School & District Management

U.S. Must Learn From International Peers, Report Says

By David J. Hoff — March 24, 2009 3 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

To respond to the Obama administration’s call for common educational standards, federal officials need to take advantage of several resources that will show where the United States stands compared with other developed countries, a group advocating such standards says in a new report.

The United States has “tunnel vision” when it comes to comparing the performance of its students, its educational expectations of students, and policies affecting every level of education, the Alliance for Excellent Education writes in a policy brief released today.

While other countries “eagerly compare” themselves against their peers, the report says, the United States “ignores the opportunities to learn from its international peers in education.”

The Alliance for Excellent Education is working with the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and other groups to establish a method for making such comparisons, often called international benchmarking.

President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have given such efforts a boost since taking office by endorsing attempts to produce common, or national, standards that are in line with what other countries expect of their students.

In a March 10 speech on education, President Obama said that other countries are ahead of the United States in creating internationally competitive education standards. Mr. Duncan has said that he would allocate portions of a new $5 billion innovation fund to support efforts to increase the rigor of education standards.

Potential Flaws

Although policymakers are leading the undertaking, prominent researchers say the measures they hope to use as benchmarks are flawed.

In its policy brief, the Alliance for Excellent Education says the United States should increase its participation in testing and policy research conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based organization of developed countries, including the United States.

While the United States participates in OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, no U.S. states or cities provide big enough samples to measure their performance. In many OECD countries, provinces and cities participate in PISA to compare their results against other countries’, says the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based nonprofit advocating policies to improve the quality of high schools.

The OECD also offers other research studies to measure the quality of teachers and school leaders, higher education policies, and overviews of national education policies.

Lessons from such research could be “an important piece” of the benchmarking process, Bob Wise, the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, said in an interview.

Other countries actively use the research and the OECD’s consulting services to help improve and refine their policies, said Andreas Schleicher, the director of OECD’s division of education indicators and analysis.

“It’s at the center of the policy debates in most OECD countries,” Mr. Schleicher said.

While other countries have embraced the OECD’s work, one prominent researcher questions whether the group’s data are good enough for the United States to use in making policy decisions.

“Our standards of evidence across all kinds of methods are higher than the OECD’s,” said Mark S. Schneider, the vice president for special initiatives in the education, human development, and the workforce division at the American Institutes for Research, a Washington-based company. Mr. Schneider was commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2008.

What’s more, the OECD’s researchers sometimes overstate the implications of their research, Mr. Schneider asserted.

“The line between policy and statistical analysis is too thin for my taste,” he said.

Last month, a report from the Brookings Institution maintained that questions on the PISA reflect ideological bias. (PISA Called Inappropriate for U.S. Benchmarking, March 4, 2009.)

But the new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education said PISA’s emphasis on measuring critical-thinking skills are “just the sort of skills that economists say an increasingly globalized and digitized economy will demand.”

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the April 01, 2009 edition of Education Week as U.S. Must Learn From International Peers, Report Says

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Student Achievement Webinar
Student Success Strategies: Flexibility, Recovery & More
Join us for Student Success Strategies to explore flexibility, credit recovery & more. Learn how districts keep students on track.
Content provided by Pearson
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Artificial Intelligence Webinar
Shaping the Future of AI in Education: A Panel for K-12 Leaders
Join K-12 leaders to explore AI’s impact on education today, future opportunities, and how to responsibly implement it in your school.
Content provided by Otus
Student Achievement K-12 Essentials Forum Learning Interventions That Work
Join this free virtual event to explore best practices in academic interventions and how to know whether they are making a difference.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Q&A This City Can Claim a NAEP Distinction No Other City Can. Here's What Happened
While American students saw another decline in 4th grade reading scores on the Nation's Report Card, this city was an exception.
6 min read
Diverse elementary students reading in the classroom
iStock/Getty Images
School & District Management Do Students Suffer When a Superintendent Leaves? A New Study Has an Answer
A new study is the first in a while to explore how students fare academically when there's turnover in the district's top office.
5 min read
A man places his hand on top of his head as he looks up at an upwardly pointing arrow turning downward as it turns a corner.
iStock/Getty Images
School & District Management What Latino Superintendents Say It Will Take to Grow Their Ranks
Three Latino superintendents talked about the direct and indirect paths to building a pipeline of future district leaders of color.
4 min read
Vector image of many professionals, diversity, highlighting hispanic.
Liz Yap/Education Week and iStock/Getty
School & District Management Opinion Your School Needs a Teacher-Mentorship Program
We all know how critical the first few years of teaching are. Here's how to set teachers up for success.
Pamela Slifer
4 min read
Mentorship development of young teachers. School leaders make the teaching profession more sustainable by developing a robust mentoring program in their school.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva