This epoch in America will likely be remembered for our great divide–economically, scientifically, culturally and educationally. These aren’t the worst of times, but they are the best of times for fewer and fewer. From Jordan Weissmann at the Atlantic, a passage about the top-heavy success of our educational system:

“When you look at the average performance of American students on international test scores, our kids come off as a pretty middling bunch. If you rank countries based on their very fine differences, we come in 14th in reading, 23rd in science, and 25th in math. Those finishes led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to flatly declare that ‘we’re being out-educated.’

And on average, maybe we are. But averages also sometimes obscure more than they reveal. My colleague Derek Thompson has written before about how, once you compare students from similar income and class backgrounds, our relative performance improves dramatically, suggesting that our educational problems may be as much about our sheer number of poor families as our supposedly poor schools. This week, I stumbled on another data point that belies the stereotype of dimwitted American teens. 

When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.”