CLAIM We are falling behind other nations, putting our economy and our national security at risk.
REALITY An old lament, not true then, not true now.
Critics say that the nation is more at risk than ever because American students are getting mediocre scores on international tests and falling behind other nations. If we don’t have top scores soon, our nation will suffer grievously, our national security will falter, our economy will founder, and our future will be in jeopardy.
By now, this is a timeworn bugbear, but it still works, so the critics continue to employ it to alarm the public. In 1957, critics blamed the public schools when the Soviets were first to launch a space satellite, even though this feat was the work of a tiny scientific and technological elite. In 1983, critics blamed the public schools for the success of the Japanese automobile industry (overlooking the lack of foresight by leaders of the American automobile industry) and said the nation was “at risk.” In 2012, critics asserted that the nation’s public schools are “a very grave national security crisis,” even though the nation has no significant international enemies.1
Today, critics use data from international assessments to generate a crisis mentality, not to improve public schools but to undermine public confidence in them. To the extent that they accomplish this, the public will be more tolerant of efforts to dismantle public education and divert public funding to privately managed schools and for-profit vendors of instruction.
In 2010, the release of the international assessments called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) provided a new occasion for lamenting the mediocre performance of American students. Sixty countries, including thirty-four members of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), participated in the international assessment of fifteen-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. Students in Shanghai ranked first in all three subjects (Shanghai is not representative of China, which did not participate in the assessments). Of the OECD nations, the United States ranked fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science, and twenty-fifth in mathematics (these rankings are overstated because the United States was in a statistical tie with several other nations on each test).
The media, elected officials, and think tank pundits reacted with shock and alarm. President Obama said it was “our generation’s Sputnik moment” and warned that we were losing ground to economic competitors in India and China (neither of which participated in the international tests). Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the results were “a wake-up call” to the nation.2 Editorialists were alarmed that Shanghai had scored at the top, which seemed to symbolize a new era of Chinese supremacy. The front-page story in The New York Times carried the headline “Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators.” The Chinese-born educator Yong Zhao, now a professor at the University of Oregon, cautioned Americans that China had long ago perfected the art of test taking, and Chinese parents were not happy with this practice, but his voice did not reach as many people as did the major media.3
Examined closely, the scores reveal two salient points.
First, the scores of American fifteen-year-olds had not declined. In reading and mathematics, the U.S. scores were not measurably different from earlier PISA assessments in 2000, 2003, and 2006. In science, U.S. students improved their scores over an earlier assessment in 2006.4
Second, American students in schools with low poverty—the schools where less than 10 percent of the students were poor—had scores that were equal to those of Shanghai and significantly better than those of high-scoring Finland, the Republic of Korea, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. In U.S. schools where less than a quarter of the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (the federal definition of poverty), the reading scores were similar to those of students in high-performing nations. Technically, the comparison is not valid, because it involves comparing students in low-poverty schools in the United States with the average score for entire nations. But it is important to recognize that the scores of students in low-poverty schools in the United States are far higher than the international average, higher even than the average for top-performing nations, and the scores decline as poverty levels increase, as they do in all nations. Two scholars, Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, asserted that the international testing agency had made a sampling error, assuming far higher levels of poverty in American schools than was the case; when the scores were readjusted appropriately, they argued, the United States was actually fourth in the world in reading and tenth in the world in mathematics.5
But what do these international scores really mean? Do they predict the economic future? Do average scores mean that our nation is trapped in a cycle of decline? Will top-scoring nations rule the world in twenty years?
Fact: American students have never scored especially well on international assessments.
