Reformers and International Comparisons
On Tuesday at This Week in Ed I asked what the evidence is that education reform is the best way to fight poverty. The domestic evidence doesn’t strike me as obvious, but I was especially curious about the international evidence.After writing that post I started nagging people on Twitter to tell me which countries have - at least according to reformers – education systems we should be aspiring to.
My main reason for doing this was that if reformers really think education is the best way to fight poverty, then presumably countries with the best education systems should have substantially lower poverty rates as a result. My guess is that there is little evidence for this; if a developed country is successful at reducing poverty (and many are), that is usually because of government taxes and transfers, not education. Still, since reformers seem largely unwilling to identify the countries they believe have the most effective education systems, their claims about the benefits of reform (e.g., poverty reduction) are difficult to test.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t have many takers on Twitter. A few reform-sympathizers chimed in that while we might want to learn from aspects of different countries’ education systems, reformers aren’t really committed to the idea that copying other countries would be useful in general. We have a different Reformers and International Comparisons | Paul Bruno: