Critics of international education comparisons often complain that they are misleading because the variation in student performance is so great in the U.S. "The achievement of American schools is a lot more variable than is student achievement from elsewhere," asserted Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis. A new study by three RAND researchers says that's not so. In an examination of eighth grade math scores on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), the researchers find that the standard deviation (or spread) of the US sample was near the middle of the pack of the seven countries they analyzed. Student scores in Hong Kong and Japan show much greater variation than in the US; American scores vary about the same amount as those of students in England and New Zealand. For more, see "Predicting Variations in Mathematics Performance in Four Countries Using TIMSS," by Daniel Koretz, Daniel McCaffrey, and Thomas Sullivan, Education Policy Analysis Archives, v. 9 no. 34, September 14, 2001, http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n34/
