Education

As even some of the experts who appear in Two Million Minutes note, the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations. Both countries are going to continue to send many of their brightest young people to study at U.S. universities. Stupidly conceived and administered immigration laws give many of these foreign students little choice but to leave once they receive their degrees. Given the chance, many more are likely to stay in the United States, where the jobs pay better; creativity in all fields, including politics, is encouraged; and—another blow to education critics—the colleges their children would attend are far better and more accessible.
Most commentary on the subject leaves the impression that China and India are going to bury the United States in an avalanche of new technology. Consider, for example, a much- cited 2005 Fortune article that included the claim that China turned out 600,000 engineers in the previous year, India graduated 350,000, and poor, declining America could manage only 70,000. The cover of Fortune showed a buff Chinese beach bully looming over a skinny Uncle Sam. The headline said, “Is the U.S. a 97-Pound Weakling?”

This argument be came a favorite target for collectors of bad data, including Carl Bialik, The Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy,” educational psychologist and author Gerald W. Bracey, and a Duke University research team led by Vivek Wadhwa. The source of the China numbers seemed to be the China Statistical Yearbook, a Chinese government publication, which said that the country produced 644,000 engineering graduates in 2004. But a subsequent McKinsey Global Institute report said that about half of those “engineers” would be no more than technicians in the United States. Bialik could not find a source for the 350,000 Indian engineers, but National Science Foundation officials told him that the real number was unlikely to be anywhere near ­that.

In a 2005 report, the Duke researchers concluded that the United States produced 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor’s degree in the most recent year, while India produced 112,000 and China 351,537. “That’s more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation,” Bracey said in The Washington Post. Yet he found the discredited numbers still presented as fact by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Senator John W. Warner (R.-Va.).

The Fortune article belongs to an emerging genre of news stories that raise hysterical alarms about the deficiencies of American education in international comparisons while completely overlooking the complexities involved in such studies.

In “More Than a Horse Race” (2007), Jim Hull, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association, analyzed four major studies of school achievement around the world. When Hull looked carefully at the numbers, he found that the United States did much better than the headlines suggest. In reading, only three nations’ students did significantly better than their U.S. elementary and high school counterparts. “The reading performance of U.S. fourth ­graders was particularly strong,” Hull said. “They scored above the international level . . . while our 15- year- olds scored slightly above the average.” In science, fourth and ­eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. (It is worth noting that the studies Hull examined did not include India and China, in part because schooling is
so minimal for so many children in these two countries that their performance isn’t comparable.)

Hull also examined the frequent charge that American students fare well in international comparisons at earlier ages but fade as they enter their teen years. Some studies did show U.S. fourth graders doing relatively well, eighth graders about average, and high school students below average. But when the American Institutes of Research, a Washington- based think tank, did a more careful, apples- to- apples comparison, making sure the students were actually at the same grade level, those differences disappeared.

Bracey has detected the precise flaws that warp international comparisons. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) of 1999, for instance, seemed to show that American high school students were far behind in advanced math. But the alarming news accounts that followed the study’s release— and the politicians who echoed them— failed to note an important caveat. A significant portion of the U.S. test takers, unlike the overseas students, had not yet gotten beyond pre calculus. The U.S. TIMMS administrators included those students in their sample because, one told Bracey, “we just wanted to see how they’d do.” They had not concerned themselves with how the results might look in the newspapers. When the TIMMS experts later re­analyzed the data, comparing overseas students only to American high schoolers who had taken Advanced Placement calculus, the United States did much better. That news, however, wasn’t widely reported.

Bracey found other differences that distorted international comparisons. In Europe, many teenagers who hold jobs are tracked into nonacademic schools, but American youngsters commonly combine traditional school and work. Bracey noticed that 55 percent of the Americans tested in the TIMMS study reported working more than 20 hours a week, the point at which, research shows, after school jobs begin to hurt academic performance. Few European students seem to devote as much time to after-school jobs. In Sweden, the only country for which Bracey found hard data, only 16 percent of students worked more than 20 hours per week.

There is, in any event, scant evidence that test scores have much to do with national economic performance. In the late 1980s, when Japan still seemed on its way to becoming the world’s economic superpower, U.S. newspapers published glowing stories about the lofty test scores achieved by Japanese students and suggested that failures of American public education had helped bring on bad times in the United States. By 1998, despite the lack of any significant change in math and reading scores, the U.S. economy was back on top. The Japanese still had good schools, but the bottom had dropped out of their economy (which still hasn’t fully recovered). No story.

Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, analyzed the disconnect between test scores and economic growth in a column reprinted in his 2001 book, Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong. Samuelson told of the computer guru at Newsweek’s Washington bureau who had an English degree but found, through a series of jobs that taught him new skills, that he had become a technological expert indispensable to Samuelson and his colleagues. “People don’t learn only at school,” Samuelson concluded. “If they did, we’d be doomed. In isolation, test scores hardly count. What counts— for the economy, at least— is what people do at work. . . . On the job, people learn from supervisors, mentors, ­co workers, customers and— most important— experience. One Labor Department study estimates that about 70 percent of training in the workplace is informal. Culturally, this is America’s strong suit.” What keeps the American economy so productive, Samuelson said, is its flexibility. American companies “have more freedom to set pay rates, hire and fire, and alter work practices.”

Other countries have job training too. The Germans are praised for bringing teenagers to a technical level that makes them valuable in the workplace right after high school. But the U.S. system excels all others in allowing enough freedom for people to flounder and fail and change jobs until they find the niche where their talents are put to best use. It’s disorderly and unbusinesslike, but it works.

American schools have the same ability to innovate on the run, even if not as freely as one might wish, and foreign educators have begun to realize that they may have something to learn from them. Some U.S. schools now regularly host visiting educators from China, Singapore, and Japan, who want to know how American teachers are able to produce such creative students. They have noticed that American schools produce Nobel Prize winners, and theirs don’t. The Chinese have been particularly impressed by the fact that every Nobel laureate of Chinese descent was educated outside China.