The past several decades have witnessed a growing demand for educational reform within a wide range of countries. To this end, researchers and policymakers have recognized the crucial role that comparative analyses of different educational systems can play in reforming a nation’s school system. The inability to do so helps explain the recent emergence of international datasets in education. Now, cross-national estimates of student competencies are available through a series of tests given regularly by two different international organizations. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) administers two of them. One is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which is a study of the reading literacy of fourth-grade students. The other is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ...