jobs, facing off against millions of young people with ever-improving math and science skills.

Now, for the first time, educators in a few big cities can see how the math skills of their students compare to those of peers worldwide.

For a study released today, Gary Phillips, a former top U.S. Education Department official now at the private American Institutes of Research, a Washington, D.C., think tank, created a sort of math-score mashup. He superimposed scores from the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, over those of the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), from 2003.

ON THE WEB: American Institutes for Research

What he found is eye-opening. Fourth- and eighth-grade students in six U.S. cities — Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Houston, New York City and San Diego — actually hold their own against international competitors from Singapore, Japan, England and elsewhere.

But international students in many nations outperform students in five other U.S. cities: Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Hank Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, says he hopes the data don't prompt critics to slam the underperformers. The cities, after all, volunteered to take part in the urban NAEP trials.

Even if the findings are less-than-stellar, he says, they should help local officials focus on improving results.

"In that sense, I think it could be a very positive thing to use in-house, in the district, to keep their nose to the grindstone," says Kepner, a former middle- and high-school math teacher in Iowa and Wisconsin."If they can show they're improving, they might be able to attract more companies to a system that's on the move."

Phillips says the findings prove that in other countries "it is possible to do well and learn considerably under a lot of varied circumstances — in other words, being low-income is not really an excuse when you look around the rest of the world."

Phillips once oversaw NAEP and other large-scale tests as acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. He says he got interested in the new project after thinking about how a big test like NAEP is "good for policymakers at the national level, but state people and districts really haven't had the benefit of it."

He says the findings could be helpful to local educators, who "are, in many ways, insulated from what's happening even in the next state — and certainly in the next country."