Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Baker is Professor of Education and Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, and publishes widely on comparative education, the organization of schools, and sociology. Gerald LeTendre is Associate Professor of Education Policy Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and is the author of Learning to Be Adolescent.

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National Differences, Global Similarities

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Tables and Figures.............................................................................................................ixPreface................................................................................................................................xi1. The Global Environment of National School Systems...................................................................................12. The Declining Significance of Gender and the Rise of Egalitarian Mathematics Education..............................................163. Symbiotic Institutions: Changing Global Dynamics Between Family and Schooling.......................................................344. Demand for Achievement: The Worldwide Growth of Shadow Education Systems............................................................545. Rich Land, Poor Schools: Inequality of National Educational Resources and Achievement of Disadvantaged Students.....................716. Safe Schools, Dangerous Nations: The Paradox of School Violence.....................................................................867. The Universal Math Teacher? International Beliefs, National Work Roles, and Local Practice..........................................1048. Schoolwork at Home? Low-Quality Schooling and Homework..............................................................................1179. Slouching Toward a Global Ideology: The Devolution Revolution in Education Governance...............................................13410. Nation Versus Nation: The Race to Be the First in the World........................................................................15011. Conclusion: Observing Modern Schooling as an Institution...........................................................................169Bibliography...........................................................................................................................179Index..................................................................................................................................191

Chapter One

With all the importance attached to schools, it is no wonder that politicians and policy makers around the world place much emphasis on providing quality public education to their constituents. Operating and regulating a nation's schools-public or private-is of extreme importance to national leaders, and governments everywhere guide and direct the kind of education that children receive. In a very short time, public schooling has become the major means by which governments try to promote positive economic change, strengthen national identity, and inculcate citizenship values and behavior in entire populations of people. Consequently there is incessant public discussion about schooling, and political campaigns in all sorts of nations make educational policy and the performance of schools a central point.

By and large, most people most of the time think about education as solely a national undertaking. The trends we examine here, however, lead to quite a different vision, one where there is a considerable global process at work. To make sense of this contrasting globalized world of education, it is helpful first to describe the common image of schooling as a national enterprise. It is a vision with several components.

The everyday vision of schooling as a national enterprise sees it as chiefly a unique product of a nation's culture and governmental effort to foster prosperity for its citizens. This is thought to be true regardless of the particular level of governance of schools within the nation. It is common, then, to refer to French, Chilean, Japanese, American, and South African (or any nation's) schools as separate national entities. After all, what could be more deeply embedded in a nation's society than its schools preparing children for future adult lives in that country? The reigning image of education today is that schools are designed and managed within a national context for the specific needs and goals of a particular nation.

This vision also assumes that schooling is organized to educate and socialize children in a specific way that is directly linked to the future welfare of a particular nation. For example, German schools are thought to produce German adults with the technical skills, linguistic capabilities, and cultural awareness necessary to carry forth the entity of Germany into the future. A national product of educated citizens issuing forth from the school system is the main image of what schooling does in every nation. Educators may be aware of the larger global world, but their predominant image of a nation's schools is as a means to pass on a sense of national uniqueness and heritage, as well as meet the technical needs of its particular labor market. This image implies that schooling is limited to the specific needs of a nation, therefore schooling would not expand except as is needed for national reasons. Nor would schools engage in education that is separable from traditional values of the nation. Additionally, this image of schooling holds that because labor markets are hierarchical, so should schooling be hierarchical. For efficiency, the argument continues, the best and the brightest of a nation deserve the best educational opportunities for the best national outcomes, and those with lesser endowments should receive less. All of this is wrapped up in the picture of a national system of education operating uniquely to produce efficiently adults with the kind of skill necessary for a range of tasks in the labor market and adult life within a national context.

