We have been hearing a constant drumbeat from politicians, policy wonks, and pundits that America's public education system is losing the educational "arms race" against other countries around the world. These advocates for reform use the widely reported results of testing of students from dozens of countries showing that U.S. students have gone from world leaders to middle-of-the-packers in a generation. As Thomas Friedman noted in a recent New York Times essay, "…the latest international education test results show our peers out-educating us, which means they will eventually out-compete us." The ramifications of this dramatic decline in academic achievement are, according to these voices of impending educational Armageddon, nothing less than the loss of our intellectual, technological, and economic supremacy on the world stage for future generations.
But a recent email exchange with Dr. David Berliner, a leading education researcher from Arizona State University, has led me to conclude that these doomsayers may actually be more Chicken Little than Paul Revere. The comparisons of American students to an international cohort may not be valid because the differences that exist between the U.S. and other countries make
