A FEW WEEKS ago, an earnest-sounding journalist based in Halifax called me with a new twist on the What do tests tell us? question. Any educator who deals with the media knows the frustration of trying to answer questions that seem perfectly reasonable from the layperson's perspective but deserve almost impossibly complex responses. The wisest answers to these questions usually begin with the phrase, Well, all . Unfortunately, nuanced comments tend to irk journalists, who know that their editors and producers are looking for pithy, unequivocal statements that can be ridiculed by the next interviewee. It's called making the news. Certainly, politicians realize that it all depends isn't a vote- getting sound bite. Action, not deliberation, is the new measure of leadership. And, as turned out, was a politician's ready, fire, aim reaction to public criticism that prompted the phone call from Halifax. Canada's results on the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment (1999), known as PISA, had just been released.1 While Canadian 15-year-olds achieved their best-ever rankings in reading, mathematics, and science, the province of Nova Scotia, along with the other Atlantic provinces, had fallen well short of the performance of the central and western provinces.2 Under fire from the opposition and the media, Nova Scotian Education Minister Jane Purves announced a quick fix. Her ministry would see that each fourth-grader would receive a writing handbook. Grammar is like the rules of the road for effective communication, Ms. Purves explained in a press release, which went on to defend accurate spelling and correct usage as essential employability skills.3 When an impish member of the press gallery asked the minister to define a gerund, she admitted to being uncertain, but ventured that she thought that had something to do with i-n-g endings. I assured the reporter that, in my opinion, there was no known link between being able to distinguish gerunds from participles and scoring well on retrieving and reflecting -- or, for that matter, succeeding in the labor market, which is the intended focus of the PISA assessment. But I also told him that the report did contain a great deal of information that deserved public attention and debate. Several important findings are buried in the detailed, competent, and clearly written 93-page report on PISA produced by Statistics Canada, some of which are interesting because they are counterintuitive. The most useful findings were derived by integrating achievement scores with contextual information collected through YITS: the Youth in Transition Survey. YITS questionnaires were administered to the Canadian students who took PISA and to their teachers and principals; parents participated in half-hour telephone interviews. According to StatCan's report, * Canadian schools have been more successful than most of their international counterparts in mitigating the effects on achievement of students' socioeconomic characteristics (p. 19). * Moderate use of public and libraries contributes to high scores, but very frequent use is associated with a drop in reading scores (p. 21). * Time spent on homework has a trivial effect on scores in reading, math, and science in all but a very few jurisdictions (p. 28). * Students' sense of belonging to school has no significant effect on scores (p. 29). * Part-time jobs, held by an estimated 40% of high students, have a negative effect on scores in all provinces. Contrary to several previous studies, labor force participation of even a few hours a week appears to hamper student achievement (p. 28). * Students who live in single-parent households perform significantly less well than those in dual-parent households (p. …