The Washington Post's prescient economics columnist Robert Samuelson wonders if perhaps the American-schools-are-losing-ground-to-China-et-al panic isn't overblown, its premises mostly wrong. For one, ?economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools,? Samuelson writes. ?To take an obvious example: The Japanese have high test scores, but Japan's economy languishes. Its export-led growth has foundered.? That point is obvious?or at least it should be. His next argument is more interesting: ?American schools are better than they're commonly portrayed.? Referring to the OECD PISA study that catalyzed the latest doom-and-gloom talk, Samuelson writes that ?the overall scores don't tell the full story.?
The U.S. Education Department examined the American scores by race and ethnicity. This report (?Highlights from PISA 2009?) allows comparison with countries whose ethnic and racial compositions are more homogeneous than ours. For example, you can compare the scores of white non-Hispanic Americans with the scores from Canada, a country that is almost 85 percent white. This is an admittedly crude approach, but it suggests that U.S. schools do about as well as the best systems elsewhere in educating similar students.
Among non-Hispanic white Americans, the average score was 525 ? not very different from Canada's 524, New Zealand's 521 or Australia's 515. All these countries are heavily white, and all ranked in the top 10 of the 65 participating school systems. The story is the same for Asian Americans. Their average score was 541 ? somewhat below Shanghai, about even with South Korea and ahead of Hong Kong (533) and Japan. Again, all these other systems were in the top 10.
One could argue that the results of Samuelson's race-based comparison are immaterial: The United States is a diverse nation and, like it or not, it will have to compete as a diverse nation with other countries whose populations are mostly homogenous. Which is to say that America's citizens of Asian descent aren't competing against the Chinese; all Americans are competing against the Chinese. That's persuasive, in a way. But it's also somewhat persuasive to argue that Samuelson's racial breakdown shows that finger-waggers ought to quit portraying PISA results as proof of America's educational backwardness. What's most persuasive, though, is the columnist's final paragraphs:
Americans have an extravagant faith in the ability of education to solve all manner of social problems. In our mind's eye, schools are engines of progress that create opportunity and foster upward mobility. To the contrary, these persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom ? broken homes, street violence, indifference to education ? that discourage learning and inhibit teaching. As child-psychologist Jerome Kagan points out, a strong predictor of children's school success is the educational attainment of their parents. The higher it is, the more parents read to them, inform and encourage them.
For half a century, successive waves of ?school reform? have made only modest headway against these obstacles. It's an open question whether the present ?reform? agenda, with its emphasis on teacher accountability, will do better. What we face is not an engineering problem; it's overcoming the legacy of history and culture. The outcome may affect our economic competitiveness less than our success at creating a just society.
And that ? the creation of a just society ? ought to be the motivation for improving American schools. Battling the Chinese is just a distraction.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow