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Teachers have set aside time. Families have rearranged their schedules. Everyone is ready for parent-teacher conferences. This can play out in one of two ways. If there is something crucial to discuss, you might wonder: Shouldn't the parents and teachers have been communicating about this already? If there is nothing crucial to discuss, is it a waste of everyone's time?

THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S. against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts - itself a leader within the U.S."

"Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students."

To prove that poverty doesn't matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain.