Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

So now we know what does happen in top countries (including some standardized testing in Finland and some union conflict in South Korea), despite what we keep hearing.

What doesn’t happen?

One major difference, about which we hear far too little, is that kids virtually never repeat grades in Finland or South Korea. Now this is counter-intuitive in a way. Isn’t it better to repeat a grade than to promote a student who isn’t ready? Don’t kids benefit from the extra year of schooling?

Not so says a new PISA In Focus Report. High rates of grade repetition are not associated with better performance; they are associated with higher costs per student.

“PISA 2009 shows that countries with high rates of grade repetition are also those that show poorer student performance. Some 15% of of the variation in performance among OECD countries can be explained by differences in the rates of grade repetition, and students’ socio-economic background is more strongly associated with performance in these countries, regardless of the country’s wealth.”

When a country transfers a large percentage of students to another school, whether for low achievement or behavior issues, overall performance suffers again. Even though such a transfer is supposed to send a student to a school that can better deal with their individual learning needs, the PISA 2009 results point out an unfortunate irony:

“[...]transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems, where students from advantaged backgrounds end up in better-performing schools while students from disadvantaged backgrounds end up in poorer-performing schools.”

Happily, transferring, repeating or suffering are not the only options. Or they shouldn’t be. In countries with low rates of transfers, teachers have more autonomy to determine the best curriculum for different kids and better training to know how to do so effectively. In those countries, schools with the most poverty and other challenges also tend to receive the most resources.

The biggest myth that Americans tell about other countries’ schools is that they are perfect. In fact, as with health care, people always complain about their systems—wherever they are. Education is complicated, important and emotional. And no one has achieved bliss. Teachers do not like change—even in South Korea. Native-born parents do not like immigrants moving into their schools—even in Finland.

Why does this matter? Because making schools better is hard—in any language. I think union leader Randi Weingarten knows this even better than I do, and she can be far more creative and collaborative than she gets credit for being. But even she routinely makes fast-and-loose international comparisons that polarize the debate without much concern for accuracy. Here’s an example from the Wall Street Journal:

“A month ago, education ministers and teachers union presidents from the 16 top-performing and improving countries—including Finland, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil and Canada—came to New York to participate in an international conference on public education sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.S. Department of Education. The education leaders of these countries presented with impressive clarity all the methods they are using to improve student learning and strengthen teacher quality….

These countries emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration. They revere and respect their teachers; they don’t demonize them. Virtually all of them are unionized. In fact, school leaders in these countries work very closely with their unions, and most said they would never introduce changes or legislation without union collaboration.”

Really? Because the South Koreans were not actually at that summit in New York.

Know why? Well, they were invited—but the invitation required that the education minister come with the teacher union leader. And Korea’s education minister and the union leader are not BFF’s right now, despite what we keep saying. So they, um, didn’t come.

Hmmm…not so blissful anymore, right? I mean, even our union leaders and our education secretary came to that summit—and they even sat next to each other. I actually saw Arne Duncan kiss Randi Weingarten on the cheek when they said goodbye! True story! The Koreans should be so lucky.

In real life, if you ask Korean teachers whether their government would ever dare to make changes without union collaboration, they might start laughing at you. In fact, the Korean government recently banned corporal punishment and began evaluating teacher and principal performance more rigorously. Many of the teachers I met last month did not like these changes at all.

Clearly, it’s much better if we can all get along. It is probably the only way to make reform work in schools. But oversimplifying the problem for short-term rhetorical gain does not seem like a path to sustainability.

On Aug. 4, I’ll be in New Orleans at the NCS4 conference—talking to about 400 men and women whose job it is to make sure tens of thousands of people can come to a game or a concert and leave in peace a few hours later. That is a complicated job. I look forward to hearing their stories.

I increasingly hear folks like Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch criticize America’s current experiments in education reform as “market-driven” or “corporate.” On some level, I understand what they mean. But on another level, it’s worth considering what kind of assumptions this language implies.

First of all, what makes a reform “market-driven”? Well, Weingarten and Ravitch are usually referring to the increasing use of student test-score growth to evaluate teachers; the dismissal of those teachers who are low-performing; and the opening up of more charter schools. And that’s fair on a superficial level. Education, like health care, does not lend itself to a free-market solution. And accountability and competition are indeed hallmarks of a free market.

But seriously now. Accountability and competition are more than just that. At their best, and that is a huge caveat, they are integral to how human beings function—which is why they exist at the heart of many institutions that we hold dear. Elections, for example, rely on accountability and competition. Does that make them bad? No. Does it make them vulnerable to gaming and in need of supervision? Yes.

Accountability and competition are also hallmarks of other things….like Sports, for example. Consider the evils of “corporate” high-school soccer and “market-driven” tee-ball. (In fact, it would be fun to see what would happen if you told a high-school football coach that he could not use touch downs to assess player performance—because, after all, the player cannot control the weather, the other team, the rest of his team, etc.)

More to the point, education, like health care, is not and never has been (and never will be) a free market. The use of this kind of rhetoric is calculated, but not remotely accurate.

For example, the vast majority of American teachers are not now (and never have been) subject to dismissal for a failure to improve student test scores. Even in DC, most teachers are still not evaluated based on test scores. They are evaluated by their principals and master educators. We do not consider that market-driven. (Although perhaps we should, since most private-sector employees are evaluated by their bosses as well.)

Charter schools do indeed inject more competition to the education system. But how many of our kids are actually in charter schools? About 5%, according to the Department of Education. More kids attend private schools.

So why all the anxiety about market-driven reforms? The fear is that these kinds of policies will eventually become common place. And it is true that charter schools and value-added evaluations are growing in practice every day. In 1999, only 2% of our kids attended charter schools.

But this kind of pre-emptive fear-mongering is not helping anyone. If we are to focus on what works in education—and stay very disciplined in looking for solutions—then we can’t rule out entire classes of ideas just because they have been effective in the private sector. After all, one thing this country still does better than any other is to generate productivity and innovation in large groups of people known as companies. These companies do a massive amount of research on basic human behavior: How do people work? What motivates them? How can we make employees happy? While it may feel good to reject this kind of knowledge, it is unwise.

What we need in this country is not market-based reforms or nonprofit-based reforms; what we are human-driven, evidence-based reforms.

Both sides of this debate have a tendency to latch on to policy agendas with very little regard for how real human beings actually function. And what we have found after decades of trying and failing is that no policy, no matter how well-intentioned, will work without considering the human beings who must implement it. Without measuring what actually works, what actually does not and listening to the teachers, parents, principals and most of all the students affected, we will just keep arguing in circles, with only the talking points changing.

Bloomberg’s Jane Williams interviews Marc Tucker, Linda Darling-Hammond and me about how U.S. schools compare to schools around the world. The link will be up for a little while at least right here.