The Fraser InstituteAugust 2004
The latest issue of the Fraser Forum, published by Canada's free market Fraser Institute, offers five short articles on education. They focus on Canada (none more so than Testing Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic: A Modest Next Step for Aboriginal Education), but several are relevant to the U.S. In particular, John H. Bishop's High School Diploma Exams: Explaining High Achievement Levels in Students of Some Commonwealth Countries, compares scores on the Program for International Student Assessments (PISA) among a dozen countries, the States included. Perhaps not surprisingly, American students come in eleventh on this list (the others being Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, and five commonwealth countries). But Bishop argues that one of the usual villains - America's diverse population - is not to blame. Rather, he points to the existence of "curriculum-based external exit exams (CBEES)" in the more successful countries as evidence that accountability leads to results, while its absence tends to breed complacency. (The author also notes that studies of TIMSS data have substantiated these results.) Even more importantly, those countries with CBEES showed markedly smaller achievement gaps, as measured by two methods: comparing scores between native and first-generation immigrant students, and comparing scores between children of mothers with and without college degrees. In Why BC's Children Need For-profit Schools, Peter Cowley offers a brief but useful argument on the merits of allowing for-profit schools to serve our children. In short, Adam Smith's logic should hold in education as elsewhere: profit motives provide the right incentives to produce quality work. And if not, parents are free to vote with their feet and select other schools. Finally, the Forum offers an article on private schools, dispelling the notion that they might fragment society, and reprints an abridged version of Rick Hess's recent piece reassessing the meaning of "public" schooling (available here). To view any of these short works yourself, click here.
