Tests Don’t Measure Creativity U.S. Scores Low, But That Might Not Matter, Some Educators Say

When the results of a major international mathematics and science test were made public last week, showing American 12th-graders near the bottom of the industrialized world, leaders reacted with well-rehearsed alarm. They warned that Americans would not be able “to continue to be global competitors in the new knowledge economy,” as Education Secretary Richard Riley put it.

Fingers were pointed, hands were wrung. Officials lamented that the United States continued to be, as the title of an influential 1983 education report had it, “A Nation at Risk.”

But with the country standing today as the world’s unchallenged technological powerhouse, the trendsetter for a global computer and information economy that Asian and European countries are struggling to match, the scripted furor has drowned out a quiet, embarrassed debate. Top scientists and educators are wondering whether the country is succeeding despite loose educational practices or at least in part because of them.

“Like America, science is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, a kind of child’s play, where little attention is paid to getting it right immediately and there is little stress on canons,” said Dudley Herschbach, a chemistry professor at Harvard University and a 1986 Nobel laureate.

“I have noticed that graduate students who get straight A’s are often lost when it comes to research. Maybe we have let kids wander all over hell in high school, but that preserves some energy for later when it is better spent.”

Many expressed alarm and puzzlement over the results, released last week, of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, widely seen as the most comprehensive and rigorous comparison of quantitative skills across nations.

American 12th-graders were out-performed in mathematics and science literacy by their counterparts in 12 countries out of 20 and did better than students in just two, Cyprus and South Africa. In advanced mathematics and physics, no country performed more poorly.

In the same study, American fourth-graders scored above the international average and eighth-graders about average. So some educators took the opportunity to argue that recent attention to standards and better schools had begun to pay off but had not reached the upper levels of schooling.

The trouble is that this pattern has been consistent for as long as comparative tests have been given. In basic skills, American students start out equal to or ahead of students of the country’s main trading partners, and steadily decline the longer they stay in school.

“I remember when the education minister of Singapore came here, and people said: ‘What are you looking here for? Your kids consistently score on top of all international tests.’ And he said something like ‘All that our kids can do is take tests.’ He understood that we are nurturing more creativity here than the Asians,” said Gerald Bracey, a researcher and writer on education.

Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University, said the United States was “a country of infinite second chances.”

“There are a thousand ways to bounce back,” Gardner said. “What harms you in other countries is the straight and narrow path you have to follow. If you fall off, it is very hard to get back on. Here it is a more chaotic system. But the world economy is more chaotic. So that’s good.”