It was a day buzzing with talk about how Asia is surpassing the West, and Martin Carnoy was among the minority of dissenting voices.
The U.S. Department of Education, along with groups such as the Business Roundtable and the College Board, had declared Dec. 3 as “PISA Day” — a moment to spotlight the just-released results of the worldwide test: the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. On that day, concerns about U.S. students' relatively middling performance — most notably, they ranked 26th in math — spurred headlines about the nation’s “educational stagnation” and how “U.S. teens lag in global education as Asian countries rise to the top.”
Amid the predictions of the nation’s risk of economic demise, Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford, was a voice of moderation. The Stanford Graduate School of Education had issued a release earlier in the year about a report Carnoy had co-authored that cautioned against putting too much stock in PISA rankings for a variety of reasons (including its being designed around a math curriculum different from what prevails in the United States and its failure to take into account the different socio-economic class composition of different nations).
In a blog item for the Economic Policy Institute that also ran in the Washington Post the day before the scores were released, Carnoy and colleague Richard Rothstein warned that despite the limitations of the PISA rankings, they were being rolled out “to manipulate public opinion” toward the view that “economic disaster” is around the corner.
“I don’t think that they should be taken very seriously,” Carnoy said the next day in an interview about the test scores on the British Internet radio station Monocle24, while acknowledging that students from Asian nations had done much better than students from the United States and United Kingdom. “Is the future of these countries affected? … [D]oes it mean that the societies [with the higher scores] are going to be more creative — that they’re going to be at the head of the pack in terms of new product innovation, new technology. I don’t think so.” [To listen to the entire interview, see the screen below.]
Still, many experts, including some Stanford colleagues, begged to differ. “Increasingly, we have to rely on the skills of our work force, and if we don’t improve that, we’re going to be slipping,” Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, said in a New York Times story, explaining why he and so many others took the scores very seriously.
Indeed, U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement that emphasized the scores’ importance. “The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 PISA is straightforward and stark,” he said. “It is a picture of educational stagnation. That brutal truth, that urgent reality, must serve as a wake-up call against educational complacency and low expectations.”
Carnoy said that these scores, while clearly indicating need for improvement, needed careful analysis, not sensationalism about their signaling the nation’s economic demise. He noted that the United States had poor test scores at other points in its history and still had robust growth. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times endorsed and neatly summed up Carnoy and his colleague’s position: “Their message goes something like this: Calm down, everyone.”
