Foreign exchange: school leaders find tangible benefits in their overseas educational study missions - Cover Story

School Administrator, Jan, 2004 by Carol Brzozowski

AASA's Houston points out that Americans "only hear criticism of how bad we are and how we score lower in the world on tests without understanding the contextual differences." Singapore may excel in math and science, but does not have the ethnic diversity of the United States, he says, adding Finnish students score higher than U.S. students on reading tests, but the country doesn't have issues of poverty and second languages to address.

The universal access that has defined public education for the past century gains a new appreciation when American educators visit schools abroad. In some countries, fewer than 10 percent of the children who start in the equivalent of kindergarten make it to what Virginia's Barham calls an "academic 12th grade," compared to 72 percent in the United States. Comprehensive testing in the 8th grade often determines whether the student will head down an academic or vocational track.

The traveling educators contend the comparisons between the U.S. public schools and foreign education systems--which often are used to point to the failures of American schools--are largely invalid.

"I tell my students when you talk about how a foreign country educates people, it becomes very difficult to leave your paradigm, because we're not even starting in the same places as to what our objectives are," Collier says.

Houston concurs. "Someone may say, 'Why don't we do schools more like the Japanese?' Well, it's because we're not Japanese; we don't have their culture. To do it like they do it would mean you'd have to adopt their cultural values, and we as Americans are not about to do that.

"On the other hand you say, 'What can we glean?'" Houston adds, "and then you bring that back and talk about it or write about it."

Shared Skepticism

During some recent travels abroad, U.S. administrators have noted with some amusement that No Child Left Behind now is being translated into other languages.

For example, in England, a national directive was being developed in 1999 to create a larger separation between academic instruction and vocational training, mirroring other countries' practices.

"They did this without consulting much the people who run the schools," says Cirasuolo. "It struck a responsive chord. In this nation, public policy is being made without much consideration given to the perspectives of the superintendents of schools."

Cirasuolo recalls one instance in which the education minister told England's school administrators he didn't consult them because he didn't believe they were doing a good job. Cirasuolo says the administrators listened passively. Later, a British colleague told him: "They can issue all of the white papers they want. Let's see how they can carry them out without our help."

"It was a classic case of passive resistance, which I think is happening to a certain extent with No Child Left Behind. Resistance isn't the right word, but there's a lot of skepticism," says Cirasuolo, who has visited three African countries on International Seminar for Schooling trips and England as part of an annual exchange involving the leadership of AASA and its British equivalent.