Should America Be More Like Them? Cross-National High School Achievement and U.S. Policy

The modern comprehensive American high school, since its inception in the early twentieth century, has been considered alternately an organizational blessing and a bane on educational progress. Welcomed as an organizational advance through which the hodgepodge of schools in urban America could be made into an orderly pedagogical and administrative pyramid, the early modern high school was seen as an educational institution meeting the social and economic challenges of an increasingly diverse industrial-urban society. ¹ The image of a rational, bureaucratic, large, and robust comprehensive high school was pushed forward through the middle of the twentieth century as a progressive and modernizing model for the entire nation. ² However, by the second half of the century, as evidence of social decline, persistent poverty, racial disparities, and educational failure in urban communities became ever more obvious, the image of the urban comprehensive high school shifted from an exemplary model to a broken institution in need of reform.

The world's image of the American comprehensive high school has run a similar course over the twentieth century. The creation of a comprehensive and socially integrated secondary education was the cornerstone of U.S. education plans for reforming the defeated fascist regimes in Japan and Germany. It also had a significant influence on the development of modern secondary education systems throughout the world from the 1940s on. ³ Yet by the time the influential ANation at Risk report was issued some forty years later, secondary education in the most politically and economically powerful nation in the world was declared internationally mediocre at best. ⁴ Ironically, many of the organizational features of the once-lauded American high school became the focus of intense speculation about how they might impede educational quality.

At the same time, international comparisons of American education have become popular and widespread in the reform debates of the last several decades. Many centerpieces of the current American reform movement were shaped through evidence and speculation on what other more educationally successful nations were doing that the United States was not. The growing volume of international studies and data available with which to compare the United States has influenced this policy trend. For example, the international data portfolio of the National Center on Education Statistics in the Department of Education has more than tripled since the 1980s and is slated to grow even more over the next decade.

As a consequence, many debates about what should be done to reform the American high school revolve around assessing U.S. national competitiveness in the world's educational progress. This is evidenced by both the Bush administration's early 1990s educational strategy and the Clinton administration's Goals 2000 (see Goal #5) and informally through two decades' worth of op-ed pieces on the international state of American education. So the question has become not only what would improve American secondary education, but also what is required to make it the best in the world? Making international competitiveness a main goal of educational reform has opened the door to wide speculation about what should be imported from other nations to improve secondary education. In other words, in American education policy circles an often-asked question over the past two decades has been: What is it that other nations do to make their mathematics and science education more effective than the United States and should it become more like theirs? Many suggestions have been put forward, and these continue to circulate within American policy debates as possible reasons that some nations do better than others in mathematics and science.

Specific features from other education systems that have intrigued American reformers of secondary education fit into five categories.

1. Create nationwide school and classroom climates that are conducive to teaching and learning...