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 international 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 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 research 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 schooling, 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 education, and, in the second instance, toward a theory of education in the context of colonialism, imperialism, and class and racial conflict.5 Each represented 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 “international” 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 comparisons. 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, processes, and issues across countries and uses similar methodology and data collection. I have participated in four such comparative projects in my research life: one at the Brookings Institution, concerning the industrial comparative advantage in Latin America; the second, 20 years later, comparing education in so-called socialist developing countries; the third, 10 years after that, comparing educational reforms in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Most recently, my collaborators and I completed a study of primary school quality in Brazil, Chile, and Cuba and offered possible reasons for differences in quality.7 Finally, I have begun a comparative project on the relative salaries of teachers in many countries and how these relative salaries are related to student performance. These are all difficult projects that have required a great deal of coordination and cooperation among various researchers. Comparisons of educational systems and student outcomes have been greatly aided and, I might add, shaped by international testing programs (and their accompanying surveys), including the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Program for International Stu- dent Assessment (PISA), and UNESCO’s primary school testing in Latin America (Laboratorio Latinoamericano de Evaluacioń de la Calidad de la Educacioń) and Africa (Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Edu- cational Quality). There are many problems with using the international test data for meaningful comparisons of national educational systems, but test data have contributed to speculation about why pupils in some countries perform so much better than pupils in others. In countries such as Mexico, where the PISA sample is large and random in each state, the data lend themselves to interstate comparisons. In an October 2005 speech to the Mexican educational research association, I urged Mexican researchers to

6 See, e.g., David Plank and Gary Sykes, Choosing Choice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003). 7 Martin Carnoy, with Amber Gove and Jeffery Marshall, Cuba’s Academic Advantage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

554 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS use the PISA data to begin doing cross-state institutional comparisons, much as Bill Cummings suggested 7 years ago to CIES researchers. In summary, my personal experiences lead me to suggest four ways to engage in comparative educational research today. First, we can pursue a research program that studies one country or region at a time within the context of a broader agenda of using such studies to “compare” the results of the studies across time and space. Second, we can pursue an international research program that builds on others’ studies of the same issue, with the intent of constructing a larger, comparative study on that theme. Third, we can study various countries or regions using the same methods of data collection and analysis. Finally, we can use large international data sets already available or create an international data set from national data sources, and then analyze those data comparatively.

State Theory and Comparative Education

To gain greater clarity in comparative analysis, I find it useful to begin with a theory of the state. There are many good reasons for this. First, most education in most countries is provided by the state. Second, even when education is partly “private” and partly “public,” it is the state that defines the meaning of private and public education. In most countries private schoolteachers are paid by the state. Third, because the state is the supplier and definer of education, the way changes take place in educational systems is largely defined by the political relationship of the nation’s citizenry to the state and the way that the state has organized the educational system politically. Thus, the main institution we need to be concerned with when analyzing education is the state. Interestingly, in the past 15 years only two CIES presidential addresses have specifically discussed the state. The most extensive discussion was by Nelly Stromquist in 1995. She focused on the state as “a key actor in the definition of gender and in establishing mechanisms to sustain it.”8 She viewed the state as contested terrain, where women have fought to change the way the state defines gender, hence increasing women’s rights but not being able to transform the state completely from its fundamental patriarchal form. She also discussed how this fundamental form and the feminist struggle in the state’s apparatuses are represented in education as a subinstitution of the state. Carlos Torres also dealt with the state in his presidential address of 1998.9 He argued that the work of international comparative research necessarily has to focus on the struggle of national populations for “citizenship” rights—what Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis called the ongoing fight in capitalist societies

8 Nelly P. Stromquist, “Romancing the State: Gender and Power in Education,” Comparative Education Review 39 (November 1995): 423–54, 423. 9 Carlos Alberto Torres, “Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism: Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World,” Comparative Education Review 42, no. 4 (November 1998): 421–47.

