Part V: Education Policy

Present Trends in Public Secondary Education in Western Europe
Education, Credentialling, and the Labor Market in the European Community: An Agenda for Research
The Study of Education as a Pariority
'Goodbye, Mr. Chips': A Proposal for the Abolition of the Lifetime Classroom Teacher
Academia in Anarchy
Private Education
OECD Reviews of Educational Policy
Education for Development
The Utility of Country Case Studies for Educational Planning
Educational Financing and Policy Goals

Source: Harold J. Noah, "The Utility of
Country Case Studies for Educational Planning,"
Notes on Education (New York: Institute of
Philosophy and Politics of Education,
Teachers College, Columbia University, 1974) 5: 4-7.

THE UTILITY OF COUNTRY CASE STUDIES FOR EDUCATIONAL PLANNING

The set of activities called educational planning is a far from thoroughly defined branch of governmental activity. Not infrequently the best laid educational plans go awry, and many are not so well,laid in the first place. Educational planning is an art that continues to need all the help it can get. What aid can it expect from country case studies?

Comparative education had its beginning in country case studies and nowadays, too, they dominate the comparative education scene, at least quantitatively. But there are notable differences between the early and the contemporary country case study contributions. We are seeing some rather sharply focussed analytic, replication studies, in contrast to the more discursive, descriptive and "one-shot" work of the past. Of late, we have had a number of outstanding sets of replication studies. Examples are the financing of education studies sponsored by the International Institute for Educational Planning, Paris; the country educational policy reviews, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris; and the Mathematics Achievement and Six Subject studies of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Stockholm.

In the past, authors and sponsors of case studies were openly optimistic about the direct, immediate value of studies of foreign educational systems for domestic policy-making and planning. Today, a properly much more cautious note is sounded. Moreover, in the long period up to the mid- and late 1960's, when the major emphasis was upon quantitative expansion of schooling, the tasks facing the educational planner looked reasonably manageable, his data needs seemed well definable, and evaluation criteria intuitively available. All this aided and abetted a fairly positive approach to the question of using studies of foreign school systems to improve the management of one's own education.

The goals of education planning have now become more complex and less easy to define, if only because the emphasis has shifted to qualitative improvements. In consequence, data needs are now more difficult to specify and success criteria have become less obvious and more arguable. In such a world, the contribution of country case studies to the work of the educational planner is less intuitively clear. Nonetheless, I believe they are useful.

First, case studies can help in the recognition of problems. Educational planners need to do more than react to the problems set them by policy-makers and administrators. Planners need to be aware of a wide range of crucial educational problems in other countries than their own. This is desirable, partly to give them perspective on what may otherwise seem to be problems uniquely their own and partly to forewarn them of problems that they may need to face before too long. Surely this must be one of the major benefits of perusal of the 8-10 OECD Country Educational Policy Studies, that have so far appeared. The range of problems touched on and discussed is so extensive that no educational planner could leave their reading without at once a sense of comfort that his country is not alone in having to deal with some very difficult situations, and a warning of difficulties perhaps not yet faced at home, but already presaged abroad. Thus, the strains produced in Japan by a highly competitive system of entry into the prestigious "best" universities; the problems occasioned in France by application of a legalistically defined principle of égalité to reform of secondary education; the missed educational opportunities in West Germany because of too rigid an insistence upon the maintenance of "academic standards" -- all this and much more are valued fruits of the OECD country case studies series.

Equally with the widening of horizons on problems comes the benefit of a wider perspective on solutions. Nothing in educational planning and policy is more difficult than the transplanting of one country's procedures and institutions to another. Rigid, unenlightened copying is a sure prescription for failure. But this is no argument for the opposite viewpoint: that there is nothing to be learned from foreign example. On the contrary, a careful appraisal of the way other countries go about schooling their young is indispensable. Here, too, not only the OECD country studies, but also the 21-nation IEA work will repay close study. For, brought together in compact, systematized fashion is a wealth of information on the range of possibilities for ordering the institutions of schooling.

More valuable even than reviewing the finished product of other people's case studies is participation in an internationally directed case study of one's own system, or of a foreign system. The training and job-experience of an educational planner is likely to be incomplete without such an experience. The OECD studies and the IEA work have had one of their most valuable impacts in the very process of involving hundreds of individuals in consistent, systematic thought, discussion, inquiry and writing concerning educational practices, goals and values.

With these points in mind, it may be worth reviewing the specific use to educational planners of the National Case Studies that A. Harry Passow, Max A. Eckstein and I conducted, within the framework of the IEA Six Subject Study. (The final report is in press and will be published shortly under the title, International Studies in Evaluation VII.- The National Case Study -- An Empirical Comparative Study of Twenty-One Educational Systems. (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell; New York: John Wiley and Sons.)

The IEA National Case Study

Work began in 1968, to identify those major aspects of each country's socioeconomic, political, cultural and school systems that can be regarded as having some prima facie anterior relationship to the levels of school achievement in the subjects tested by IEA. Over 50 aspects were so identified, and variables that would reflect these aspects were agreed. After a lengthy process of international discussion and refinement, a final questionnaire (the National Case Study Questionnaire, or NCSQ) was determined, accepted, and submitted to each of the national IEA centers for completion. The NCS analyses are based primarily upon the country data submitted in response to the NCSQ by 20 IEA National Technical Officers (no reply was received from Romania). The final report contains country-by-country "profiles" of the socioeconomic, political, cultural and school systems of 20 countries, as well as analyses of the relationships between each country's average level of school achievement and the factors described in the profiles.

In summary, the NCS reports on level of economic development, standards of health care and nutrition, national affluence, population size and urbanization, female participation in the labor force, financial effort for education, family size, parents' availability to the young child, extent of foreign contacts, linguistic and cultural diversity and religious affiliation. School system factors include: enrollment size and growth (both compulsory and postcompulsory), student-teacher ratios, ages of beginning and ending compulsory education, and arrangements for transfer from primary to secondary schooling and from secondary to higher education. Characteristics relating to the teaching cadre are: control over teacher personnel decisions, emphasis on pedagogy in teacher training programs, academic ability of recruits to teaching, teachers' pay, professional organizations, representation on public bodies dealing with education, and teachers' power over instructional decisions. Curricular and instructional matters are represented by degree of openness of the system to curriculum reform, centralization versus local/regional modes of implemented curriculum change, and number of hours of instruction.

The National Case Study report thus contains a vast amount of systematically organized information on national social and educational systems. The report does not, however, attempt to be comprehensively encyclopaedic; instead, each element of the information presented there is included only because it is used to test an hypothesis concerning the correlates of national achievement levels.

Throughout the NCS volume, cautions are expressed regarding imperfections of the data which severely limit the implications for policy and planning to be drawn from the findings. The indicators are often only gross estimates (sometimes hesitantly provided by IEA national technical officers) and these are related to achievement scores in science and reading comprehension only. Hypotheses could be tested only with a small number of cases, never exceeding 19 countries. While a number of the relationships are consistently in the same direction, the data do not lend themselves to sophisticated statistical treatment which would warrant drawing strong inferences. Some of the findings suggest support for hypotheses with respect to younger children (aged 10 years, or "Population I" according to IEA definitions), but not for somewhat older children (aged 14 years, or "Population II"), or vice-versa, thus raising additional questions about the nature of the relationships which might exist.

The levels of knowledge generated by the NCSQ are not adequate for providing the planner or policy-maker with information directly applicable to action. NCSQ data generally do not provide guarantees that taking action X with respect to some aspect of the educational system will yield increased achievement in the subject areas tested. Furthermore, the criterion used in the IEA studies is school achievement as measured by test scores, and not the entire complex range of outcomes that schools are intended to deliver. No planner will wish to concentrate the efforts of schooling entirely upon measured achievement in particular subject areas (even when the measures do include non-cognitive aspects), at the expense of everything else. Hence, an analysis which related an indicator or cluster of indicators to aggregate science and reading comprehension measures, without attempting to examine trade-offs (because the data do not warrant such analyses), is inevitably limited. However, it can sensitize planners to question what is the conventional wisdom and focus on qualitative as well as quantitative factors, and furthermore, when read in conjunction with the other IEA volumes, the NCS findings provide a basis for wide-ranging speculation about policy.

Educational planners need to give attention to the conditions and processes which affect the functioning of the institution called "school" in achieving its objectives, but in addition they must not neglect the other agencies and institutions affecting home and family background. While it is often argued that schools are not the primary institutions of economic and social reform, but more typically preservers of the status quo, democratization of the schooling process and extension of access to educational opportunities are trends in all IEA nations. The data, however, are not fine enough to provide definitive guidance for the policy maker about such issues as socioeconomic and/or racial balance of student populations, allocation of financial resources, or the desirability of investing in schooling rather than in other social welfare areas.

In addition to reporting the outcomes or achievement measures in specific subject areas, each of the other IEA volumes reports relationships between achievement and other pedagogical and sociocultural factors within the school and classroom context. These data analyses are consistent across nations in emphasizing the significance of home background on those aspects of cognitive achievement which were assessed. The policy implications of these findings of the Coleman and Plowden Reports are not unambiguous. The school system may not be in a position to have an immediate impact on the home and family (although there are educational programs which are designed to do just that, especially with respect to child-rearing patterns), yet in those areas within its domain -- curriculum, instruction, resources, educational climate, student body composition, staff deployment, and so forth -- reforms and reallocations may be possible which could affect both the cognitive and affective growth of students.

