A few days back, I ran across a review in a Forbes magazine blog that discussed Finland’s educational system, which apparently foregoes most standardized testing and yet produces some of the best results of any educational system in the world. I have my own skepticisms about the usefulness of standardized testing, but in my curiosity, I found a chart on another website (geographic.org) that I reproduce via screenshot, here.
A little fact in the above chart leaped out at me, and blew my mind.
Yes, Finland is near the top of this little chart. But look what country is right above it, in position #1. Korea (which one has to assume means South Korea, and not the charming utopia a little bit to the north of here). And you see, this blew my mind because South Korea’s educational system is far from free of standardized testing – rather, the Koreans’ obsession with testing of all kinds is unparalleled and downright obnoxious.
And so I had an insight – a moment when everything became clear. The two top countries on the chart achieve their stunning world rankings in education with widely divergent approaches to standardized testing. What if standardized testing actually didn’t have any impact, either way, on education? What if not only was standardized testing useless but also relatively harmless? That would explain a lot.
My personal opinion, or gut feeling, about what we see on the chart, is that what drives countries like Finland and South Korea to the top of charts like this has very little to do with education policy and a great deal to do with cultural valuations of education – which is to say, what the government does about education (or fails to do) is much less meaningful to outcomes than what individuals and families feel about education.
By the by, this doesn’t bode well for the sorry state of American education. Because if it’s a cultural problem, and not a policy failure, the solution is much more difficult.