Comparative Education Review 555 CARNOY for individual rights against property rights.10 Through the expansion of citizenship (individual) rights, Torres contends, education can create participative, democratic societies in which education becomes inclusive rather than exclu- sive, democratic rather than hierarchical. In 1985, Henry Levin and I published a book called Schooling in the Dem- ocratic State.11 This was not a comparative study, but we did situate the theoretical basis for our analysis in a broader array of state theories. Four years later, Joel Samoff and I, together with students from Stanford and the Uni- versity of Stockholm, did complete a large comparative analysis of education in developing-country socialist societies, from China to Cuba to Nicaragua to Tanzania to Mozambique. We also situated our analysis in a broad discussion of state theory, and we showed how state theory might be applied to these kinds of societies.12 I mention these two books because I found them to be very useful to me personally in laying out a framework for understanding educational systems and the process of educational change. With the enormous amount of data now available from international tests, comparative education has become a big business, particularly in trying to explain why students in some countries do better on tests than students in other countries. How can we begin to analyze these differences coherently without an underlying theory of the state? How can we have a serious discussion of the various analyses without asking analysts to make explicit their underlying state theory, much as Stromquist and, to a lesser extent, Torres do in their CIES addresses? Here is an example of what that discussion might look like. For a number of years now, there has been an ongoing debate about privatization of educational systems. There are many reasons given for the push to privatize systems—which generally means turning management of education over to private entities while funding most of schooling publicly. Such reasons include the notions that the market will increase student performance, that privately run institutions will deliver the same quality education for a lower price, and that, by privatizing education, it will be possible to fund at least part of educational provision by taxing users through fees rather than by assessing everyone through general taxes. Seen from the perspective of institutional state theory, this response in- dicates that the state is limiting its responsibility for education and shifting it to individual families, hence reducing educational equity but reducing its responsibility for educational results. Seen another way, however, it does not make any difference what the state calls private and public education in a

10 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contra- dictions of Modern Social Thought (New York: Basic, 1986). 11 Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling in the Democratic State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 12 Martin Carnoy and Joel Samoff, Education and Social Transition in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

556 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS market economy. If one believes that states in capitalist societies are fundamentally class based, then the division between public and private might be seen as arbitrary, since all educational institutions, whether “private” or “public,” depend for their existence and deﬁnition on the state. Whether public or private, education in a class state would be of low quality for the poor and high quality for the rich. Indeed, going even further, one could argue that in a certain sense, privately run, unregulated institutions might give the greatest possibility for the working class to develop counterhegemonic education. The Black Panther school in Oakland during the 1970s and 1980s was a private school, and in today’s Milwaukee, many of the most ardent supporters of the voucher program there are black nationalists who want to expand Afro-centric education. That is not the only interpretation of privatization, however. If we see privatization as a movement to destroy teachers’ unions, and if teachers’ unions are a progressive or even counterhegemonic political force, then privatization does have meaning even within a class state, but that meaning has little to do with the provision of education. For example, the Chilean military instituted a voucher plan in 1981 that led to the rapid growth of private education subsidized by the Chilean state. As part of that privatization, Chilean teachers, whose unions had already been dismantled, were converted from employees of the civil service to independent contractors, to be hired individually by private schools or municipalities. Was the military govern- ment’s primary objective to provide better education or to eliminate the teachers as a political force? Most observers agree that destruction of teachers’ organizations was a key part of Chile’s privatization plan. I realize that delving into state theory is a lot of work, but without this framework we will have trouble making sense of why educational systems and practices operate as they do. Without this framework, we also have serious problems in doing coherent comparative analysis, particularly across countries. Without some theory of the state, how does one begin an explanation of why country X puts much more resources into schooling than country Y ? Without some theory of the state, how do we deﬁne educational access and the distribution of educational quality among members of the society? Indeed, how do we explain the educational system—what is taught, who teaches, and who learns what? Or, for that matter, how do we explain the great variance in teacher practice, or the distribution of teachers and students among schools?

Globalization, State Theory, and Comparative Education

Three important trends are making comparative and international analysis increasingly relevant to educational research generally. They simultaneously make comparative work more complex. Globalization, brought on by the ascendancy of new economies and cultures outside the Western

