Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World…

Since at least the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, standardized test scores have served as the primary measures of public school effectiveness. Yet, such scores fail to measure the ultimate goal of education: maximizing happiness. This exploratory analysis assesses nation level associations between test scores and happiness, controlling…

Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, supplanting No Child Left Behind and placing responsibility for public school improvement squarely upon each of the 50 states. With the federal government's role in school accountability sharply diminished, it now falls to state and local governments to take decisive action. Even though most…

The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third of countries in 2015. What accounts for this…

Does the government control of school systems facilitate equality in school quality? Whether centralized or localized control produces more equality depends not only on what "could" happen in principle, but also on what does happen in practice. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database to examine the…

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international test results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading…

Examining a popular political notion, this article presents results from a series of Spearman Rho calculations conducted to investigate relationships between countries' rankings on international tests of mathematics and science and future economic competitiveness as measured by the 2006 World Economic Forum's Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI).…

This study investigates the relationship between Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in mathematics, science and reading and the employment rates in the following four economic activities: research and development, agriculture, industry, and service industries. Thirty-three countries were included in the study, and most…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Conference on Education and New Developments (END 2017), organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (W.I.A.R.S.). Education, in our contemporary world, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of the…