Educational Leadership - November 2009

can do that, because no test can measure the many complexities of an “ educational system,” much less a test that measures only two subjects. To get some idea of the complexity of an “educational system,” I suggest that readers glance through the 100-plus goals of public education in John Goodlad’s 1979 classic, What Schools Are For.

to ace tests, but Japan’s economy sputtered into the new century and slipped back into recession in 2007.

It is doubtful that the ability of 4th and 8th graders to bubble in answer sheets has any connection to the economy. In fact, although educators might not want to recognize it, the current economic calamity should drive

The Education/Economy Fallacy

Both politicians and the media have relentlessly linked scores on national and international assessments to economic health. Release of the PISA results in 2004, for instance, led to headlines like “Economic Time Bomb” (Kronholz, 2004) and “Math + Test = Trouble for the U.S. Economy” ( Chaddock, 2004).

This notion is easily refuted by the example of Japan, which led the world in test scores and economic growth in the 1980s but saw its economy sink into the Pacific in the 1990s. Throughout this period, Japanese students continued

home the reality that the economic forces at play in the world dwarf the effects of education. Iceland scores high on international assessments, but in the global crisis of 2008–2009 it became an economic basket case with a national debt equal to 850 percent of its gross domestic product.

Education, by itself, does not produce jobs. There are regions of India, for example, where thousands of applicants show up for a single job requiring moderate education. The people who noticed this phenomenon worry that overeducation in the absence of job production could destabilize India

(Jeffrey, Jeffery, & Jeffery, 2008). Similar worries no doubt afflict the government of China, where 33 percent of 2008 college graduates are still looking for jobs (Johnson, 2009).

Those who decry the United States’ rankings on international tests should note that the Institute for Management Development (2009) and the World

Economic Forum (Porter &
Schwab, 2008), two organiza-
tions that rate nations on
global competitiveness, rank
the United States as the most
competitive nation in the
world—especially in the area
of innovation.
In an interview, Singapore
Minister of Education
Tharman Shanmugaratnam
acknowledged that Singapore
students score well on tests
but often don’t fare as well as
U.S. students 10 or 20 years
down the road. He cited
creativity, curiosity, and a
sense of adventure as some of
the qualities tests don’t
measure, adding, “These are
the areas where Singapore
must learn from America”
(Zakaria, 2006). Sadly for

American students, as Robert Sternberg (2006) observed, “The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity” (p. 47).

Blunt Instruments This brief look at several widely recognized assessments demonstrates that none of these tests are useful for comparing the quality of schools or teachers—especially in the United States, with its diverse population, high poverty rates (by far the highest among developed nations), and wide variety of