Bringing It Back Home: Why State Comparisons Are More Useful Than International Comparisons for Improving U.S. Education Policy

• Published in: Policy File 2015
• Main Authors: Carnoy, Martin, Garcia, Emma, Khavenson, Tatiana
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Subjects: Economic Policy Institute; Education

International test rankings have come to dominate how politicians and pundits judge the quality of countries' education systems, including highly heterogeneous systems such as that of the United States. While international tests and international comparisons are not without merit, international test data are notoriously limited in their ability to shed light on why students in any country have higher or lower test scores than in another. Indeed, from such tests, many policymakers and pundits have wrongly concluded that student achievement in the United States lags woefully behind that in many comparable industrialized nations, that this shortcoming threatens the nation's economic future, and that these test results therefore demand radical school reform that includes importing features of schooling in higher-scoring countries. This report challenges these conclusions. It focuses on the relevance of comparing U.S. national student performance with average scores in other countries when U.S. students attend schools in 51 separate education systems run not by the federal government, but by states (plus the District of Columbia). To compare achievement in states with each other and with other countries, we use newly available data for student mathematics and reading performance in U.S. states from the 2011 TIMSS and 2012 PISA, as well as several years of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We conclude that the most important lessons U.S. policymakers can learn about improving education emerge from examining why some U.S. states have made large gains in math and reading and achieve high average test scores. The lessons embedded in how these states increased student achievement in the past two decades are much more relevant to improving student outcomes in other U.S. states than looking to high-scoring countries with social, political, and educational histories that differ markedly from the U.S. experience.