Is the grass always greener?

To ensure America’s global competitiveness, does our education system need to emulate the policies and practices from other countries?

According to Yong Zhao, those enamored with foreign education systems seem to have taken Leo Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina too seriously and forgotten the second part: “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” They attempt to extract some universal factors of the “happy families” or “high achieving education system” and apply them to the unhappy American education. For example, the recently released paper by Marc Tucker of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) tries to develop an agenda for American education reform by “standing on the shoulders of giants,” that is education giants—countries with high test scores on the PISA. “This paper is the answer to a question: What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance” (Tucker, 2011)? Earlier McKinsey and Company tried to do the same with How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come out on Top (McKinsey & Company, 2007).

There are at least two problems with this view. First, there are really no completely happy families all the time. The educational systems with high scores all have their own problems and challenges. The Asian systems are struggling to liberate their students from a test-driven education so they can be more creative, entrepreneurial, confident, and critical thinkers (Ho, 2003; OECD, 2011; Tan & Gopinathan, 2000; Tucker, 2011; Zhao, 2009). Finland faces challenges of how to educate an increasingly culturally and ethnically diverse population (Sunnari & Rasanen, 2000; Talib & Hosoya, 2007) and address the achievement gaps between girls and boys as well as Swedish speaking students and Finnish speaking students (Chung, 2009).

Of course, a system does not have to be perfect to offer something we can learn but then here is the second problem: “happy families” are not really alike. What works for one system does not necessarily work for others. The McKinsey report reveals factors that leads to success:

• The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers;
• The only way to improve outcome is to improve instruction;
• High performance requires every child to succeed. (McKinsey & Company, 2007)

The list also includes clear goals and expectations, high quality teachers, high quality principals, exams and incentives for students, sorting students using external exams, access to high-quality education for all students, accountability and autonomy.

Don’t many, if not all of these items are incorporated in some way, shape or form into most of our schools?

Both the Tucker and the McKinsey papers attempt to describe how these factors are differently realized in each educational context, but that is precisely Dr Zhao’s point. He says that all happy families are alike, at least not in terms of what made them happy. Finland’s success may come from high-quality teachers and teaching, local autonomy, and an egalitarian and homogenous society, while East Asian systems succeed from a meritocratic centralized system that places high stakes on test scores, which the Finns reject (Chung, 2009). Perhaps what is truly common across the high performers on the PISA is their small geographical size and relatively homogenous population, when compared to the United States.

What makes one happy can also be the cause of unhappiness. For instance, Finland’s egalitarian approach has caused concerns about not offering enough opportunities for the gifted and talented students (Chung, 2009). Its cultural homogeneity is the source of challenges for educating culturally diverse students (Sunnari & Rasanen, 2000; Talib & Hosoya, 2007). And in Asia, the exclusive focus on testing scores and devotion to a few academic subjects are the sources of frustration over a lack of creativity and innovative talents. While they have learned a lot, they may not have learned how to learn. (OECD, 2011, p. 93).