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Presidential Address Rethinking the Comparative—And the International

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Presidential Address Rethinking the Comparative—And the International Presidential Address Rethinking the Comparative—and the International MARTIN CARNOY It is both a great honor and a great responsibility to address the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. A great honor, of course, because of the symbolism associated with such an event. The great responsibility comes from the richness and depth of past presidential addresses and the weight of living up to their standards. The theme of our meeting this year in Hawaii is “Rethinking the Com- parative.” It might well have been “Rethinking the Comparative and the International,” for both elements of our name bear reexamination in a world and in national societies that are changing rapidly and profoundly. We need to ask ourselves, after 50 years, what it is that makes comparative and inter- national education unique and what the CIES, as an intellectual community, contributes to understanding how the world works and to human progress. What Is Comparative Education? In one sense, all evaluations of education are comparative. For example, if we analyze the effect of an educational treatment on a random sample of students, we are doing a comparison of a treatment group and an untreated control group. Should this be considered comparative education? Most of us would probably agree that it is not. Let’s go a step farther: if we analyze the Chilean voucher program, comparing the performance of students in Chile’s subsidized private schools with those in public municipal schools, is this comparative education? After all, we are comparing the educational impact of two kinds of educational experiences, and we are doing so in another country if we live in the United States. If the idea is to use the Chilean case to gain insight into educational policy in the United States, is this “comparative”? Here we might find disagreement. Some would argue that we have not done a comparative study because we have not compared the effects of private and public education in different societies in order to gain insights into the social and cultural conditions under which “private” might differ from “public.” Others might argue that comparative education is not restricted to the comparison of national educational systems and that implicit comparisons, such as analyzing the impact of a large-scale voucher plan in another society with the intent of understanding the effect of such Comparative Education Review, vol. 50, no. 4. ᭧ 2006 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2006/5004-0000$05.00 Comparative Education Review 551 CARNOY a policy on one’s own society, are legitimate forms of comparative education research. What about comparisons of the effects of education on different groups within countries? If a researcher studies the differential impact of French- language education in, say, Coˆte d’Ivoire or Chad on children speaking different local languages, is this comparative education? Should studies of the black-white test score gap in U.S. schools—studies in which researchers try to understand why formal education may not have the same meaning even for those who nominally speak the same language, who grow up in the same society, but who face different social conditions and imbibe different historical interpretations of their social role—be considered comparative education? Let me share some of my personal experiences to show how I view these questions. I have been deeply involved in comparative and international education research since before I had any notion that the field existed or even that I was doing such research. My adviser in the economics department at the University of Chicago, Theodore Schultz, learned that I traveled reg- ularly to Mexico to visit my parents. They had moved there when I went to college. Schultz encouraged me to write a dissertation on the costs and returns to education in Mexico and to compare those results to similar re- search in the United States. I spent a good part of 1963 in Mexico, assembling a time series on the costs of primary, secondary, and university education in Mexico and personally interviewing about 4,000 workers in 65 establishments in three Mexican cities about their socioeconomic background, their school- ing, and their income. I visited schools, talked to young children working in Mexico City’s streets to find out how much they earned when they did not attend school, and interviewed pupils’ parents to find out how much they spent on their children’s uniforms, notebooks, books, and other school sup- plies. My results showed that the payoffs to education in a rapidly developing lower-income country were considerably higher than in the United States— the first empirical comparison of economic returns to education.1 Yet, 5 years later, when I completed a similar study in Kenya, I found very different results—the Kenya economy in the late 1960s had high rates of unemployment and low rates of return to education, particularly to primary schooling.2 This second study made me question many of my assumptions about the inherent value of investing in education and led me to try to understand why primary education in one society might be associated with social mobility and in another society could be largely worthless unless it led to entering and completing secondary schooling. Without knowing it, I had 1 Martin Carnoy, “The Costs and Returns to Education in Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1964). 2 Martin Carnoy and Hans Thias, Cost-Benefit Analysis in Education: A Case Study of Kenya (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, for World Bank, 1972). 552 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS become an international, comparative education researcher in the best sense of the word, using the results of my empirical work and the work of others to try to revise existing theories (in this case economic) of the relation between education and labor markets. The Kenya results, when compared with my earlier study in Mexico, helped me to formulate a theory about changing patterns of rates of return to education over time.3 The Kenya research also gave me an opportunity to observe a society just emerging from several generations of British colonialism. What I saw had great impact on me. Combining this with my intense involvement in the anti–Vietnam War movement, I began to raise questions in my own mind about the very meaning of education in developing societies. I became especially suspicious of the dominant paradigm of the time that Western education was a positive force for the common good even in countries that were colonized and exploited economically by the same countries providing that Western education. Had my early research been published in the Comparative Education Review (CER), it might have been classified by some as “foreign” or “international,” not comparative, at least according to later commentators such as William Cummings.4 But in its totality and where it ultimately carried me, it became a high level of comparative analysis—in one instance, toward a theory of changing relations over time in the economic value of various levels of ed- ucation, and, in the second instance, toward a theory of education in the context of colonialism, imperialism, and class and racial conflict.5 Each rep- resented a different type of comparative research—the comparison of rates of return was based on quantitative data from various countries, inspired by what I learned from the quantitative studies I had done in Mexico and Kenya. Education as Cultural Imperialism was a comparative history, also based on what I had learned by studying education in Latin America and Africa but seen through the politics of the anti–Vietnam War movement. Not all so-called foreign research leads to a comparative analysis, but much does, or at least it can be used by the author or others to develop comparative analysis. We cannot know ahead of time whether international research will become comparative research, so we also have to take some risks, but we must realize that it is virtually impossible to be comparative without being international, and we may have to be international one country at a time. Truly comparative research can be very expensive, and it requires many more resources (including time) than does research in a single country. This prevents most of us from carrying out comparative projects, at least comparative projects that require fieldwork. This is why a valid comparative 3 Martin Carnoy, “The Political Economy of Education,” in Education and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Thomas LaBelle (Los Angeles: University of California, Latin American Center, 1972). 4 William Cummings, “The Institutions of Education: Compare, Compare, Compare!” Comparative Education Review 43 (November 1999): 413–37. 5 Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: David McKay, 1974). Comparative Education Review 553 CARNOY research agenda could be one consisting of a number of “foreign” or “in- ternational” research projects, or even an international research project that implicitly or explicitly attempts to influence policy or practice in country X by using research results in country Y. Thus, the Chilean voucher studies that I discussed earlier were implicitly comparative because certain political tendencies are pushing to implement voucher programs in many countries, yet relatively few of these programs are actually in place, especially on a national scale. Such individual country studies are also implicitly comparative if they consciously add to a body of empirical work that allows for compar- isons. This is certainly true of the numerous studies of economic rates of return to education as well as school choice research.6 Although individual country case studies can be implicitly comparative, the best comparative research compares similar interventions, outcomes, pro- cesses, and issues across countries and uses similar methodology and data collection.
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