ON ONE OF his many school visits this fall, President Bush announced the formation of Friendship Through Education, which will link U.S. students with students from Muslim countries. This might have been difficult to even conceive of were it not for Internet-based communication, and it might have been totally irrelevant were it not for our current effort to seek friends in formerly strange places. When our shores are threatened by such things as waves of immigrants or the Cold War, the usual American response is a display of xenophobia. Indeed, some vile incidents involving mistreatment of Muslims have occurred in this country. Lynn Che-ney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has even called for all energies to be directed at teaching about the U.S. Constitution rather than about Islamic culture. But, in these new threatening times, the general response has been quite different. College students have overenrolled in courses on the Middle East, teachers have begun searching the Web for resources to weave into social studies and literature, and adults have signed up to escort Muslim women on shopping trips, to drive their children to school, and to participate in informed discussions about the Middle East and Islam. The truth is that American education has been under the influence of globalization for a long time. While the usual indicators - enrollment in foreign languages or support for bilingual education, for example - don't seem to show a change of focus, in many other ways schools are becoming more aware of the world. Nor can this decrease in isolation be traced to the demand for multicultural education. Most of the changes taking place in our outlook come from the outside. We have begun to recruit teachers in shortage areas - e.g., foreign languages, bilingual education, and - from other countries. We have borrowed the idea for ungraded primary schools and school-quality inspections from Great Britain. We have taken German and Danish school- to-work transition programs as models for our own attempt to build a system here. The popular Reading Recovery program started in New Zealand. A recent feature in the Washington Post described the adoption of math in schools throughout the country, schools that are now using books and a curriculum that have boosted that small nation's achievement to the top of the international pack. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has even launched its own study - a $350,000 grant - to compare the scores of students enrolled in the Singapore program with their state's average assessment scores. The transfer of such academic accomplishment is no given, Alan Ginsburg, director of planning and evaluation for ED, points out. Singapore inherited the traditional British exam system, so the context for learning would truly be foreign to American students. Consider that a seventh-grader in Singapore, at an accelerated level, studies and takes exams in two languages (English and the student's native language), math, science, history, geography, home economics, design and technology, art, music, physical education, and civics and moral education. Despite real contextual differences, international academic measurements have prodded the American public education system to look beyond itself. International studies on a large scale began appearing in the 1970s, but not until the Third International Mathematics and Science Study came along in 1995 did American educators and policy makers take a lot of notice. The 1995 report included a rich source of comparative data on our own and other nations' curriculum, teaching strategies, and teacher preparation, and a follow-up report issued earlier this year, in which several states, districts, and consortia of districts participated, was even more informative about U. …