Selections from the works of Harold J. Noah and Max A. Eckstein

Teachers College, Columbia University New York, NY 10027, USA 1997 

CONTENTS 

Introduction 

1. Comparative Orientations 
• Toward a Science of Comparative Education 
• On Teaching a 'Scientific' Comparative Education 
• Defining Comparative Education: Conceptions 
• A Comparative Study of Outlier Schools in Metropolitan Settings 
• Other Schools and Ours 
• Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish in Comparative Education 
• Use and Abuse of Comparative Education 
• State of the Field 
• Dependency Theory in Comparative Education 
• The Darling Young 
• The Comparative Mind: Metaphor in Comparative Education 
2. Schools in Context 
• The Elitist and the Popular Ideal: Prefects and Monitors in English and American Secondary Schools 
• Ultimate Deterrents: Punishment and Control in English and American Schools 
• The Academic Preparation of Teachers 
• Metropolitanism and Education 
• Teachers and School Success in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and New York 
• Toward a Strategy of Urban-Educational Study 
• International Study of Business/Industry Involvement with Education 
3. Achievement, Assessment, and Evaluating Learning 
• Comparative School Achievement 
• National Case Study Report
• International Study of School Achievement 
• Reflections
• The Two Faces of Examinations 
• Tradeoffs in Examination Policies: An International Comparative Perspective
• Secondary School Examinations: International Perspectives on Policies and Practice
• An International Perspective on National Standards 
• A Comparative Assessment of Assessment 
• An International Comparison of End-of-Secondary School Examinations 
4. Communist Education 
• Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems 
• Communist Schooling 
• Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies 
• The Economics of Education 
• Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union 
• The 'Unproductive' Labor of Soviet Teachers 
• China's Vocational and Technical Training 
5. Educational Policy 
• Present Trends in Public Secondary Education in Western Europe 
• Education, Credentialling, and the Labor Market in the European Community: An Agenda for Research 
• The Study of Education as a Priority 
• 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips': A Proposal for the Abolition of the Lifetime Classroom Teacher 
• Academia in Anarchy
• Private Education
• OECD Reviews of Educational Policy 
• Education for Development
• The Utility of Country Case Studies for Educational Planning
• Educational Financing and Policy Goals

Introduction 

We feel extraordinarily fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate over a long period of time, developing ideas and publishing on topics in comparative education that were of interest to us both. We offer here a selection of our individual and joint writings over the past thirty-five years as a celebration of that good fortune.  

Our initial collaboration was not planned, nor when it occurred could we have imagined that it would continue for so long. Happenstance and good fortune shaped our scholarly futures in comparative education. We first met only in the early 1960's at Teachers College, Columbia University, when both of us were well into work on doctoral dissertations. Harold was trying to unravel the mysteries of Soviet school finance; Max was engaged on a comparison of disciplinary practices in English and American secondary schools. But though we had not previously known one another, the paths leading to our first meeting had been roughly parallel, even touching in some respects. We had both been born and educated in London. Both of us had attended the University of London, at colleges across the Strand from one another, at the London School of Economics and at King's College respectively. After graduating with bachelor's degrees, we both went on to obtain the Post-Graduate Certificate of Education, the professional qualification for secondary school teaching, and we both taught in London secondary grammar schools.  

It was in the course of that professional training at King's College (where we were both enrolled, though at different times) that we were introduced to the systematic study of foreign education systems. Nicholas Hans was active at King's, Joseph Lauwerys at the Institute. Soon thereafter, Edmund King and Brian Holmes introduced other perspectives and approaches. Their work has exerted a life-long influence on our own.  

Max came to teach and continue study in the United States in 1957; Harold in 1958. Quite independently, both of us enrolled at Teachers College for doctoral study, Max choosing a specialization in sociology and comparative education, Harold economics and comparative education. TC had long been a widely recognized center for the study of different national educational systems, attracting many graduate students from overseas and sending them home with their degrees, often to become major figures in the educational systems of their countries. Though by that time retired, Isaac Kandel, doyen of comparative education in the United States, remained a presence. In addition, new themes were now being enunciated and contributed to the formation of our thinking. William W. Brickman at New York University, George Z.F. Bereday at Teachers College, and C. Arnold Anderson at the University of Chicago were active in promoting new organizational and intellectual directions in comparative education. Bereday, in particular, as teacher and dissertation advisor, watched over our work as neophyte academics in a field that in the 1960's had suddenly burgeoned in universities across the United States, as well as elsewhere.  

