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.

There was a time when individuals such as Sadler, Arnold, Kandel, Hans, or Rossello, 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 unachievable 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 more and more the benefit of long-term collaboration in the face of this ever-growing complexity of comparative education.

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. By the end of the 1960s, though, 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 to introduce into our teaching an effort to instruct students about empirical research and to turn away from the strange lands and friendly people 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 Education we 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 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 features (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 one of us 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 these 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 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris undertook a series of National Education Policy Studies. One of us 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 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 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. Thus we include in this collection 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 in the present selection from our work.





Harold J. Noah & Max A. Eckstein