What's Wrong with Catalan Schools? (III)

In the 2009 OECD Pisa Report, my home school system of Ontario scored 531 points for reading skills, with a fairly narrow spread between the lowest and the highest scores. Spain and Catalonia rated lower, as they did in mathematics, despite steady improvement across the 2003, 2006, and 2009 reports. (Scores for reading stood at  481 and 498, respectively.) Ontario schoolchildren spend sixteen more days at school per year than do their Catalan counterparts, which may go some way to explaining the difference in scores. My first question, then, is why there is no public debate in Catalan media about the number of contact hours as an aspect of education policy.

More worrying than overall scores is the shape of bell curve for Spanish reading scores. Consider this:

Click for a larger image.

Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-590-x/2010001/tbl/tblb1.13-eng.htm

Reading scores are here broken down into six ranges. How many students score in the highest of these six ranges? In Ontario, it's 1.9%; in Spain, it's 0.2%. How many score in the two two ranges, Levels 5 and 6 together. In Ontario, it's 14.2%; in Spain, 3.4&. How many score in the top three ranges, Levels 4-6? In Ontario, it's 41.9%, in Spain, 21.2%. Spain catches up with the rest of the developed world with very healthy percentages in Levels 2 and 3--both of are tantamount to a passing mark--but does very poorly if one concentrates on students who are scoring particularly high. Numerically, Spain does a poor job at producing brilliant students. Thus my second question: Why?