A further set of coincidences led to the beginning of our lengthy scholarly collaboration and to our long lasting friendship. We had more than once rehashed the problems involved in teaching comparative education, and the pedagogical techniques, resources, and approaches that might be employed. We had both tried a variety of styles and strategies at our respective institutions, if only with the goal of drastically reducing the "strange lands and friendly faces" aspect of comparative studies of education. For one semester, we team-taught a course that was explicitly directed at having students perform comparative investigations and which emphasized being conscious of (and conscientious about) methodology, rather than being based upon descriptions of foreign educational practices. After repeating this exercise, we found ourselves in adjoining offices at Teachers College, teaching summer school. Our schedules allowed us blocks of time each day between classes and we began to review somewhat systematically what we had done in our teaching to date of comparative education. We quite quickly found ourselves able to write up what we had done, as well as explain its rationale. Soon after, under the watchful eye of the late Lawrence A. Cremin, we developed a history of major contributions to comparative education, pointing to a succession of changes in perspectives and techniques. Prompted by George Bereday's own intense interest in matters methodological, we wrote a text that endeavored to bring the comparative study of education solidly within the ambit of the social sciences.  

The early 1960s were years when comparative studies in education, as indeed comparative studies in many other fields, were changing rapidly. Until that time the field had been dominated by historical approaches and descriptive works, most of them taking the form of studies of school systems in individual countries. Although there were numerous examples of excellent reporting, based on intimate knowledge of the foreign systems described and evaluated, we were concerned by the subjective nature of the accounts of even the best works we read and the absence of any overt rules or guidelines for the judgements made.  

There was a time when individuals such as Sadler, Arnold, Kandel, Hans, or Rosselló, working in comparative education, could hope to comprehend and explain the whole of education, its origins, present aspects, and future prospects in a host of countries. For the present-day single researcher this is hardly possible. The sheer volume of data from more and more countries, the way in which education and training have become central to national policies, and the need to master or at least understand many different modes of analysis have all conspired to make the example of the renaissance men of our immediate past simply not achievable today. On the macro-level, international organizations wishing to profit from comparative investigations in education have recognized the need to deploy and coordinate teams of specialists in several disciplines. On our small micro-level, as individual researchers, we have had occasion to appreciate the benefit of long-term collaboration in the face of this ever-growing complexity of comparative education.  

By the end of the 1960s social science methods had gained a permanent, if still disputed, place in comparative studies of education. We were wholly in sympathy with this trend, even though we by no means wished to cast out historical, philosophical, and generally normative approaches. But we did want to boost the social science approach. As we observed in the Preface to Toward A Science of Comparative Education:  

We are conscious ... that we have sung a single tune ..., the theme of empirical, quantitative research and that the problems of education and society also encompass phenomena that are more amenable to treatment in other ways. Hence, we would not want the complete comparative educator to discard ... the concerns and techniques of the humanist, the philosopher, and the artist. 

The selection of pieces included here will, we believe, be evidence of our long-term commitment to both types of work.  

In any event, one immediate result of our concern for greater attention to social science approaches was, as we have indicated, to introduce into our teaching an effort to instruct students about empirical research and to turn away from the descriptive and often normative approach that characterized most comparative education courses at the time. In particular, we tried to show how it was both possible and enlightening to use comparative data to test hypotheses about the relation between education and social phenomena. We asked our students to assemble evidence sufficient to test the cross-national validity of such statements as: The greater the concern for political (or religious) orthodoxy, the more centralized the school system; or, educational revolutions are consequences, not causes of political revolutions; and, the longer the average length of schooling of the population, the fewer the external marks of class difference, and so forth. Eventually this led to our writing Toward A Science of Comparative Education, as well as editing a companion collection of studies broadly exemplifying this approach (Scientific Investigations in Comparative Education).  

Shortly after the publication of Toward A Science of Comparative Educationwe were invited by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement to join the group established in Stockholm to analyze the data from the six-subject IEA study. In collaboration with A. Harry Passow we were charged to consider how far and in what ways national social and school system characteristics were related to student performance in 21 nations -- a formidable task, if ever there was one! We regarded this as a challenge to apply our newly defined methods. We emerged from this exercise with only at best a set of tentative conclusions. In no way could we say that any particular social or educational feature (or even combination of features) was unambiguously associated with higher or lower school achievement. But we learned a great deal from the IEA work, not least that the techniques being developed during IEA investigations could eventually lead to more confident statements about what works and what doesn't (in terms of producing school achievement) at different grade levels in different schools in different countries.  

