Comment

Cross-national education survey research was first just an experiment, born by a chance visit of Torsten Husen from the University of Stockholm to the Comparative Education Center at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s. There, Husen met C. Arnold Anderson, Mary Jean Bowman, and Benjamin Bloom, whose view was that the whole world should be seen as a single educational laboratory. From this meeting emerged the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which, for diplomatic reasons, was managed from Sweden. First results appeared in 1964. Since then, thirty-three cross-national studies have been conducted, twenty-nine of which were associated with IEA.

From the beginning a myriad of problems emerged—the logistics of such a massive enterprise, the complexities of agreeing on common definitions, methodologies, sampling and data management. These problems have been the focus of a great deal of official and unofficial assessments of the state of the art, which helped to generate a number of significant improvements in the standards expected for cross-national surveys.⁴⁰ In spite of this progress, doubts and skepticism remain.⁴¹ These have generated carefully constructed replies.⁴²

Early reviews of cross-national policy implications focused attention on better understanding of the generalizations associated with the influences on academic achievement. One of the most persistent generalizations is that the influence of the home is greater than the influence of the school itself.⁴³ Stephen P. Heyneman and William Loxley, however, found that the degree of this influence varies across nations and that the lower a nation's gross domestic product (GDP), the more influence the school seems to have.⁴⁴ This finding has been a principal rationale for the investment in school quality by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and many other development assistance agencies. Although recent reanalyses have challenged the strength of the earlier findings, the current conclusions are that the influence of socioeconomic status on achievement is by no means uniform across nations, age or grade levels, gender, and subject matter.⁴⁵

More recent policy reviews have tried to speculate on the meaning of these cross-national projects on local education policy within the United States. William H. Schmidt and his colleagues, for instance, helped Americans focus on the weaknesses of having a splintered curriculum in which a scattering of topics is presented to students with insufficient attention to the progression, sequencing, and review found in more academically successful nations.⁴⁶

David P. Baker has used cross-national studies to generate novel hypotheses across a wide variety of education policy characteristics. He finds that American school systems distribute school resources less fairly and are less able to educate the most disadvantaged students by comparison to other countries. He also uses cross-national studies to challenge common assumptions—for instance, that American schools are more likely to experience violence and classroom disruption. He finds that more homework is often a proxy for poor educational quality and that nations with effective family assistance policies are better able to overcome the handicap of social poverty. And he uses these cross-national studies as the basis for speculating that the reason American school systems have such significant policy difficulties stems from their public governance in which elections for education posts determine policy direction. Because political campaigns have a single and simplistic focus (sex education, get God back in school, more time on task, class size, and so on) that attracts voters for school board elections, the nature of American education reform seems to be as fractured as the sequencing in its curriculum.

The problems in Baker's paper are few, but not without importance. Baker seems to assume that remedial work (the main focus of homework) is somehow less than useful. The term remedial seems to imply something pejorative. But in any survey the interpretation of what remedial means may vary. It may imply work to make up...