Dear Editor: I have absolutely no quarrel with a single thing Mike McCabe wrote about what we need to do to improve education in America . However, I’d like to expand upon his observation about having to "live with diminished international competitiveness that comes with increasing educational mediocrity here at home.”

The basis for determining where the USA stands vis-a-vis other countries in science, mathematics, and language is a series of tests administered uniformly across all the industrialized nations that participate in the comparison program. Needless to say, kids in Spain take the language part in Spanish, those in Germany take it in German, and so on. Only fair, right?

What almost nobody pays attention to is that it doesn’t work that way for the other two parts. American students are handicapped in the science and math exams by having to take them in a "foreign language” — the metric system. Everyone else in the world uses the metric system on a regular, day-to-day basis. They’re familiar with it. It’s also the language of science and math, which is why the tests use it as well. But it’s not the normal measurement language of American students, and so they end up having to “translate” the questions in order to determine the proper answers, whereas all the other kids on the planet only have to “read” them.