Meanwhile, the Comparative and International Education Society (USA) was growing and responding to changes in the kind of work that comparativists were doing. Its journal, the Comparative Education Review, developed into a leading publication, its contents frequently cited by authors within and outside the field of comparative education. Over the years we contributed a fair number of articles to the pages of the CER, and Harold had a spell editing the journal. We also paid our dues to our professional organization serving at different times as its president. Membership in the Society grew rapidly, drawing in a wide variety of practitioners, some of whom went beyond whatever point we had reached in extending the methodological scope of the field. These scholars sought to promote work relying on micro-observations of school processes, deconstructionist critiques of school systems and educational activities, reproduction theory, and so on. We chose not to follow the latter, entirely novel paths, being generally out of sympathy with them. In particular, while participating in some of the common intellectual and academic developments of the time, we somehow succeeded in avoiding the contemporary fashion of viewing the schools as oppressive instruments for maintaining an intellectual and political status quo.  

During the 1970s and 1980s some of the official international organizations vastly increased their comparative education activities. UNESCO expanded its global collection of educational statistics, its promotion of literacy programs, and its journals in comparative education, International Review of Education and Prospects). We made substantial use of UNESCO's statistical collections and we published in its journals. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris undertook a series of National Education Policy Studies. Harold was engaged in four of these, as well as in a comparative study of the financing of elementary schools. The World Bank increasingly saw a role for itself in lending money and providing advice for the development of education and training in lower-income countries. It found itself doing comparative education, without necessarily acknowledging that was what it was doing. Agencies of the U.S. government (the Department of Education, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the National Endowment for the Humanities) and the American Federation of Teachers exhibited interest in foreign education systems, focussing on standards and assessment in education, and we were individually as well as jointly enlisted as consultants in this effort.  

Our work can be characterized under a few main topics: our early and abiding interest in the way research in comparative education is undertaken; the social context of school systems and practice, in particular in metropolitan areas; the outcomes of schooling as reflected in student achievement; and the ways in which education policy is made in different countries. Although much of our work was deliberately not locked into events in particular countries, we nevertheless also paid special attention to educational policies and practices in the former Soviet Union, as well as the changes taking place since the end of World War II in Western Europe.  

What to put in and what to leave out of this collection was governed by a few self-imposed rules. We wanted to make sure that there was at least one piece for each type of comparative work we had done, for each issue or problem we had considered, and for each area of the world that we had studied. We were willing to include articles and book chapters in their entirety, but we wanted to be strictly economical in the sampling of our books, on the ground that an interested reader would probably have an easier job locating a copy of an out-of-print book than a fairly ancient journal article. We also include several book reviews, which afforded us the opportunity to comment on broader issues of comparative interest, especially changing approaches to the field, both methodological and substantive. Above all, we wanted only pieces of work we still felt happy with -- translated, that meant pieces which did not make us cringe when we read them again with the full benefit of two, three, or even four decades of hindsight!  

Within these broad categories, the choice of topics was largely influenced by the issues which from time to time came to the top of the list of educational policy concerns in the United States, such issues as: the training and qualifications of teachers; the financing of education; the special nature of schooling in large cities; the involvement of business and industry in the work of the schools; and educational standards, national examinations, and the measurement of educational achievement. Each of these topics is represented here.  

Our research and publication did not follow a clear linear progression, with one topic or approach neatly finishing and being followed by the next. Like most scholars, we believe, we circled around, went back and forth, accepted assignments that happened to come along. We certainly did not chart out a decisive program of work for three decades or more. In consequence we have had to deal with repetition in some of the works by making cuts where necessary. Thus the version of some pieces presented here is not an exact reproduction of the original. Other changes are few in number and were made only to correct typographical errors, or glaring errors of syntax or style.  

We acknowledge with thanks the organizations who have kindly given us their permission to reprint materials to which they hold the copyright:  

Academic Press; Butterworth Publishers; Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education; Carfax Publishing Company; Evans Brothers Ltd.; The Free Press; Georgia State University Press; Kluwer Academic Publishers; Peter Lang Publishers; OECD; Peacock Publishers; Teachers College Press; UNESCO; University of Chicago Press; University North Carolina Press; University of Pennsylvania Press; University of Wisconsin Press; World Bank; John Wiley and Sons; Yale University Press. 

For any comments, please email to : cerc@hkusub.hku.hk