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Editorial International Cooperation Recently I have been reading reports from a number of different sources, such as the National Center for Education Statistics, on trends in academic achievement in the United States and on studies in comparative international education (a new term for me). The results are often confusing and contradictory and give new meaning to the old saying that a researcher is a person who can find trends in random data! Results are usually given in absolute terms. We can find reports "proving" that American children can't read or write or count to 11 without taking off their shoes and that there has been a steady deterioration in education since the halcyon days of yore to the point where we are now a nation of illiterates about to be overrun by children from families where English is not spoken. At the same time, others point to the fact that our children have skills that we never imagined when we were children ourselves , including the ability to use computers in ways that most of us still cannot. Of course, the truth about academic achievement lies somewhere between. For more than 150 years, the United States has experienced heavy immigration, especially into its cities, which has placed unique demands on the nation's educational systems. In fact, a greater number of immigrants entered the United States from 1890 to 1910, when the population was one-third its present size, than have arrived over the past 30 years. During that time, a higher percentage of our children came from homes where languages other than English were spoken than do so now. As hard as it may be to believe today, there were fears that immigrant children's knowledge of German, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, etc., would interfere with their assimilation into the larger culture. We hear the same fears articulated today about other languages. Despite the many expressions of concern, the evidence seems to suggest that, in general, the achievement of American children is greater than in the past, and that there have been particular improvements in the achievement of children classified as coming from minority backgrounds. Still, it would be foolish not to admit that we face daunting problems. Which brings us to the issue of comparative international education . International sharing of information can be quite beneficial , so long as the information can be used to assess and improve educational practice. The U.S. government has set the goal of making American schoolchildren "number one" in achievement in math, science, and so forth by 2000. Besides being impossible to measure, this objective seems to me to be overly simplistic and to obviate the real goals of education. Competition of that sort is better left to World Cup soccer or the Super Bowl, where the final score really means something. Any society should have two interrelated general objectives for its educational systems—one individual and one societal. The first objective is to prepare individuals to develop to the full extent of their abilities so that they might lead productive and satisfying lives. The second is to prepare children to contribute to the good of the society. The ways in which these goals may be accomplished in a technical, pluralistic society such as the United States should be far different from the approaches used in other types of societies. There will be overlap in the kinds of outcome measures we may use, but they should not be identical . For example, in reading about literacy, math, and science achievement in various industrial countries—after accounting for problems in sampling and testing—I think we can say in general that American children do relatively well in reading and not so well in math, with science somewhere between. One general reaction to the reports has been to note that American children spend fewer days in school than children in most other countries, and that we should therefore expand our school year from roughly 180 days to 220, as is the practice in France and Japan. I came across a response to this proposal that claimed American children spend more hours per day in school, so that the number of hours in school per year is greater...

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