By Dustin Beilke

A blogger on the website of The Atlantic magazine presents a very unpopular perspective on the meaning of international standardized test score comparisons in a recent post: the U.S.'s scores are quite good compared to the rest of the developed world. The blogger's rationale is that when you control for things like immigration and language barriers the U.S. actually out-performs almost all advanced, industrialized nations even on the one measure that public education critics have singled out as most important.

But the rationale almost doesn't matter. What the blogger is suggesting is almost tantamount to blasphemy in this country. That the U.S. is far behind most industrialized nations, including and especially China, is the first crucial supposition in the argument the phony school reform "movement" presents, and which the mainstream press swallows whole without even asking the most basic questions.

These arguments are presented as research but what they are in fact is an organizing effort: an effort to privatize public education so that public dollars can enrich private, for-profit education companies. To say that reporters and editors do not understand this would be to assume that they would act otherwise if they did understand it, and I'm not ready to assume that. In any case, this recent New York Times piece about the most recent scores is indicative of what we usually see: China is going to kill us because our schools are failing. Echoes of this sentiment can even be found in the recent rant by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who was upset that a Philadelphia Eagles game was postponed because of snow and somehow managed to bring China's calculus acumen into it.

The New York Times reporter finds it acceptable to compare test results in one city--the wealthiest city in China--to results of whole nations. He also accepts it on faith that each nation's government is reporting its results fairly and accurately. And the Chinese government is acting on faith that the U.S. news media will not question its scores as long as they can lead to the conclusion that U.S. media likes to make about how our schools are failing.