claim: "in eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place."
author: barack obama
evidence_1: oct 23, 2009 ... by may of this year, mr. bracey was hitting obama too, noting that the president  was wrong when he said "in 8th grade math we've fallen to 9th place." actually,  this was an improvement from 28th place in 1995, mr. bracey pointed out. in his  book, "education hell: rhetoric vs. reality," published this year, ...
evidence_2: jun 28, 2014 ... when mr. obama said, “in eighth-grade math, we've fallen to ninth place,” he was  referring to the average score of eighth graders. he didn't say anything about  how many of the world's 13-year-old math geniuses were american. international  university rankings, moreover, have little to do with education.
evidence_3: mar 10, 2009 ... and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we've let  our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other  nations outpace us. let me give you a few statistics. in 8th grade math, we've  fallen to 9th place. singapore's middle-schoolers outperform ours three ...
evidence_4: we have been through four rounds of timss: 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007. as  with pisa, politicians and the public are quick to use timss results to criticize the  quality of u.s. schools. in his march 2009 speech to the hispanic chamber of  commerce, president obama observed, "in 8th grade math, we've fallen to 9th  place.
evidence_5: ago, u.s. fourth graders ranked twelfth in math and sixth in science among the  students in 25 countries who took the test. by eighth grade, u.s. students had  fallen to fifteenth in math and ninth in science among 45 nations measured.  american students lagged behind such economic competitors as singapore,  taiwan, ...