This article reports on reactions to the U.S. Department of Education's first time decision to sit out an international study designed to show how advanced high school students around the world measure up in math and science. Mark S. Schneider, the commissioner of the department's National Center for Education Statistics, which normally takes the…

Educators, researchers, and policymakers have considerable interest in how the American educational system compares to those in other countries. One major index for comparison is student academic achievement. This paper links the scale of the "National Assessment of Educational Progress" ("NAEP") to the scale of the "Third International…