[M.D. Holloway]

An interesting article. I went to school with many from Asia and Europe and they all told me that the kids that are in secondary education are not all the kids. The test score that the US compares itself to against the rest of the world isn't the same. Its taking their best and rating them to all of ours...

Assessment Around the World
By Iris C. Rotberg
How does NCLB fit in an international context? Here's what's happening in the rest of the world. Standardized testing is controversial everywhere, regardless of its purpose. Most countries use testing for tracking and for selecting students for admission into academic secondary schools or universities, but generally not for holding educators accountable. Many countries don't even administer standardized tests until the later grades. In fact, most Canadian universities don't require the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or other standardized admissions tests—except for students applying with a U.S. high school diploma! (Ghosh, 2004) In a recent collection of studies of education systems worldwide, which I edited,1 numerous experts discussed current education policies in their countries, including the role that standardized testing plays in their public schools (Rotberg, 2004).

I draw on these overviews here to set No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the context of testing across the globe. The current preoccupation with test-based accountability in the United States is founded on several misperceptions about other countries' practices as well as about international test score comparisons and the extent to which test scores are valid indicators of the quality of education or the state of the economy. These assumptions have dominated U.S. public policy dialogue for decades.

Assumption: The rest of the developed world is one (high-achieving) country.

Much of the rhetoric about international test score comparisons treats the rest of the developed world as though it were one mythical country that does a better job of educating students than the United States does. However, the rhetoric does not recognize the significant differences in student academic achievement among developed countries; the level and distribution of education funding; the extent to which schools track students by academic ability; secondary school and university enrollment rates; and perhaps most important, the quality of education that each country offers low-income students, minority students, students with disabilities, languageminority students, and recent immigrants.
Assumption: Other countries have found the “right” way to improve student achievement.

Many people in the United States assume that other countries have centralized education systems and that the resulting standardization is the magic bullet for improving student achievement. This assumption ignores the fact that many countries question that policy. France, for example, is reassessing its highly centralized education system because it doesn't meet the needs of an increasingly diverse immigrant population. Many other countries, such as China, Israel, and Sweden, are moving from a centralized to a decentralized system of governance. Australia, Canada, and Germany—countries with long-standing decentralized systems—envision little change. In addition, no evidence supports the contention that organizational structure, whether centralized or decentralized, bears any relationship to academic achievement or the ability to compete in the global economy.