Martin Carnoy, author of Transforming Comparative Education, on measuring student performance.
For the past two decades, based on international tests measuring student performance in math, science, and reading, countries around the world have been told where their educational systems rank compared to others. Students in the U.S. have not fared particularly well on these tests, especially in math and science, but neither have students in other countries; such as France, Russia, and Israel; that seem to have “great” educational systems. Policy makers worldwide have been told to organize their schools to look more like those in Finland or Singapore or Korea, the “high performers” on the OECD’s popular PISA test.
The latest “fashion” in the field of comparative and international education is the use of international test “league tables,” which rank countries by their sampled student’s average, made by test organizers, such as the OECD. These tables make high scoring countries exemplars to emulate within the industry.
The field’s origins are in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when educators often looked to other countries for ideas on how to construct their own educational systems. For example, Europeans saw mass primary education in the U.S. as important for their own development. The U.S., in turn, took Germany’s Humboldt University as the model for land grant universities.
After World War II, the conception of comparative education changed, shaped by two main forces. First, the United States became the dominant Western democracy, and many U.S. educators believed that the U.S. educational model could be used to instill democratic values elsewhere, especially in developing countries. This mission was made more urgent because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and its educational model. Second, the 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of the social sciences and their application to social problems, from enhancing economic development to curing poverty. Education was similarly influenced by this social science approach. Comparative and international educators increasingly drew their comparative methods from economics and sociology, looking to broader contexts to compare educational systems and to understand why they were similar or differed among countries. Social scientists studying education internationally called for gathering sample data on students, their family background, their teachers, and their schools. This led to large scale surveys, including achievement tests, comparing student performance in various countries.
As I show in my recent book, Transforming Comparative Education: Fifty Years of Theory Building at Stanford, it was in this context that universities such as Chicago, Teachers College Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford developed comparative and international education programs in the 1950s and 1960s. The programs were social science based, and some, such as Stanford’s and Harvard’s, initially focused on combining research and training with spreading U.S. democratic ideals to developing countries. At Stanford, Paul Hanna, who had made his name as a social studies curriculum innovator, founded the Stanford International Development Education Center (SIDEC) in 1964. He raised major funding from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, and began training large numbers of PhD students, who went out to influence educational policy in developing countries. Not surprisingly, Hanna saw social studies textbooks as a key to promoting democracy globally.
However, along with other U.S. comparative education programs, both research and student training at Stanford shifted rapidly after the 1960s. The new focus was on using economic, sociological, and political models to explain the dynamic of educational systems internationally. This transformation of comparative education as a field was driven by a series of important theoretical contributions and debates, most of them coming out of the Stanford program. Among them were John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez’s “world society theory,” Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin’s application of state theory to comparative education, and Hans Weiler’s compensatory legitimation theory, all developed in the 1970s and 1980s at Stanford. These theoretical approaches tried to make sense of how and why educational systems worked the way they did, and how and why they differed or were similar. In all the approaches, education was socially, economically, and politically contextualized — educational systems were part and parcel of larger, complex societal dynamics. One of the implications of these analyses was that successfully importing features of educational systems in other societies was quite difficult unless the institutional structures of those societies were similar to each other.
At the same time as the theoretical debates invigorated comparative education, the first international student achievement tests also became part of the comparative education discussion. Despite pleas by the psychometricians who developed the tests not to use average student performance as quality measures of national education systems, this is exactly what the test results came to represent. Nevertheless, as late as 1995, interesting analyses emerged from the Third International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) for why students in the U.S. did not do as well in math as, for example, students in Japan. In the words of the U.S. report, the U.S. math curriculum was a “mile wide and an inch deep,” while Japan’s focused on fewer math subjects and dealt with them much more profoundly.
In the current measurement mania that has gripped education more generally, comparative education is dominated by student achievement country rankings. High scoring countries are used as exemplars for everyone else, with ad hoc reasons provided for why students in those countries performed well on the tests. Little attention is paid as to more detailed understanding of the societal context of higher and lower test scores, and even less to understanding whether and why educational systems in some countries are organized to produce high test scores and in others, to produce a more diverse set of outcomes.
One thing is certain: the heady theoretical debates situating educational system comparisons in the context of broader social dynamics no longer dominate comparative international education. As my book argues, there is good reason that the debates should be resurrected, hopefully in new forms. There is also good reason that completely new theoretical approaches should emerge from the mass of international data now available. In the book, I provide some likely candidates for new approaches — some from organization theory, some from state theory, and yet others from the learning sciences. Drawing on international and intranational educational comparisons, all could contribute to better strategies for making educational systems more relevant and more effective in the societies they serve.
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