The first such assessment, called the First International Mathematics Study, was offered in the mid-1960s. It tested thirteen-year-olds and seniors in twelve countries. American thirteen-year-olds scored significantly lower than students in nine other educational systems and ahead of only one. On the test given only to seniors enrolled in a mathematics course, U.S. students scored last. On the test given to seniors not enrolled in a mathematics course, U.S. students also scored last. In brief, our scores were dreadful.6
The First International Science Study was administered in the late 1960s and early 1970s to ten-year-olds from sixteen educational systems, to fourteen-year-olds, and to students in the last year of secondary school from eighteen educational systems. Among the youngest group, only Japanese students scored higher than those in the United States. Among fourteen-year-olds, five systems scored higher than the United States, and three were lower. Among students in their last year of high school, Americans scored last.7
When mathematics was tested again in the early 1980s, American thirteen-year-olds tested at or near the median. American seniors placed at or near the bottom on most subjects, and the scores of our top students in algebra (the top 1 percent) were lower than those of the same group in every other country. Science was tested again in the mid-1980s, and U.S. students did not excel: ten-year-olds scored at the median, fourteen-year-olds were in the bottom quarter, and seniors scored at or near the bottom in biology, chemistry, and physics.8
Why have American students scored poorly over the years on international tests? No one can say for certain, but I recall that when I worked in the U.S. Department of Education in the early 1990s, we were briefed on the latest dismal results. The representative from the testing agency described how Korean students in eighth grade were excited about doing well on the test, on behalf of their nation, while American students didn’t seem to care about the tests because they knew their scores didn’t “count,” didn’t matter, wouldn’t affect their grades or their chances of getting into college. Later, when I was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, we held discussions about the problem of motivating high school seniors; they didn’t take the NAEP seriously, because they knew it had no stakes for them. Some doodled on the exam; some made patterns on their answer sheet.
Given the current emphasis on testing and the ongoing pressure to raise scores, students have learned to pay more attention to tests, even when they don’t count toward grades or graduation.
In 2012, the results of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), the major international assessments of mathematics and science, were released. American students have participated in TIMSS since 1995. The major American media presented the 2012 results in a negative light, reflecting the reformers’ gloomy narrative. The headline in The New York Times read, “U.S. Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests Show.” The Washington Post ran the headline “U.S. Students Continue to Trail Asian Students in Math, Reading, Science.”9
But the media were wrong. American students performed surprisingly well in mathematics and science, well above the international average in both subjects in grades 4 and 8. Two American states (Florida and North Carolina) volunteered to take the TIMSS tests in fourth grade, and another seven states took the tests in eighth grade, to gauge how they were doing by international standards.10
In fourth-grade mathematics, U.S. students outperformed most of the fifty-seven educational systems that participated. American students were tied with their peers in Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, and Russia. South Korea, Singapore, and Japan were the only nations that outperformed fourth-grade students in the United States (as did certain regions, like Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei). American students outperformed their peers in such nations as Germany, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand. North Carolina ranked as one of the top-performing entities in the world.
In eighth-grade mathematics, U.S. students also did very well. They were tied with their peers in Israel, Finland, Australia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, and England. The only nations that outperformed the United States were Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Russia (along with the two Chinese regions noted above). Students in four American states that offered to take the tests ranked among the world’s highest-performing entities: Massachusetts, Minnesota, Indiana, and North Carolina. Black students in Massachusetts received the same scores as students in Israel and Finland. Imagine that! It should have been a front-page story across the nation, but it was not.
In fourth-grade science, American students ranked in the top ten systems of the fifty-seven that took the test. Only South Korea, Japan, Finland, Russia, and Singapore ranked higher (along with Chinese Taipei).
In eighth-grade science, American students were outperformed by only six nations (Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Finland, and Slovenia, along with Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei) and tied with those in England, Hungary, Israel, and Australia. The states of Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado, which volunteered to participate in TIMSS, ranked among the top-performing nations in the world. Massachusetts, had it been an independent nation, would have been ranked second in the world, behind Singapore.
Four dozen nations participated in the latest international reading assessment called PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). Fourth-grade students in the United States were among the top performers in the world, ranked behind only Hong Kong, Russia, Finland, and Singapore. The only U.S. state to participate, Florida, scored behind Hong Kong; if it were a nation, Florida would have been tied for second in the world with Russia, Finland, and Singapore.11
So, contrary to the loud complaints of the reform chorus, American students are doing quite well in comparison to those of other advanced nations. Are the test scores of American students falling? No. Between 1995 and 2011, the mathematics scores of our students in fourth grade and eighth grade increased significantly. In science, the scores did not fall; they were about the same in both years. In reading, the scores increased from 2001 to 2011.12
Although the media did not report the improvement, some reformers may recover from the shock of seeing American students performing well on international assessments by claiming credit. See, they might say, all that testing has raised our standing on the international tests. Perhaps the constant drilling in reading and mathematics did have some effect on test performance—as Yong Zhao points out, Chinese educators long ago perfected the art of test taking—but it would be ludicrous to give credit to the reformers’ other strategies. The number of students enrolled in charters and holding vouchers (perhaps 4 percent of American students) was too small to matter, and test-based evaluation of teachers was too new to affect student performance on tests taken in 2011. To what must certainly be the chagrin of our reformers, American public schools produced these strong results.