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European–United States axis, has made the world as a whole much more central to social analysis. The vast expansion of knowledge-based produc- tion—the new information revolution—has put education at the forefront of the economic problematic. And new global ideological struggles have pitted radically different conceptions of postindustrialism against each other. Again, education is at the center of such competing conceptions. Given all this, many of you will ask whether state theory as a framework for comparative and international education is obsolete in the new global economy and the new global ideological struggles. I don’t think so. Although the role of the state has certainly been changed structurally by the current version of globalization, one of the major impacts of globalization on national states has been to increase the pressure on them to expand and improve formal schooling. How they expand and improve schooling is still up to local states, even though there are obviously international ideological forces and ﬁnancial incentives (and sanctions) that try to shape these decisions. So national and (in many cases) more local state apparatuses are still responsible for providing education. To understand how they do this and what strategies they use still requires a theory of the state. However, theories of the state have to reﬂect the new form of the globalized economy, the information and communication revolution (including the changing role of the media), and the new global ideological struggles over postmodernity.13 A lot has been written in the past 10 years on the impact of globalization on education and, in some cases, on the impact of globalization on how we analyze education. Few of these analyses are based on any coherent theory of the state. I cannot cover the whole discussion of globalization and education, but let me give one important example of how this impact is viewed. In his 1996 presidential address, Noel McGinn wrote, “Once a country buys into the global economy, a broad set of decisions is removed from national debate. Countries reform their education systems in response to decisions made in non-accountable, nontransparent, and non-democratic corporate headquarters and international agencies. The adjustment of education to these so-called market forces is not new, but in the past those forces were shaped by national economic policies, making them at least partially subject to the will of the nation.”14 I cite this example because this is a popular view in the CIES—the notion that dominant capitalist forces, including international agencies such as the

13 Some versions of institutionalist (Weberian) and class-based state theories have long taken account of how national states are situated in a larger global structure. The debate between Francisco Ramirez, John Meyer, John Boli, and others, on the one hand, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s conception of world system theory, on the other hand, shows how these theories conﬂict in their notions of the ways that nation-states (as institutions) tend to behave in the larger structure. See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 14 Noel F. McGinn, “Education, Democratization, and Globalization: A Challenge for Comparative Education,” Comparative Education Review 40 (November 1996): 350–51.

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World Bank, have taken the power of shaping the educational system out of the hands of the national state and placed it in the hands of global capital, so to speak. Yet, this assumes that 30 or 40 years ago (and McGinn explicitly makes this assumption), economic decisions were largely in the hands of the national state. Another assumption is that educational decisions were more likely to be shaped by local communities, including the national state. In my opinion, this is not an accurate analysis of the implications of the current era of globalization for education. A major reason it is not accurate—I would argue—is because it is not rooted in any explicit theory of the state. What theories of the state would support McGinn’s argument? Those that seem most consistent would assert that, before globalization, most states were pluralistic, representing some configuration of local interests. If they were not pluralistic, at least they were controlled by national bureaucracies that represented a national configuration of political forces. That is, even if these forces acted in the interests of capital, this capital was mainly national. Once entering into the current era of globalization, however, the local configuration of interests (pluralism) or the power of the national bureaucracy/ local capital is subsumed to the hegemony of international capital. And once that happens, educational expansion and reform is shaped not by the national state but by global capital based in dominant countries. In this view, lower-income countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa supposedly had national states that were once fairly autonomous from international capital and could develop independently of the United States and Europe. These lower-income countries created educational systems that were oriented toward this independent development. This is allegedly no longer the case today, due to globalization. Today, all national educational systems are developing according to the demands of international corpora- tions, and the main role of national states is to implement those demands. But we could come up with a different underlying theory of the state, one that suggests a different explanation for what is happening (or not) to education in the era of globalization. In this alternative theory, national states in most lower-income countries always represented an accord between weak local bourgeoisies (or local bureaucratic elites, as in Africa) and the structural conditions of dominant countries’ capital. The national states in these dominant capitalist countries, in turn, were always the expression in some form of dominant capitalist interests and simultaneously the definers of the relations between these dominant capitalist interests and national periphery states as their agents in periphery countries. Educational policy in the periphery, therefore, has always necessarily been a manifestation of this same relationship. With globalization, local bourgeoisies have had to enter into a new accord with dominant-country capital, but the underlying power relationship has changed only in the sense that perhaps new groups of local capitalists are favored over other groups.

