Three years ago, 20 suburban Chicago school districts banded together to improve students' math and science education. In the 1994-95 school year, they obtained special permission to take the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) as though they were a separate country. The test involves hundreds of thousands of students in 41 countries who are tested at ages 9, 13 and in their last year of high school. TIMSS scores were released earlier this year.

While other U.S. students performed miserably in comparison to students in other countries, the Chicago students -- calling themselves the First in the World Consortium -- did extremely well.

• While U.S. students ranked 18th among the 41 countries in science, consortium students came in second -- bested only by Singapore students.

• In math, the U.S. ranked 28th, but the Chicago group placed fifth -- behind Singapore, Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.

The consortium plans to study the teaching practices of successful countries, as well as their textbooks, curricula, student attitudes and how students spend their time. It also hopes to pinpoint what it is doing right.

There are already some clues. Half of the consortium's eighth-grade students take algebra, compared to only 20 percent nationally. Experts say that teachers in high-scoring countries often assign less homework than U.S. teachers -- suggesting a reduction in the amount of homework, but more focused assignments.

Some consortium teachers believe U.S. teachers demand less high-level thought from students and instruction is less focused.

• Experts at the University of California rated 23 percent of eighth-grade mathematics lessons in Germany and 30 percent in Japan as high quality.

• None of the lessons in the U.S. was rated of high quality and 87 percent were rated low quality.

A student's home and neighborhood environment may not play as significant a role as commonly thought -- since the children of Hong Kong parents who never finished high school significantly outperformed U.S. children with a parent holding a college degree.