Now comes word that some school systems do work and the US is not, after all, at the bottom of the educational heap, as some may have feared an international survey would reveal. Still, ranking 18th among 24 industrialized nations examined by a research center run by Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, is nothing Washington lawmakers may want to brag about. Germany comes in a notch lower than the US, at 19th.

American media had a field day recently over the panicky shenanigans of a top securities analyst earning a reported $20 million a year in his ultimately successful effort to get his twins into preschool -- a task he rated more difficult (no kidding) than getting a high school graduate into Harvard.

Parents pushing their children toward excellence, without necessarily pulling financial strings -- the analyst's children's school was reported to have collected a donation of $1 million to back his application -- is nothing new. Japan and the Republic of Korea are among countries where this is common. The UN survey demonstrates the merits of keeping students' noses in their books. Korean and Japanese teenagers came in first and second as national groups for academic achievement.

Finland and Canada ranked No. 3 and No. 4 in the list.

A child starting school in these countries "has both a higher probability of reaching a given level of educational achievement and a lower probability of falling well below the average," the Innocenti Research Center reported.

The center, which is in the Italian city of Florence, also remarked that while "handwringing over educational failures is a national pastime" in the United Kingdom, British kids actually showed up better in the survey than those of the other countries in the European Union with the exceptions of Finland and Austria. Britain ranked seventh overall. France was twelfth.

Tests on which the survey was based were conducted among students aged 14 and 15 and covered literacy and an ability to apply essential mathematics and science.

Students from Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal fared the worst.

Not surprisingly, the survey found that the economic and occupational status of parents was "a strong predictor of a child's success or failure at school." Smart, well-to-do parents tended to produce young achievers.

But the "big picture," said Unicef, is simply that some states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose 30 members account for most of the world's wealth and among which the survey was done, are consistently performing better than others in educating and equipping their youngsters for life in the 21st century. On this basis, the US, by far the wealthiest member, is simply an underperformer. Many critics have worried about this for some time.

China is not, of course, in the OECD, preferring to maintain the fiction of being a developing country. At some point, the Innocenti researchers may want to compare the academic attainments of Chinese students to those of the OECD group. Anecdotal evidence suggests they would be up among the leaders.