Education Olympics provides no basis for assertion that nation's students will harm its economic future
Contact: Edward G. Fierros, (610) 519-6969; Edward.Fierros@villanova.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) kevin.welner@gmail.com
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Oct. 15, 2008) -- A recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute report frames worldwide education policies and outcomes as Olympic medals contests and finds the U.S. ranks poorly against much of the rest of the world. A new review of that report questions the rankings but saves its harshest criticism for the report's leap to unsupported policy recommendations.
The report, Education Olympics 2008: The Games in Review, released shortly after the 2008 Olympic Summer Games in Beijing, was written for the Fordham Institute by Amber Winkler, Amy Ballard, and Stafford Palmieri. It was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by professors Edward Fierros of Villanova University and Mindy Kornhaber of Penn State University.
Education Olympics compare the performance of American schools against those of other nations. Based primarily on standardized test results, it awards the U.S. only one gold (for civics education). Other nations did substantially better.
The Fordham report acknowledges that it isn't based on new research and that it takes some shortcuts to arrive at its rankings. Also not new is its conclusion that low U.S. rankings threaten the nation's standing in the global economy. But the report offers little or no support for that conclusion or the associated recommendations.
While a link between international test rankings and global economic standing may be widely assumed, it is by no means a settled question. Fierros and Kornhaber point out that "Extensive bodies of research ... couple or decouple educational achievement and economic outcomes." The research is highly equivocal on the report's key assumption. Moreover, the report ignores virtually all of that research.
The core of the report consists of 28 tables showing how countries rank on various student achievement measures, as well as accompanying descriptive text. Supplementing the tables and narrative are a number of sidebars that, Fierros and Kornhaber write, "raise doubts about the use of educational resources in the U.S., while praising other countries' school choice policies and Canada's lack of a federal role for education." Yet nothing in the rankings themselves or the main text of the report connects them to the sidebars. The review discusses, as an example, a sidebar largely focused on promoting school choice. The sidebar's content "is driven by ideology rather than reasoned argument," the reviewers write. As evidence, they point to the fact that Finland--the highest ranking of all the countries in the report--in fact has the lowest rate of school choice. The sidebars lack any analysis of the needs of students, teachers, communities, or families, and also lack any foundation of analysis of previous reform efforts.
In short, the report "does not attempt to provide clear guidance for policy or practice on the basis of its findings and conclusions," Fierros and Kornhaber write. "The Education Olympics report, driven by predetermined positions and lacking any rigorous demonstration of argument, theory, evidence or methods, provides no basis for generating constructive policy for improving our nation's educational performance."
CONTACT:
Edward G. Fierros, Professor
Villanova University
(610) 519-6969
Edward.Fierros@villanova.edu
Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com
About the Think Tank Review Project
The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate."
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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.
Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/
EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance (http://educationpolicyalliance.org).
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