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From a perspective that sees global capital and its relation to national periphery states, a certain degree of autonomy always exists for local states relative to dominant-country capital. Further, global capitalism ultimately sets the conditions of local development, and—this is crucial—it enforces these conditions through dominant-country states. The local state has always been in charge of education. Thus, the conditions of local educational development are no more controlled by dominant-country/global capital today than they were in the nineteenth century or the middle of the twen- tieth century. Nevertheless, according to this model, the structure of dominant-country capital changes over time, and this is very important for understanding what happens to the role of national states and educational development around the world. Since dominant-country capital has to rely on dominant national states to exert its power in core and peripheral countries, an important question arises in the current wave of globalization: will this increased globalization reduce the power of the traditionally dominant states and place more power in the hands of the global capital and international organizations that operate independently of national states? If the power of traditionally dominant national states declines, this may open space for peripheral states to exert more, not less, power over their national economies. One of the main features of the new globalization is the development of new centers of capital accumulation in Asia and the competition of new large economies such as China, India, and Korea with the United States, Europe, and Japan. These new economies may create economic and political space for national states, for example, in Latin Amer- ica and Asia. This gives increased power to local bourgeoisies in the Latin American and Asian economies and hence provides more rather than fewer options for their national states, including in shaping their educational systems. Furthermore, the effect of increased economic competition in the developed and developing countries in the context of globalization is changing the organization of work, the family, and the community, particularly in the developed countries. I have written about this in a book called Sustaining Flexibility.15 Competition drives companies to seek greater ﬂexibility in their labor arrangements, which separates workers from permanent work arrangements toward more precariousness and less connection with particular companies or collections of fellow workers. The role of education as a potentially incorporative force (organized by the state) increases, and most developed and developing nation-states understand this potential. The potentially incorporative role of education is set not only in terms of preparing

15 Martin Carnoy, Sustaining Flexibility: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

560 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS labor for high-tech jobs but also in terms of helping young people develop their sociocultural identities. Thus, in this state theory framework, there may be greater opportunity for nation-states to use the educational system to reincorporate increasingly individualized and socially isolated labor into new national identities. This may occur even as the economy becomes globalized, increasingly compet- itive, and out of the state’s control. Some fraction of the capitalist class may or may not be able to develop a new hegemonic position around such reincorporation of labor into a national project. But that depends on do- mestic political conditions, not on the state’s inherent capacity to use the educational system for these purposes. Nation-states may actually have more power and more interest to shape the educational systems for their purposes than during the preglobalization industrial era. The ability to develop a new hegemonic position and to reincorporate labor into a national project depends on the particular interests of fractions of the national capitalist classes in other strategies to maintain control over capital accumulation in the framework of their spheres of interest, whether these are national or international. Globalization clearly affects education. Dominant nation-states, through bilateral action and the international agencies, attempt to inﬂuence educational policy both in the dominant countries and in the periphery. So, too, do local bourgeoisies and bureaucracies. At our annual CIES meeting each year, international agencies present their reports on their efforts to improve the quality of primary education, increase access for girls to education, and make other interventions in national educational systems. Other international agencies test pupils in schools, ranking performance in various subjects. If nothing else, all this has made comparative and international education a much more important ﬁeld of study and has made comparative analysis easier because of the increasing availability of data, of international real-time communication via e-mail, and of the greater interconnectedness of university researchers on a global scale. One of the most striking conclusions that we are coming to accept is that what happens in national educational systems depends largely on the willingness and capacity of national states to effect change. Without a sound theory of the state, a coherent analysis of this process is impossible. The trend over the past 25 years in our annual meeting also suggests not only that globalization affects education but that it has affected us. We are part and parcel of the global system. Our research prospers because of globalization. Yet, in order to make a substantive contribution to the understanding of education and educational policy in the new global context, we should make our assumptions about how national states operate and what this means for educational change.

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The Methodology of Comparative Analysis

What methods and techniques should comparativists use to analyze educational systems using the frameworks of globalization and state theory? Comparative analysis itself can be considered a method of doing research. Several presidential speeches have identified it as a source for developing theories of education.16 Clearly, comparative analysis provides an important framework in which to develop new knowledge simply because it adds a dimension to observational social science. But to understand the potential contribution of comparative analysis, we need to reflect on precisely what that added dimension is. I suggest that what we learn from comparative analysis depends almost entirely on our theoretical perspective, not vice versa. That is, comparative analysis is a way of shaping theories, not a way of developing new theories. Further, not only do we need a sound theoretical framework to do productive comparative analysis; we also need to choose a technique or techniques to discuss our comparisons—either quantitatively, qualitatively, discursively, or with a combination of these techniques. Bill Cummings, in his 1999 presidential address, argued for institutional analysis as the best theoretical base to do comparative analysis in education. This argument has a certain logic. When we compare education in different regions or countries, we are comparing education in potentially different institutional contexts. By drawing attention to these different institutional contexts as a source of differences among regions or countries, we are comparing institutions. Institutional analysis that draws attention to differences across national and regional contexts can be contrasted with much of the analysis done by the World Bank, which—since it begins with a unifying theory of markets— assumes institutional homogeneity across space and much of recent time. In my comparative analysis of changing patterns of rates of return to education in the early 1970s, I was up against a better-financed World Bank analysis, advanced by George Psacharopoulos, that argued for the constancy of rate-of-return patterns across space and time based on the unifying general theory of diminishing returns to capital.17 For Psacharopoulos and the World Bank, all rate-of-return studies had to show the same result: comparative analysis was intended to find similarity, not difference. The policy implications for every country, every state, and every region were the same: always focus investment on primary education because the economic payoff to primary education is higher than that of investment in secondary and higher education. There are