A sampling of some of the conclusions we advanced will illustrate the potential utility of these studies. A number of NCS hypotheses deal with the expansion of pupil enrollments for the system as a whole and for the primary and secondary levels. Generally, the notion that the greater the expansion in enrollments over the period 1950-1960-1969 the lower the achievement, is confirmed when all countries are taken together. However, the negative correlations are much smaller and sometimes become marginal when the developed countries only are considered. Rapid changes in enrollment naturally place burdens on school systems with respect to facilities, staff needs, and educational costs. While systems may be able to cope with these problems on a quantitative basis, the qualitative aspects are more difficult and it is to these aspects that planners must give attention.

The finding that there is a low correlation between growth of secondary enrollment and average Population II achievement for the developed countries lends additional support to the conviction that expansion of secondary school opportunities does not necessarily mean lower achievement. Certainly, the questions of retentivity and expansion, of enrollment at the secondary and tertiary levels -- among the most significant areas educational planners must deal with -- should continue to be dealt with in terms of national priorities. Certainly, the concept that "more means worse" is generally not supported by NCS data nor by the several subject reports. However, if planners focus only on the physical aspects of growth instead of on qualitative dimensions such as quality of staffing, flexibility of instructional programs, and variety of curricular materials, some decline in achievement levels may be expected.

The large and regular differences between the developed and the developing countries necessitated treating the four developing and the fifteen developed nations separately in many instances. The findings suggest that the significance of certain indicators differs between the developed and developing countries. Some of the indicators may, in fact, be operating on a threshold basis, or, once having reached a certain level, major increases beyond this level may not have a discernible relationship to achievement. The inverse relationship between economic development and Population II achievement among the developed nations deserves attention: the higher the level of economic development, the lower the Population II achievement.

There is consensus that the quality of education is closely tied to the quality of teachers in a nation's schools. Certification, selection, hiring, and assignment of teachers can be made at the national, regional (or state), local, or school building level. There seems to be little difference in aggregate achievement between those nations which perform staffing functions on a centralized basis and those which are more decentralized. Policy makers who deal with issues of centralization and decentralization of educational processes will need to take into consideration other factors (e.g., local control and political power) in resolving these problems. There is little evidence in the NCS data to suggest that centralized or decentralized staffing policies are associated with achievement levels.

There are a number of factors which determine the range and level of academic ability of recruits into teaching, and various professions compete for the best in academic talent. Most of the IEA countries recruit their primary teachers from a lower stratum of academic ability than that from which they draw their secondary teachers. Eleven nations recruit their primary teachers from the lower half of the academic ability range. On the other hand, three IEA nations recruit secondary teachers from the top half of the academic ability range and six recruit from the second quarter of the academic ability range. Some positive relationship is shown between the average academic quality of teacher recruits and achievement scores, especially at the Population I level.

In ten of the 19 IEA nations, primary school teaching is viewed as a woman's job while in the remaining nine it is regarded as a career for either males or females. On the secondary school level, however, in all but one country teaching is perceived as a career for either men or women. Only in one is secondary teaching perceived as primarily a job for men. In many countries, there is considerable concern about the perceived "feminization" of the teaching profession and the consequences on affective development, particularly of boys. The NCS data provide some support for the hypothesis that the perception of primary teaching as a job for females is associated with lower achievement scores.

"Opportunity to learn" seemed to be one of the important aspects affecting achievement in Science and Reading Comprehension. Opportunity to learn is, of course, related to the number of hours of instruction available to pupils. When taken in conjunction with related findings concerning "opportunity to learn," the implication for the planner is that hours of instruction and exposure to particular areas of knowledge have substantial impact on levels of school achievement.

There are four distinct kinds of implications to be drawn from the NCS data. Some findings suggest that the policy makers might take "positive action" if increased achievement in Science and Reading Comprehension is desired. Some findings suggest that certain aspects of the so-called "conventional wisdom" are not borne out cross-nationally, and policy makers would do well to seriously query such wisdom. Some findings suggest that policy makers should look to make qualitative rather than quantitative changes and recognize that "more" alone may have little bearing on the question of "better" or "worse."

What we are left with insofar as the policy planner is concerned, are a number of hints and possible implications which need to be examined on both a within-country and a cross-national basis. The correlations of the indicators with achievement, it must be repeated, deal with achievement in Science and Reading Comprehension. An educational system has broader goals than achievement in these subjects, goals of both a cognitive and affective nature, goals dealing with individuals and the society. Those were not considered in the NCS analyses, and the policy maker and planner must perforce consider these other goals, and make decisions on a wider basis than that of measured school achievement alone.