At the risk of sounding as though I am arguing against standards, I must say I disagree with virtually everything in Harold Stevenson's article. The sweeping generalizations and simplistic recommendations that ran through his book The Learning Gap also afflict his article. My disagreements, though, arise mostly from claims about his findings that simply aren't true and from the deep flaws in his research.
Ability and Effort Both Count
For example, Stevenson argues that American children attribute high performance in school to ability, while Asian children think it comes from effort. But his own data contradict this conclusion. A graph in The Learning Gap shows the relative weights children give to the importance of ability and effort (p. 102). Chinese students do put their money on effort, and American students do rate ability more highly than Chinese students. But American kids rate effort higher than ability and as important as the Chinese students rank it. Any psychologist or educator knows that ability and effort both count—and so do American children. Effort alone will not make you a Michael Jordan, an Itzhak Perlman, or an Albert Einstein.
Comparing Apples and Oranges
More disturbing than misinterpretations of data are flaws in his research design. Stevenson claims in his article that he used “representative samples” of students. But in a 1990 Child Development article, he describes his Chicago students as a most nonrepresentative group: 39 percent black and Hispanic with 20 percent of the families not speaking English at home. Many of his Chicago families are very poor (13 percent earn less than $10,000 a year), and none are wealthy. Most of the Chicago families have about three children, while the Beijing families, because of China's population control policies, are raising an only child.
Further, 50 percent of the Beijing households, contrasted with only 10 percent of the Chicago households, are home to a grandparent. Thus, Chinese children have more adults around to interact with—a factor that no doubt influences their intellectual growth. How in the world does one take into account the only child and grandparent factors? The Chicago sample does not represent the U.S., and it is in no way comparable to the Chinese sample. These are not trivial problems. They render the results meaningless: you cannot compare noncomparable groups.
Stevenson asserts that he has solved this problem by choosing in the last decade “locations where there is universal elementary school education.” This claim rings hollow given the nonrepresentative 1990 samples described above. Even if he chooses locations with universal education, in a country without universal education those will be elite locations.
What Larger Studies Say
These methodological problems no doubt explain why Stevenson finds much greater achievement gaps than larger, better designed studies do. His research has given rise to the ludicrous, but common, assertion that only 2 percent of American students perform as well as 50 percent of Asian students in mathematics. International studies such as those described in the recent reports, Learning Science and Learning Mathematics, find tiny differences in the 95th percentile for most countries (Lapointe et al. 1992). That is, the scores of the upper 5 percent of virtually all countries are virtually identical. Indeed, in some areas, the American 95th percentile is higher than that of some countries whose average score is higher than those of U.S. kids. How can Stevenson equate this outcome—which is the common one— with his own?
Sometimes Americans don't even finish behind Asian kids. Westbury (1992) found that when American and Japanese students are tested on material both have been taught, the Americans score substantially higher. Because this analysis compares the academically top 20 percent of American 8th graders to a whole grade of Japanese students, Westbury reasoned a fairer examination would compare the American kids to the top 20 percent of the Japanese students. When he performed this analysis, the Americans still scored higher, although the difference is so small that “no difference” is the proper conclusion. The question, then, is whether all American 8th graders should study the same thing that all Japanese 8th graders study (algebra). The answer I hear from math reformers is a resounding “no.”
I am happy to see Stevenson reporting data on reading, which is a much more important skill and one on which Americans do much better than students in a number of other countries. Until very recently, Stevenson has been silent about reading, although his early research found Americans equaling Japanese students in this area. Indeed, the recent study by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement finds American 9-year-olds second among 28 countries and 14-year-olds ninth among 31, but with scores very close to all of the top finishers except the top-ranked Finns. The difference between second-place France and ninth-place United States is 14 points on a 600-point scale (Elley 1992).
A Darker View of Japanese Education
The greatest weakness of Stevenson's research, though, is that it does not examine the entire education system. The Learning Gap and all of his research published up to that point rest solely on a math test given to 1st and 5th graders. Do the scores of 6- and 10-year-olds say much about the whole system (Scandinavian 6-year-olds aren't even in school yet)? Even within the K–12 system, others such as Karel van Wolferen (1989) have painted a much darker view of the Japanese system.
Once you get beyond the K–12 setting, though, the apparent advantage of Asian systems disappears. A “60 Minutes” segment (which aired February 21, 1988) showed Japanese college students spending many years partying or taking it easy. Schooland (1990) confirmed this perspective, finding that Japanese college students do little work, seldom go to class, and cheat openly on tests. What good does it do to hold kids' feet to the fire in elementary and secondary school if they fall apart in college? In addition, America sends about 58 percent of high school graduates on to college, a rate more than triple that of most European nations (colleges to which, it should be noted, European and Asian high school graduates are flocking).
For Children in Need
My two recent articles amassed a mountain of data to refute Stevenson's few data points, but they also showed we have plenty of problems to work on (Bracey 1991, 1992).
A recent news story told of districts in Indiana sending their obsolete textbooks to rural districts in Alabama and Mississippi, where they were received as “godsends.” For children in such need, what will higher standards mean? There Are No Children Here describes parts of Chicago in terms usually reserved for Somalia and Sarajevo. Savage Inequalities paints a grim picture of urban schools, and The Rural Underclass does the same for the largely invisible poverty of the countryside. For children in such need, what will higher standards mean? Nothing, I submit.
Schools exist within a culture. To glorify Asian schools without picking up the rest of the cultural baggage is to try to graft a vine onto a concrete wall. And, by uttering such gross generalities as “American schools are in trouble,” Stevenson has missed both the nature and quantity of what needs to be done and where.