16 In addition to the 1999 presidential address of William Cummings (n. 4 above), see Robert Arnove, “Comparative and International Education Society Facing the Twenty-ﬁrst Century: Challenges and Contributions” (Comparative Education Review 45 [November 2001]: 477–503); David N. Wilson, “Comparative and International Education: Fraternal or Siamese Twins? A Preliminary Genealogy of Our Twin Fields” (Comparative Education Review 38 [November 1994]: 449–86). 17 George Psacharopoulos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Global Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 1067, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1993.

562 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS many reasons that this analysis turned out to be wrong, but important among them is that the World Bank turned a blind eye to the possibility of institutional changes in countries as national economies developed over time and to institutional differences across national states and regions. The techniques used by comparativists under frameworks of globalization and state theory should depend on the purpose of the analysis. As many presidential addresses have argued, we need to pay attention to where we stand and who we are when we observe and report on education. There have been several such pleas. One is to make our academic work relevant to practice. Another is to be more aware of the subjectivity of our observations and analysis. The third plea is that we reconsider modernism, or positivism, but from the standpoint of other cultures and how their modernization differs from our own.

Modernism, Postmodernism, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction

One past CIES president, the late Rolland Paulston, spent many years classifying methodological approaches in comparative and international education. Our students at Stanford still use his typology to classify the approach they intend to take in their masters’ monograph research. Paulston liked to call my own work “radical functionalism.” I suppose he meant that I used a class analysis (which is, by definition, functionalist) and that I observed phenomena and then deduced their relation to structures and processes in order to reach some policy conclusion about these phenomena. What Paulston defined as functionalism, Ruth Hayhoe called modernism—if the research begins from an assumption of contributing to some notion of progress, or to the improvement of the human condition, we are modernists and positivists. The opposite of this notion was described by Paulston in 1977 and by Val Rust in Rust’s 1991 CIES presidential address as “post-modernism.”18 Others, such as the French postmodernists, have called it “deconstruction,” and some, such as Peter McLaren at the University of California, Los Angeles, use the term “critical analysis.” But we have to be very careful in using these terms. In its purist form, postmodernism makes all observation of phenomena subjective—indeed, the researcher as subject becomes more important than the observed phenomena as object. Yet this subjectivity brings its own difficulties. At a professional meeting last year, I attended a panel on Africa where a young white woman (you see, I am already trying to influence your perception of her by describing her ethnic origin, with all the embodied history that the very word “white” implies in this context) read her beautifully written paper describing her encounter

18 Rolland G. Paulston, “Social and Educational Change: Conceptual Frameworks,” Comparative Education Review 21, nos. 2–3 ( June 1977): 370–95; Val Rust, “Postmodernism and Its Comparative Education Implications,” Comparative Education Review 35 (November 1991): 610–26.

