Test Scores and Economic Growth

Abstract

SOMEWHERE around 2000, I observed that, while people argued vehemently that good schools led to improved national economies, there wasn't much in the way of evidence for that contention. And there was certainly one glaring counterexample: Japan. Kids in Japan continued to ace tests, just as they had during Japan's boom years in the 1980s, but the country had been mired in recession or stagnation for a decade. (People now think that 2006 may have been the year that Japan finally started an expansion that will last for more than a quarter or two.) Out of curiosity, I correlated the ranking of countries on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) with the rankings for global competitiveness issued by the World Economic Forum. The resulting number for about 35 countries was quite small and became negative if I removed the bottom five nations, which were quite low on both rankings. Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen's article in the December Kappan observed that the goals for American education have seldom been cast in economic terms. Instead, right from the founding of the nation, they have more often been stated in terms of moral and civic outcomes. The dominance of an economic reference point is new. An aberration, Rothstein and Jacobsen called it. Moreover, the focus on the economy is new elsewhere as well. A Belgian critique of the Programme for International Student Assessment (for details on this critique, see the June 2005 Research column) implied that ranking education systems according to test scores was, well, dumb: Hit parades have been flourishing here for some years: the best schools, the world's best universities, the top-performing research centers, etc. Some 30 years ago this sort of ranking would have produced a smile as we were of the view that the broad and long-term effects of education cannot be reduced to a few trivial indicators and that every education system could be validly understood only by taking account of its history, its aims, and the complexity of its structures. Now, in too many places, people seem to think that a good education means only more math and science so students can compete for good jobs in the global economy. Yet there remains very little evidence of the impact of math and science achievement on the economic growth of nations. This makes the powerful rhetoric calling for ever more math and science somewhat hard to understand. On the day that I began to write this column, for instance, a program called Preparing U.S. Students for the Global Economy took place in Washington, D.C. It featured Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), and various pundits from think tanks. A Dodd-Ehlers bill calling for the National Assessment Governing Board to establish national standards in mathematics and science has been introduced in Congress. From a different perspective, in the November 2006 issue of the American Journal of Education, Francisco Ramirez and John Meyer of Stanford University, Xiaowei Luo of the University of Illinois, and Evan Schofer of the University of Minnesota observe the disjuncture between strong rhetoric and weak impact: The dramatic portrait of achievement and development presupposes a world of enormous variation with respect to curriculum, teaching, and achievement. But cross-national investigations actually show considerably less variation with respect to curriculum, teaching, and achievement than expected in policy discourse.... So, from a research perspective, one should not expect robust achievement effects on economic growth. Or, as I have more crassly put it on occasion, education is critical, but among the developed nations differences in test scores are trivial. Ramirez and his colleagues go on to look for data that bear on the relationship between achievement and development. Their principal variables were changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 38 countries over two 20-year periods, 1970-90 and 1980-2000, and various international test comparisons up to the initial TIMSS in 1995. …