Caution Heeded—A Response to “High Standards and Cultural Diversity: Cautionary Tales of Comparative Research”

Abstract

We welcome Louis and Versloot's addition (1996) to the continuing collection of benchmarking research on how different countries educate their young people. As we have argued (Resnick, Nolan, & Resnick, 1995), describing a nation's educational practices is a complex affair. The complexity is increased by the gap between the intended, the implemented, and the attained curriculum (Robitaille et al., 1993); by tensions between national guidelines and local control; and by the decisions of teachers in the classroom. As Louis and Versloot demonstrate, research teams that include people both internal and external to the education system under study are in the best position to guide readers through this complexity and provide a full description of how the system operates. Some readers may be puzzled by the oblique nature of Louis and Versloot's critique of our paper. Our work and theirs center on different but complementary aspects of the role of standards in different education systems. Their research is concerned primarily with how standards are established and maintained within the particular constitutional and cultural context of the Netherlands. Ours focused primarily on determining what the operative standards are in several countries. To do this, we found it necessary to take into account the broader structure of the education system. It is on this background (for us) question that Louis and Versloot, with their deep knowledge of the Dutch education system and broader Dutch culture, offer some challenges to our characterizations.