Stanford University Press Blog

Should We Use International Test Scores To Compare The Quality Of Nations’ Educational Systems?

Martin Carnoy, author of Transforming Comparative Education, on measuring student performance.

MARTIN CARNOY

Free for commercial use via Pixabay.

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

Food Drive for the Aspiring Attorney

For-profit law schools are likely to remain unchallenged under Trump.

by RIAZ TEJANI

Public domain via Pixabay.

After centuries of exclusion from the legal profession and the justice system, ethnoracial and socioeconomic minorities are now welcome—at a very hefty cost. This was a key lesson I learned from years studying a US for-profit law program. Whereas school proprietors counted on a feast of unconditional federal student loan dollars, students assumed the risk of famine brought by non-dischargeable debt and limited job prospects. Students of one law school even faced literal hunger as their loan checks were temporarily suspended due to their school’s repeatedly poor performance.

For-profit law schools, once unheard of under the strict accreditation monopoly of the American Bar Association (ABA), suddenly became viable after a deregulatory policy shift in the 1990s. Following the lead of large for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, financiers powered by fresh interest in private equity investment created new law schools and branded them with a mission to “serve the underserved,” in other words to cater to minority and working-class communities long excluded from the legal profession and access to justice. Amid renewed, marketized interest in corporate and professional “diversity,” these schools attained ABA accreditation.

Despite accusations of predatory behavior, they could argue that no one else was so actively diversifying the legal community. When more and more students—especially minority graduates—failed to obtain Bar admission or gainful employment upon completion, school principals argued they had enabled market “access” for more minority legal professionals than anyone before.

Whereas school proprietors counted on a feast of unconditional federal student loan dollars, students assumed the risk of famine brought by non-dischargeable debt and limited job prospects.

Women and the World in Academia

How the global character of higher education has given women a leg up in STEM fields.

by KATHRIN ZIPPEL

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute. Photo by Rhoda Baer. Public domain.

International collaborations and the mobility of academics that makes such collaborations possible are both more important but also more politically charged today than they have been in recent years. The Trump administration has unveiled a new executive order banning immigration from six Muslim-majority countries after his initial order, which threatened the movement of students, researchers, and professors (among many others) from the targeted countries, was blocked by the judiciary. Meanwhile, university lawyers have advised members of the academic community already in the United States to postpone any travel outside of the states; and travel outside the country for all foreign nationals is now considered a risk. Researchers at U.S. universities have already expressed fear that they will not be able to continue their research abroad.

The premier reputation boasted by U.S. universities (particularly in science and technology fields) has been precisely because U.S. academia has been open to the world.

These developments are causing great concern in the academic community as the premier reputation boasted by U.S. universities (particularly in science and technology fields) has been precisely because U.S. academia has been open to the world. This openness attracts top talent and extends research collaborations across the globe. Immigrants have long been crucial to making U.S. science “great,” including Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany and escaped the Holocaust. Without immigrants, the United States would have won nearly one-third fewer Nobel prizes and not a single one in 2016 when all six winners were immigrants. Much less discussed, however, is the adverse impact closing national borders may have on the academic careers of women in particular, whose successes in academia have long been shaped and bolstered by having access to international opportunities.

The School Choice Agenda

Betsy DeVos believes charter schools and vouchers will improve education—but will they?

by STEVEN BRINT

A still capture from Betsy DeVos's Senate confirmation hearing, via C-SPAN. Public domain.

The express commitment of the incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, to expand school choice options for American schoolchildren has thrust charter schools and voucher programs to the fore of education debates in the U.S. Over the years the DeVos family charitable foundation has donated some $10 million to organizations promoting the school choice agenda, both through the expansion of charter schools and the introduction of school vouchers to allow students to spend public funds on any school that would take them, whether public or private. While in the United States, voucher programs remain rare (the voucher campaign the DeVos family supported in Michigan lost resoundingly), charter schools have many advocates and have gained a lot of traction in recent years.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system.

Publicly funded, but privately managed, charter schools are so named because they negotiate charters with local school districts that specify agreements about requirements, funding, curriculum, and oversight. Many of the original charter schools were organized by parents in school districts who were dissatisfied with the education their children were receiving. Today, school districts may sponsor an expanded role for charter schools by encouraging charter school expansion and making funds available to those who wish to run them.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system. Large, politically conservative foundations, including the Walton Foundation (from the Walmart stores fortune), the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation, have poured millions of dollars into promoting charter schools, as have a number of billionaire hedge fund managers. All claim that they are trying to provide options for families, but many suspect that the real motive of many advocates is to shrink the public sector in every sphere, including education. Over the last three decades, many large school districts, faced with depressing student performance results, have expanded charter school options, including in cities like Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Flunking Out In China

How high stakes exams create hurdles that many Chinese students will never overcome.

by T.E. WORONOV

Public domain.

