"...one of our most cherished beliefs, that foreigners are threatening our future by producing much better schools."
"People like me sometimes exploit this fear of global inferiority." -- Jay Matthews-Class Struggle-Washington Post-Click Here"Education policymakers and analysts express great concern about the performance of U.S. students on international tests. Education reformers frequently invoke the relatively poor performance of U.S. students to justify school policy changes ...
"However, conclusions like these, which are often drawn from international test comparisons, are oversimplified, frequently exaggerated, and misleading. They ignore the complexity of test results and may lead policymakers to pursue inappropriate and even harmful reforms ...
"Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared."
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"Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, research associates at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, have no respect for American cultural and political tradition. Their latest paper challenges one of our most cherished beliefs, that foreigners are threatening our future by producing much better schools."
"People like me sometimes exploit this fear of global inferiority. To grab reader attention, I have pointed out, as U.S. business leaders and political candidates do, how far behind parts of Europe and Asia our students are in international tests. Carnoy, also a Stanford Graduate School of Education professor, and Rothstein undermine that argument by examining the test databases and discovering that when student results are broken down by social class, our schools are doing comparatively better than we thought." Jay Matthews - Class Struggle - Washington Post - Click Here
