Low US education rankings: too much attention to sports, media, or shopping?

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Has anyone compared PISA results with something like GNP to see what influence it has on a national level?

See:
http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/

Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared.

However, …

At all points in the social class distribution, U.S. students perform worse, and in many cases substantially worse, than students in a group of top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea). Although controlling for social class distribution would narrow the difference in average scores between these countries and the United States, it would not eliminate it.

This study attempts to control for differences in social class distributions, not differences in GNP. It selected BH (Books in the Home) as “the most appropriate of the available measures for analyzing test score differences by students’ social class”.

This isn’t an issue that I follow as closely as we probably all should … in part because I find it hard to filter out the political bias that seems to color so many discussions in the popular media. I don’t get the impression that too many members of Congress, or talking heads, are able to look at the issue dispassionately and give the public an honest appraisal of where we stand as a country, and what are our realistic options are for improvements.