Debates about Chinese education feature regularly in the global media, particularly since students in Shanghai ranked first in the world in the 2009 and 2012 student assessment surveys from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. The results of the survey—which tested the abilities of fifteen-year-old students in 65 countries worldwide—led some pundits to argue that Chinese educational methods, especially in math and science, should be exported internationally so that students elsewhere can “keep up” with their Chinese age-mates. At the same time, however, others within China and abroad have strongly criticized the Chinese education system, arguing that it places too much pressure on young people, relies on rote memorization, and forecloses student creativity and independent thinking. 

This image of the test-taking, studious young person is hardly representative of all Chinese youth.

Notably, both sides of these debates are predicated on an image of China’s high-performing students. Indeed, the dominant image of China’s youth in both China and the West is of studious, academic young people, with their heads buried in books. I was often told in China that this is simply what kids are expected to do every day; As many Chinese parents informed me when I first began researching Chinese education: “All Chinese kids do is study.”

Yet in reality this image of the test-taking, studious young person is hardly representative of all Chinese youth, for it erases almost half of the nation’s adolescents who never even make it to high school. A large proportion of China’s youth—up to 50% in some localities — fail to pass through a crucial bottleneck in the Chinese educational system: the High School Entrance Examination (HSEE), a high-stakes standardized exam that all graduating ninth graders must take before they can move on to senior high school. Once students fail this exam, their academic careers are finished.

Higher Ed Flies Under the Radar

Why has K-12 undergone waves of reform while higher education remains unscathed?

Public Domain image of St. Anselm College via Wikipedia.

When the Common Core debate crescendoed back around 2010, the education sector, the reformers, the public, and the policymakers regularly waged pitched battles over student outcomes, teachers’ job security, and the overall quality of public school education. Major national media offered in-depth investigations and passionate op-eds for and against, pushing the issue into the national spotlight and turning the contest into a political flash point.

How have colleges and universities escaped public scrutiny and the policymaking zeal so characteristic of primary and secondary school?

Common Core struck a nerve in the national discourse—as did President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act; as does the ongoing debate over the merits of charter schools. Today, primary and secondary education is a highly scrutinized industry, beset by ever-shifting public opinion and interventionist policymakers. 

This reformist impulse in the K-12 space is not new to the United States: it has been the focus of the last half-century of education policy. But while policymakers and primary and secondary school stakeholders take each other to the mat over how to best allocate resources, measure success, and help students achieve more, most higher education institutions operate in their own largely autonomous ecosystem, without much awareness of or engagement in state and federal policy.

How is it that colleges and universities have escaped the public scrutiny and policymaking zeal that has characterized primary and secondary schooling?

Higher Education in Flux

Community colleges and for-profit schools are the next frontier in higher ed.

Each year bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college freshmen arrive on campus and begin their four- to six-year trajectory through higher education. Rewarding though the experience may be for most, the attendant sticker price of a college degree has put it out of reach for many and made it a sizeable burden for those intrepid enough to follow through. The increasingly untenable demands that higher education makes on students and their families has raised profound questions about the current system’s sustainability, even prompting a radical federal initiative to offer free alternatives.

Remaking College » considers the changing context of postsecondary education.

Higher education in the U.S. was not always this troubled; beginning in 1945 the U.S. built the largest and most productive education system in world history in stunningly short order. Waning state support and ever-skyrocketing costs have since pulled this golden era in postsecondary education into steep decline. Such is the opinion of Professors Michael Kirst and Mitchell Stevens, editors of the new volume, Remaking College. 

Though the seismic changes rippling through college and university ecosystems may prompt feelings of nostalgia for a bygone era of higher education, the new landscape also presents the possibility of new paradigms—perhaps better ones. Kirst and Stevens note that the typical college student—“a student who enrolls in college full time, ideally resides on a physical campus, remains unmarried and childless while in school, engages in minimal paid work, and completes a degree within four to six years”—is essentially an endangered species. 

“One of the things that the book is trying to do is to encourage Americans to think about ways in which we can have college fit more comfortably into lives rather than having lives fit into college.”
—Mitchell Stevens, Associate Professor of Education