The release of the 2012 results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on December 3, 2012, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ([OECD], 2013) brought about another round of public education fear mongering on the part of bureaucrats and policymakers. However, weaknesses with the PISA test design, sampling, and score calculations brought to light by researchers call into question the results and rankings, and any conclusions drawn from them about the quality of a country's education system. (Adams, Berezner, & Jakubowski, 2010). Sjøberg (2012) and Stewart (2013) provided comprehensive analyses that revealed serious weaknesses in PISA. Even researchers from the OECD (2010) cautioned not to use the results to infer that one country's public education system is better than another's. Basing important policy decisions on results from international tests of academic output is just bad practice; and given the recent disclosures of technical flaws in PISA rankings, it is potentially incompetent. That is not to say that all international education outcome data are meaningless. In fact, there are many indices and international student surveys worth data mining. In this article, the author presents rankings and results from some potentially worthwhile indicators as a basis for starting a different type of discussion--one that rests at the intersection of standardization and creativity. Data is presented that calls into question the need to standardize the U.S. public school system. These data suggest that perhaps we should be talking about why the United States is not capitalizing on its global dominance of innovation and talent diversity.