Comparative Education Review 563 CARNOY with an African school in a rural setting and her discussion of the school and its educational processes and problems with the black principal. The paper was characterized as a discourse analysis and, in true postmodernist fashion, it dealt largely with the author’s feelings of guilt and confusion as a European who interviewed the black principal. The paper focused on her feelings when observing how poorly the school appeared to be run and how poor the education was in the school. I was fascinated by her long account because I learned more about her personal psychological issues than I did about the principal’s views of the situation or about what was really going on in the school. I suppose that to do a really good piece of postmodern research about the principal, the researcher should have asked the principal to interview her, reporting his feelings about her coming to interview him. There is much to be said for the postmodern method, particularly as a reference point for other research, since a method that focuses on subjectivity necessarily provides insights into assumptions about subjects usually taken for granted in most functionalist work. The upside of postmodernism is that, at its best, it deconstructs notions of the way we observe the world around us. The downside is that it so easily slips into academic narcissism. In this narcissism we, the researchers, already highly self-centered, get to focus on ourselves with no pretense of discovering larger truth, since in postmodernism there is no larger truth. It is not necessary to be a postmodernist to deconstruct educational con- cepts. Paulo Freire deconstructed the notion of adult literacy; Bowles and Gintis deconstructed much of the history of early U.S. schooling; white and black conservatives have been rather politically successful (at least among whites) in deconstructing blacks’ conceptions of racial discrimination in the United States. Functionalism and deconstruction are not incompatible. In- deed, I would argue that well-done positivist analysis should have as its purpose to deconstruct mainstream conceptions and to reconstruct them with others that provide greater clarity for improving education. This is what I read into Ruth Hayhoe’s presidential plea to turn to East Asia for alternative notions of modernization, or into Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.19 This has always been the fundamental idea behind much of the better research done in social sciences and behind our own work here in comparative and international education. I thus argue for “reconstruction” as a logical extension of “deconstruction.” Comparative and international education research is a great source for both. Earlier in this address, I outlined the advantages of various forms of comparative research for gaining greater understanding of educational structures and processes and how these are related to the economic, social, and political conditions in various communities, regions, and countries. I

19 Ruth Hayhoe, “Redeeming Modernity,” Comparative Education Review 44, no. 4 (November 2000): 423–39; Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970).

564 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS have also argued that a transparent theoretical framework is fundamental to such research, hence fundamental to deconstruction and reconstruction. Much of the deconstructive work in comparative/international academic work can be characterized as critical analysis. Critical analysis represents an important tradition in education. One thinks of work by Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin, Freire, Ivan Illich, Jonathan Kozol, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Bowles, Gintis, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passseron, Christian Baudelot, and Roger Establet, just to name a few. I would include my collections Schooling in a Corporate Society, which appeared in 1972, and Education as Cultural Imperialism, published in 1974, in this genre.20 There is an important role for critical analysis in comparative and international education. Interestingly, at least some of this work is quantitative, and some of it has attempted to reconstruct as well as deconstruct. My own bias is that deconstructive and reconstructive analyses are both crucial elements in comparative and international education. That does not mean that every piece of research needs both elements to be valuable. But if a body of research is essentially only deconstructive or only reconstructive, it has a reasonable likelihood of misleading us. I admit that this reflects my inherently modernist tendencies, yet it is difficult for me to accept that the worth of intellectual insights offered by deconstructions can be judged except in terms of how well they stand up in our attempts to reconstruct our understanding of the phenomena we observe. Many in the CIES have been critical of work done in education by the international agencies, particularly the international banks. I believe that this criticism is rooted largely in two serious deficiencies of that work. First, the agencies have an almost completely reconstructive agenda with no hint of a deconstructive analysis that has preceded that agenda. Second, the reconstructive agenda is often based either on no empirical evidence, on idealized constructions, or, more often, on flawed evidence. I referred earlier to Psa- charopoulos’s influential work on rates of return to education that used comparative analysis to reconstruct capital theory in order to reconstruct World Bank policy in education. But Psacharopoulos never deconstructed capital theory to test its validity as an analytical tool for educational investment policy. The World Bank, UNESCO, and other international agencies rarely, if ever, deconstruct their underlying assumptions. Further, Psacharopoulos used systematically flawed evidence to support his undeconstructed capital theory. Institutionalists would argue that, inherently, institutions such as the World Bank are reconstructors, not deconstructors. Often, institutions are also incompetent reconstructors. This, I think, is why the CIES, as an intellectual body, has had such a problem with the research done by the agencies.

20 Martin Carnoy, ed., Schooling in a Corporate Society (New York: McKay, 1972), and Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: McKay, 1974).

