Here’s a scene familiar to anyone who follows the education debate: The latest international test scores arrive, and America policymakers and politicians wring their hands and gnash their teeth over the results. The comparisons begin almost as soon as the numbers are released. How could the United States, whose economy is the envy of the world, lag behind so many countries in so many testing categories?
For decades, our policy response to these numbers has been to put more effort into winning the standardized testing race, a desperate effort to keep up with the South Koreas and Singapores of the world by adding more tests at younger and younger ages. It is, unfortunately, a race we may never win. But more importantly, it’s a race we shouldn’t participate in in the first place. Why? Because aping the world’s best test-takers may do little for our educational system or economy — and worse still, it may cause our students irreparable harm.
Take, for instance, South Korea, where the suneung, the national college entrance exam, dominates elementary and secondary school education. South Korea is continually lauded as a model of high-stakes testing, where the intensity of the preparation is often held up as an example of character and discipline. An eight-hour marathon exam, the test is the primary instrument in determining college admissions, and thus brings with it extraordinary stress and pressure for parents and students.
As one high school senior confessed to CBS News, “I spent 19 years preparing for this exam.” Korean students regularly spend a full day in school from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. followed by specialty tutoring from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. and finish the day with homework and late nights. In other words, a 12-16-hour study day, for two decades, focused on a single test.
It’s fashionable to praise these intense hours as a hallmark of South Korean commitment to education. It’s less popular to point out that high-stakes testing has created a corrosive culture for students. It’s little wonder, for example, that South Korea ranks highest in the world in student suicides, and that a reported 60 percent of young people contemplate self-harm.
Those are the most serious consequences, but even the day-to-day impact of such demanding workloads is worrisome. Even as study after study confirms the need for adequate sleep, especially among young people, Korean students sacrifice it for their studies. As a popular Korean maxim goes, “Sleep five hours and fail; sleep four hours and pass.”
The net result of all this hard work? The jury is still out on that one. A 2008 study found that 44 percent of Korean undergraduates at top American universities dropped out — compared to 34 percent of Americans, 25 percent of Chinese undergrads and 21 percent of Indian students. The researcher, Samuel Kim, pointed to Korea’s intensive study culture as part of the problem. With almost 75 percent of student time allocated to studying and only 25 percent allocated to extracurricular activities, Korean students had a tough time fitting in with their counterparts from around the world.
For Kim, this manifests itself in business leadership. At the time of his research, 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies were run by Indian nationals; 5 percent were run by Chinese nationals. Only 0.3 percent were run by Koreans.
And while it’s not the end-all measure of a country’s success, it is striking that, in the face of report after report chronicling Korean dominance over U.S. students on standardized tests, the two countries’ GDP growth has been roughly on par for the last decade, with the U.S. usually edging out the Koreans by a nose.
Of course, making comparisons across vastly different economies is difficult. But so is comparing student performance and educational outcomes across different cultures. When we praise high-stakes testing and heap laurels upon an educational culture that emphasizes intense drilling and memorization, we necessarily give short shrift to the virtues of American education, many of which cannot be measured or tested.
And in their zeal to keep up with our foreign competition, our policymakers seem all too keen to embrace so-called “drill-and-kill” testing. Both No Child Left Behind and Race to The Top — the most significant education policy reforms of the last decade — put a premium on teach-to-the-test strategies.
But it’s worth asking the question of whether comparing ourselves to superior test-takers is the appropriate way to think about our nation’s educational infrastructure. And there’s no better time to ask such questions than during a presidential campaign. Campaigns are many things, but they are, at their core, a chance for the country to examine itself afresh and decide if the policy direction of the past has served us well.
In the field of education, it’s worth debating whether, in place of standardized tests, we might emphasize a method of evaluation that stresses critical thinking. Could tests that focus on memorization and quick recall be replaced by team exercises and cross-disciplinary problem-solving? More broadly, do we want our educational culture to look more like South Korea, or something else entirely?
Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith are the co-authors of “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era.” Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
