I sit on the board of governors of a public school in Wales, which has decided it needs to focus on math after bad PISA results. We had an official from the lo

I sit on the board of governors of a public school in Wales, which has decided it needs to focus on math after bad PISA results. We had an official from the local government come in to tell us that she'd gone through our testing scores and divided schools into quartiles, so she could focus her efforts. Good, I thought. Then she said, because of how she'd done the calculation, she had ended up with three quartiles. And she hoped most of the schools in the middle quartile (like us) would be able to reach the upper quartile for math next year. I tried gamely to point out she was an imbecile, along with a reference to Lake Wobegon, but most of the rest of the governing body seemed to think this was entirely reasonable.