What we can say with reasonable assurance is that American students have never been number one on the international assessments and—over the past half century—more typically scored either about average or even in the bottom quartile. It should thus be a source of satisfaction that in the latest international assessments of mathematics, science, and reading American students performed very well, and their performance is not declining.
But what do these tests mean, and do they matter?
Recall that A Nation at Risk warned that if we didn’t change course, our nation was in deep trouble. We stood to lose our global leadership, our economy, and even our identity as a people. A very stern warning. But thirty years after that warning was issued, the American economy was the largest in the world, and the nation did not seem to be in danger of losing its identity or its standing in the world. How could this be?
Some of our policy makers look longingly at the test scores of Singapore, Japan, and South Korea even as those nations look to us and try to figure out how to make their schools more attentive to creativity and inquiry-based learning. Others look to Finland as a model, ignoring the fact that educators in Finland do not share our national obsession with testing. Finnish educators profess not to care about their standing on the international tests, other than to note that doing well protects their schools from demands for testing and accountability. Unlike us, the Finns place a high premium on creativity, the arts, and problem solving and still manage to do well on international tests, without subjecting their students to a steady diet of standardized testing.
Yong Zhao sees the decentralization and absence of standardization in American education as one of its strengths. He writes, “American education has many problems, but to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of education except for all others that have been tried. The decentralized system with local governance is a fundamentally sound framework that has evolved within the American context, that has led to America’s economic prosperity and scientific preeminence so far, and that is being studied and copied by others.” He worries that in our eagerness to copy nations with higher test scores, we may sacrifice the qualities of individualism and creativity that have been the source of our nation’s economic, social, and technological success.13
Yong Zhao writes that China wants to transform itself from “a labor-intensive, low-level manufacturing economy into an innovation-driven knowledge society.” Innovative people, he says, create an innovation-driven society. “Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students who excel at regurgitating spoon-fed knowledge.” He asks the obvious questions: “If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it?” Why would Americans “allow the government to dictate what their children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated”? Continuing to pursue this course of action, he warns, can do serious damage to American education because it demoralizes educators and at the same time “denies the real cause of education inequality—poverty, funding gaps, and psychological damages caused by racial discrimination—by placing all responsibilities on schools and teachers.”14
The Chinese public “seems eager to embrace what is viewed as a more liberal and creative system.” Zhao quotes a Chinese journalist who was a visiting scholar in Arizona in the 1990s. The journalist admired American education because it had “no uniform textbooks, no standardized tests, no ranking of students, this is American education.” The journalist’s ten-year-old son attended an American school, and the father was impressed:
American classrooms don’t impart a massive amount of knowledge into their children, but they try every way to draw children’s eyes to the boundless ocean of knowledge outside the school; they do not force their children to memorize all the formulae and theorems, but they work tirelessly to teach children how to think and ways to seek answers to new questions; they never rank students according to test scores, but they try every way to affirm children’s efforts, praise their thoughts, and protect and encourage children’s desire and effort.15
Zhao observed that “what the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences.”
Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian American technology entrepreneur and academic, challenged the popular perception that U.S. schools are failing and that we are doing poorly in comparison to those in China and India. It is true, he said, that the schools of those nations are “fiercely competitive,” and that children spend most of their childhood “memorizing books on advanced subjects.” This kind of education has been a hindrance, he wrote, and that is why so many engineers trained in their schools and universities must spend two or three years unlearning the habits instilled by years of rote memorization. By contrast, American students learn independence and social skills. “They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation.”16
The attitudes and skills that Wadhwa admires are the very ones that are sacrificed by the intensive focus on standardized testing that has been foisted on American schools by federal policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Keith Baker, who worked for many years as an analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, asked, “Are international tests worth anything?” Do they predict the future of a nation’s economy? He reviewed the evidence and concluded that for the United States and about a dozen of the world’s most advanced nations, “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless. There is no association between test scores and national success, and, contrary to one of the major beliefs driving U.S. education policy for nearly half a century, international test scores are nothing to be concerned about. America’s schools are doing just fine on the world scene.”17
Baker argued that the purveyors of doom and gloom were committing the “ecological correlation fallacy.” It is a fallacy to generalize that what is good for an individual (a higher test score, for example) must be right for the nation as a whole. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, he said, but evidence, not just an assumption, is required to make the case. To test the predictive value of the international assessments, he used the results of the First International Mathematics Study, given in 1964 to thirteen-year-olds in twelve nations. Students in the United States placed next to last, ahead of Sweden.
Baker looked at per capita gross domestic product of the nations whose students competed in 1964. He found that “the higher a nation’s test score 40 years ago, the worse its economic performance on this measure of national wealth—the opposite of what the Chicken Littles raising the alarm over the poor test scores of U.S. children claimed would happen.” The rate of economic growth improved, he held, as test scores dropped. There was no relationship between a nation’s productivity and its test scores. Nor did high test scores bear any relationship to quality of life or livability, and the lower-scoring nations in the assessment were more successful at achieving democracy than those with higher scores.
But what about creativity? On this measure, the United States “clobbered the world,” wrote Baker, with more patents per million people than any other nation. A certain level of educational achievement may be considered “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.”
The United States has been a successful nation, Baker argues, because its schools cultivate a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”
Baker has a message for the reformers, foundation executives, journalists, policy makers, and government officials who have foisted an unhealthy obsession with testing and test scores on our nation’s schools:
For more than a quarter of a century, the American public has been barraged by politicians and pundits claiming that America’s schools are disaster zones because we are not at or near the top of the league standings in test scores. This claim is flat out wrong. It is wrong in fact, and it is wrong in theory. For almost 40 years, those who believe this fallacious theory have been leading the nation down the wrong path in education policy. It turns out that the elementary teachers who have said all along that there is more to education than what is reflected in test scores were right and the “experts” were wrong.
Trying to raise America’s test scores in comparison to those of other nations is worse than pointless. It looks to be harmful, for the only way to do it is to divert time, energy, skill, and resources away from those other factors that propel the U.S. to the top of the heap on everything that matters: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The fixation with test scores also harms the nation by diverting time, attention, and resources away from America’s real educational problems, such as too few minorities graduating from college, the run-down schools in the nation’s inner cities, misdirected parental interference in schools, and the lack of parental and administrative support for teachers. There are more, of course, but nowhere on the list of our educational problems should we ever again find worries over our performance on tests compared to that of other nations.
As Yong Zhao has pointed out, it is bizarre for the world’s leader in science and technology, the nation with the most powerful economy in the world, to be on a perpetual hunt for another nation to emulate. Of course, nations should learn from one another, but why would we want to copy the rote systems that nations like China and India are trying to shed? Why would we abandon the intellectual freedom and professional autonomy that have produced a spirit of inquiry and a love of tinkering and innovation? Why would we kill the seed corn of entrepreneurship by squeezing all of our children into a uniform mold? Why would we insist on judging their individual worth by their ability to guess the right answer to prescribed questions? Why do we not appreciate what we have that works and focus instead on solving our genuine problems?
More testing does not make children smarter. More testing does not reduce achievement gaps. More testing does nothing to address poverty and racial isolation, which are the root causes of low academic achievement. More testing will, however, undermine the creative spirit, the innovative spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that have made our economy and our society successful. Used wisely, to identify student learning problems, testing can be useful to teachers. But testing should be used diagnostically, not to hand out rewards or punishments.
Surely, there is value in structured, disciplined learning, whether in history, literature, mathematics, or science; students need to learn to study and to think; they need the skills and knowledge that are patiently acquired over time. Just as surely, there is value in the activities and projects that encourage innovation. The incessant demand for more testing and standardization advances neither.