Where Does Comparative Education Go Now?

• In Event: Current and future status of research in comparative education

Proposal

International testing of student achievement from its very beginnings was deeply rooted in the notion that educational systems are intended to be highly successful in getting all children to learn, and only do not do so because policy makers lack the information needed to make systems effective. In other words, the very ideology of the testing regimes is that with more information, education will improve. In the ideology that underpins international testing, data collection and relational analyses become the main function of comparative education research. The research goal of uncovering why some educational systems are the way they are, and others differ has become a much lower priority.
The mass of student test data and student, teacher, and school survey data collected within countries and cross-nationally could produce new theories for why students in some national or sub-national entities are making greater learning gains than in others. Even the observed results we already have from analyzing student performance on international, national, and state tests provide clues to new conceptualizations in comparative education.

The assumptions made by functionalists about needing “more data” for comparative educators are highly suspect. This is likely an important reason why the IEA’s and many comparative educators’ dream that more data alone would unravel many of the mysteries of student learning differences (Noah and Eckstein, 1969) never materialized (Medrich and Griffith, 1992). Perhaps the functionalist models behind the original and current international testing enterprise are inadequate to the task. Coming up with new theories of comparing student learning across nation-states requires looking beyond formal educational systems themselves and traditional measures of socio-economic background toward expanded conceptualizations of social capital, culture, and where and how children engage (or are engaged) to acquire the knowledge that the international surveys test.

Current learning theory can completely change the way we use international tests such as the PISA or TIMSS to gauge whether students are “learning more” or whether education is more “effective” in one country than in another. The international tests now measure something about learning—TIMSS, whether students are learning an internationally agreed upon set of math and science concepts “typically” taught in schools, and PISA, a set of “problem solving” skills associated with success in the 21st century world of work. However, these may not be the only, nor even the most important, aspects of learning that we want to measure comparatively as indicators of national educational systems’ goals in advancing individual and social progress.
Secondly, current learning theory may help us find new ways to better understand what education systems actually do in different societies. Thirdly, we may miss how different societies or even different ethnic or social class groups within societies might perform were students tested in teams. If team work is an important component of work productivity and social progress, comparing societies by their results on team tests is likely to give us new insights into why some societies with similar individual scores function better than others and may have more effective educational systems.

Author

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University