best performing students, part 2

I think I'm going to force myself to give up on the Quest to discover what TIMSS has to tell us about the presence or absence of a gender gap in math achievement in Asia.....

But naturally, I've happened across all kinds of interesting factoids en route to not finding what I was looking for, most of it relating to the question of whether our schools do a good job with rich white kids.

From the 1998 TIMSS:

• Nine percent of U.S. fourth-graders would be included in a talent pool made up of the top 10 percent ofall students who took TIMSS. Not bad.

• But only 5 percent of U.S. eighth-graders would be included in this pool instead of the expected 10 percent. Not good.

• And, the most advanced mathematics students in the United States (only about 5 percent of the 12th grade cohort), performed similarly to 10 percent to 20 percent of that same cohort in most other countries. Terrible.