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Since international agencies are so influential in international education, the problem is magnified. Notwithstanding our critique of that research, we must recognize similar deficiencies in our own work. It is not enough to focus only on deconstruction as an antidote to the pure reconstructors. In my view, the test of good deconstruction is an empirically sustainable reconstruction. Marx was a great deconstructor, but, as it turned out, he never came up with a very good analysis of reconstruction. He postulated an idealized society that many people came to believe in and that has continued as a philosophical construct. When translated into social and political reality—into Communist states— this ideal created as many hardships as benefits. Much the same can be said about Milton Friedman’s deconstructive and reconstructive work or, for that matter, about John Dewey’s writings on education. This leads me to the research techniques that form the basis for deconstructive and reconstructive analysis. What should those be? Relatively few researchers in education are quantitative analysts, so most comparative and international research presented at our annual meeting and in the CER is deductive (historical/discursive), qualitative, or mildly quantitative, contain- ing a few tables of means and correlations. I have done a lot of qualitative research, based on observations in schools and classrooms, and I have found it very useful for deconstructing mainstream thought in education. Many of the articles I read in the CER are important for precisely this reason: they provide us with insight into the way educational systems or particular educational policies work. They are both observational and discursive, and they help us frame a better analysis in our own work. However, it is much more difficult to do reconstructive policy research based on qualitative research, no matter how well designed it is or how insightful its author. Qualitative and discursive analyses can create ideals for reconstruction and can provide its aesthetic content—both necessary for any reconstructive project. But, without verifiable, tested theories, these ideals and aesthetics may collapse under their own weight. The reason for this is simple. Most qualitative analysis can produce inference, but not verifiable inference. We can use a qualitative study of Escuela Nueva, for example, to deconstruct traditional notions of rural education and create an idealized notion of what rural education should be like in developing countries. But we cannot use the same study to argue that Escuela Nueva will improve rural student attendance, student achievement, or student attainment. To do that requires quantitative analysis of longitudinal empirical data on students in Escuelas Nuevas and other rural schools in the same regions. Such analysis would need to compare achievement gains, attendance patterns, and attainment among students with similar backgrounds in these different types of schools. The studies would need to be fairly sophisticated because such comparisons be-

566 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS tween control and treatment groups are plagued by selection bias, and selection bias needs to be accounted for in order to draw causal inferences for this type of study. Indeed, quantitative analysis can also help to deconstruct commonly held views, as well as views pushed by ideologues bent on promoting particular ideas in education that have little empirical validity. Patrick McEwan and I, using data from the Chilean voucher program, contributed to the deconstruction of the widely accepted idea that private schools are more effective than public schools.21 The Chilean results, in turn, stimulated others to investigate the relative effectiveness of private and public education in a number of countries using more sophisticated statistical techniques than had been used in the past. Today, the superiority of private education is at least a contested issue. The TIMSS and PISA surveys provide a gold mine of data that can be used to challenge a number of ideas in education, although they are not very suitable for reconstructive work because they do not lend themselves easily to reconstructive analysis. However, other national surveys could be used in a comparative fashion to approach causal inference on the effectiveness of particular educational treatments. Some in the CIES might argue that all this is just “functionalist-speak” and that these quantitative analyses are inherently conservative and necessarily reproduce the social order. Critics might argue that these studies cannot problematize the underlying assumptions that need to be made to even un- dertake quantitative analysis. I would wholeheartedly disagree. It is true that quantitative analysis can be very misleading because much of it is extremely sloppy. It is also true that much (sloppy) quantitative analysis is used to support ideas that are conservative, incorrect, and even oppressive—many quantitative studies are done by economists, and many economists are die-hard neoliberals who have ideological axes to grind. Yet statistically sound causal inference that emerges from an insightful deconstructive analysis and complementary creative and aesthetic formulations of reconstructive ideals is fundamental to any reconstructive project in education. Without it, all arguments have equal weight. Whatever one wants to believe, one can believe. Reason falls before ideology and rhetoric.

Should Comparative and International Analysis Relate to Practice?

A recurring theme in our society has been the gap between academics and practitioners and the need to use our research to directly help classroom teachers.22 Much of what passes for educational research does, in fact, deal

21 Patrick McEwan and Martin Carnoy, “The Effectiveness and Efﬁciency of Private Schools in Chile’s Voucher System,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 213–39. 22 Vandra Masemann, “Ways of Knowing: Implications for Comparative Education,” Comparative Education Review 34 (November 1990): 465–73; Karen Biraimah, “Transforming Education, Transforming Ourselves: Contributions and Lessons Learned,” Comparative Education Review 47 (November 2003): 423–43.