This common image of schooling bound up in a national context is further reinforced by the rhetoric of official comparisons of education across nations (Schmer, 2004). Observing schooling across nations is thought to reveal significant differences in specific and unique national features causing relative differences in academic outcomes, such as national achievement among nations. A common extension of this idea is that the specific characteristics of a nation's schools are partly responsible for its relative position in the world's economy, and that nations are different enough from one another in their implementation of education to make it possible to learn unique lessons from one another on how to develop and manage schools better. Listen to how the founder of modern empirical comparison of academic outcomes of nations' schools in the late 1960s, Torsten Husn, describes the logic behind cross-national studies:

The more we have recognized education as an investment in human resources and as an instrument for bringing about economic growth and social change, the stronger has been the need to investigate the roots of the educational systems of which the world around us shows such a striking diversity. In the search for causative factors behind the development and "productivity" of educational systems there is a need for empirical data and for cross-nationally valid variables pertaining to these systems as they actually function [Husn, 1967, p. 19, emphasis added].

Now listen to how he perceives schooling as inseparable from national context: "Any educational system can only be fully understood in the context of the culture, traditions, history and general social structure of the nation it is designed to serve" (p. 220, emphasis added).

This image of national schooling is how many think the educational world works, but ultimately it is mostly inaccurate, and becoming more so every moment. In spite of the fact that nations (and their subunits, provinces, and states) have immediate political and fiduciary control over schooling, education as an institution has become a global enterprise. We show here that there are all kinds of trends suggesting that ideas and demands and expectations for what school can, and should, do for a society have developed well beyond any particular national context. The same global ideas, demands, and expectations filter into nations, greatly shaping their schools in union with school all over the world. Over the last century, there have been both steady expansion of schooling into our daily lives and deepening of education's meaning for things people hold dear. The current situation in schooling across nations is wholly unpredictable from the image of unique national models of schooling.

All the while that schooling has been considered a national technical project, from nation to nation considerable global forces are at work shaping and changing schooling in fundamental ways that many people are unaware of as they view education mostly from a national perspective. But just like the shrinking of the world's marketplace, media, and politics, education too is undergoing intensive globalization. Whether you find them in Mexico City, a small town in Pennsylvania, or in rural Kenya, schools all over the world appear to run in much the same way everywhere. Whether we were educated in a public school in New York City or a Catholic school in Tokyo, we experienced the same basic patterns of education. Today we can walk into almost any public school around the world and be able to understand what is going on, even though the specifics of the lesson might be totally incomprehensible. Even if we do not know the language, social mores, or dominant religious dogma of a country, we can still identify central features and make sense of the general patterns when we step into a school there. We all recognize schooling just about everywhere because it entails a similar set of ideas about education held consistently throughout the world. This commonality-and the amazing story of what produces it-often goes unobserved, and its substantial consequences on the everyday world of students, parents, teachers, and administrators remain mostly unappreciated.

This book is about the global state of education, and about how worldwide forces interact with local ones to create educational change among students, their families, teachers, and administrators in your neighborhood school. Although we focus on mathematics and science in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades, we generalize to all academic subjects in elementary and secondary schooling. We tell this story of globalized education through nine separate tales of educational trends, using some of an ever-growing stream of complex information intended to compare schooling across many nations.

Over the past three decades, there has been an explosion of information comparing schools and their outcomes, particularly the academic achievement of their students across nations. In most nations, this kind of information has become part of the dialogue about education improvement. But this information is often misinterpreted or misused, deliberately picked through for certain results and highlighting a particular political position within a national debate. Two good examples are the massive debates resulting from the Reagan administration's Nation at Risk report, with its overly gratuitous negative misinterpretation of American student performance relative to other nations (Bradburn, Haertel, Schwille, and Torney-Purta, 1991), and last year's debate in Germany over the causes of achievement differences among its provinces on the international assessment called PISA, in which politicians attributed educational outcomes to all sorts of unrelated policies.

