"First in!" read the headline of Nikkan Sports Daily following the 1-0 vintory in Uzbekistan that sealed Japan's qualification It took Shunsuke Nakamura, the most experienced player in the squad, to put a perspective on the achievement.
In 2000, the OECD ranked UK pupils above average – seventh in reading and eighth in maths out of 27 countries.
Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math.
In 1996 Texas's black fourth graders were the country's best in mathematics; two years later, Texas's Latinos ranked fourth in reading among Latinos nationwide.
In 1998, Texas's Latinos ranked fourth in reading among Latinos nationwide, and the state's black fourth-graders were the country's best at mathematics in 1996.
That, conveniently, disguised what is now apparent: that the excellent results of 2000, when the country came seventh in reading and well above average in both maths and science, were a statistical blip.
Out of 65 countries that took part in these tests, Singapore students ranked fifth in reading, second in mathematics and fourth in science.
By 2009, the exam's most recent administration, the Finns were near the top of the roster in all three subjects: third in reading, second in science and sixth in math.
New York City also tests third, fifth, sixth and seventh graders in reading and math, but those exams do not carry the same weight as the fourth-grade exams.