Comparative Education Review 567 CARNOY directly with practice. And yet we do not observe great improvements in practice, at least in terms of improved student outcomes. One important reason for this, I believe, is that almost all of the research aimed at improving practice does not meet the criterion of establishing a causal relation between treatments and student outcomes. Another reason is that there is a large gap between identifying useful interventions and implementing them even on a moderate scale. If researchers want to influence practice, shouldn’t they take responsibility for establishing a significant effect of a proposed reform on student outcomes? Why suggest changes in practice without clear evidence that they are going to have a positive impact? Beyond these methodological problems, how should researchers identify what is “educational practice”? What takes place in schools has always been the central focus of educational researchers, but should that be the case? Should not we as comparativists be very interested in comparing the varying impact of family and community “practice” on educational outcomes? There is no doubt that classroom and school practice differences between countries or for different groups in the same country are fundamental to comparative education analysis, but so are the varying out-of- school factors that contribute to educational differences. The ideology surrounding university education departments is that not only is it the job of those departments to train teachers but the highest form of research is that which contributes directly to that training—that is, preparing people to teach. In comparative education, we are even further from informing practice, notwithstanding the fact that our work can provide insights for policy makers and practitioners about what policies work in education and what does not. We focus on context, on the one hand, and, on the other, universal comparisons across contexts. Bringing this into the realm of practice, which is highly contextual, usually means decontextualizing our research—universal- izing the comparisons—just when contextual comparisons should be most important. William Schmidt and his associates have used the TIMSS data to show that math curriculum is important in explaining how much math eighth graders know.23 The curriculum gap is particularly great between U.S. eighth graders and those in other countries. However, curriculum can only be as effective as is teachers’ competence to teach it, and there is much reason to believe that math curricula are written after taking teachers’ math ability into account. Thus, Schmidt’s excellent comparative work, intending to influence practice, could probably only influence practice if the practitioners were changed. In other words, the likelihood of implementing a change in “prac-

23 William H. Schmidt, Curtis C. McKnight, Richard T. Houang, Hsing Chi Wang, David E. Wiley, Leland S. Cogan, and Richard G. Wolfe, Why Schools Matter: A Cross-National Comparison of Curriculum and Learning (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2001).

568 November 2006 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS tice” is not very likely when teachers are unable or unwilling to make the change. In many ways, then, the work is as divorced from practice as are economists’ rate-of-return studies. I don’t want to detract from the good qualitative research that focuses on practice. Freire’s work should be mentioned again here. There are many interesting international studies that focus on practice, many of them, by the way, done by the international banks, and many more by other international agencies. My only argument is that just because this work focuses on practice does not make it valuable for practice, or even make it valuable per se. It is very easy to say that the validity of such studies depends on who is doing them and on their underlying ideology. Yet the main reason we rely on such arguments is that the studies are fundamentally nonevidentiary in terms of causal inference. Under such circumstances, ideological sources become all important. So arguments about practice become anecdotal, ideological, and largely meaningless for student learning and children’s well-being. As I have already emphasized, what we learn from comparative analysis depends almost entirely on our theoretical perspective, not vice versa. That is, comparative analysis is a way of giving shape to theories, not a way of developing new theories. I have found it useful to begin with theories of the state. A specific discussion of state theory in comparative education research allows us to understand why researchers interpret the same observations in different ways. It also allows us to test whether the interpretations are inter- nally consistent. Discussions of the effect of globalization on education make even more crucial our use of state theory as the framework for understanding these debates. Without an explicit theory of the state, we have little or no basis for understanding whether the many analyses of the relationship between globalization and education are useful or whether the definition of globalization they use makes sense. We should pay serious attention to the validity of methodologies in how they speak to reconstructive purposes as well as deconstructive purposes. The properties of these methodologies may be very different. In large part, the value of qualitative versus quantitative techniques is affected by their role in reconstructive and deconstructive research. The very important relation of comparative and international research to practice needs to be reexamined. Such research necessarily needs to be reconstructive, so we need to consider what kind of research is really valuable for practice and what kind of research is valid for applying to practice. At its best, comparative and international research in education can provide a new and important dimension to education research more generally. Its influence is bound to be greater in the future than in the past because of globalization and increased importance of education in economic and social development—as the knowledge society expands, so does the impor-

Comparative Education Review 569 CARNOY tance of education worldwide. It is our responsibility as scholars to make sure that we improve the quality of our research as the importance of our work increases. We need our ideals, but we also need to build reconstructive knowledge, and that requires well-honed theories and just as well-honed methods to show what works.

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