With this recent flood of international information about schooling in various nations, it is not clear that national policy makers, educators, and even some policy analysts really understand how to interpret such data in conjunction with the global forces driving their school systems. We recognize that educational policy for running and improving schools is mostly aimed at national or subnational issues, and always will be. As the saying goes, all politics is local. Policy makers all over the globe have been organizing and reorganizing national school systems nationally or seminationally since at least the end of World War II, and in some nations well before that. But there is another major part of the story (increasingly becoming the main part of the story), namely, the effects of the globalization of schooling. As national and local educators alike are bombarded with comparative information that shows the results of this international process, the need to understand education on a more global level is inescapable in today's world.

Further, how global trends affect the operation of local schools is little understood by legislators and administrators who regulate and oversee them. These effects, we strongly suspect, will only increase in the future, with yet more globalization accompanied and reinforced by a growing array of international tests, studies, and politically motivated comparisons as well as the workings of numerous multinational and regional agencies such as the World Bank, OECD, and development foundations (see, for example, Dale and Robertson, 2002).

Using analyses of the data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we give the reader a look at how schools work around the world, and how complex forces are affecting all nations, shaping both their understanding of educational problems and solutions to them. We highlight the dramatic changes that have occurred in the recent past and speculate on where current trends will take the institution of mass education in the future.

TIMSS collected a massive amount of data in 1994, in schools in forty-one nations across three grades (fourth, eighth, and twelfth). In addition, for some analyses we use data from TIMSS-99, an identical study (done in 1999) that also included other nations, making a total of fifty-three nations participating in one or both TIMSS studies. TIMSS sampled thousands of students in hundreds of schools and classrooms in nations as diverse as the United States, South Korea, Kuwait, Colombia, Germany, and Latvia. In addition to a mathematics and science test, students were asked a number of questions about themselves, their schooling, and their parents. Their mathematics teachers and the headmaster of the school were also asked a number of questions about the mathematics and science curricula, teaching, and the school. This huge data set was then compiled by the International Association for Educational Achievement and Evaluation (IEA) and made available to nations and researchers. We augmented the original cross-national data with more than one hundred indicators of other qualities of nations drawn from a range of international sources. Complete technical details about the TIMSS data and study can be found in Martin, Gregory, and Stemler, 1999.

If we combine the nations represented in the TIMSS of 1994 and the TIMSS-99, there are now extensive data on how schools run and what kind of achievement level they produce in more than fifty nations. This represents only 15 percent of all of the world's nations, but given that a significant number of the total of three hundred or so nations in the world today are micro states with a population less than one million, these nations represent a reasonable number, and in terms of cross-national comparisons this is a large sample. Further, the TIMSS sample of nations comprises a range of national qualities such as size of school system, cultural background, history of school growth, participation of females in higher education, average wealth of citizens, political regime, economic productivity, level of violence, and many others. Most of the OECD nations are here, along with nations from North America, the former Soviet East Bloc, and the Pacific Rim. There are, however, no sub-Saharan African nations, not many in South America, and not many extremely poor ones. So we take some liberty when we say that the trends described here are worldwide, but we are confident that they are in fact trends found in developed nations and many developing nations alike. In the case of extremely poor nations, or those with severe health or political crises, it is less clear what is happening in their educational systems; we consider what the case might be for nations of this kind only in passing. A full picture of education in the most impoverished and politically dysfunctional nations is much needed, but it is beyond the scope of this work.

Each of the nine tales is interesting in itself; together they plot the global state of education now and what it might look like in the near future. Like all good stories there are subplots, and ours has three.

Subplot One: The Worldwide Success of Mass Schooling

In developing these tales about cross-national trends in education, we are struck by how successful schooling is in the world. But we don't mean just any kind of schooling; rather, we refer to a particularly successful type of schooling that has spread around the world and has become the singular model of educating children, regardless of a nation's political regime, level of economic wealth, cultural heritage, and social problems. This is often referred to as state-sponsored mass schooling, or "mass schooling" for short. It is mostly public schooling for large masses of children, hence the name.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from National Differences, Global Similaritiesby DAVID P. BAKER GERALD K. LETENDRE Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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