نقل قول:
Similar problems bedevil international comparisons of educational achievement. The media regularly report that U.S. students score less well on academic tests than their counterparts in other countries; in some cases, Americans are near-or even at-the bottom of the rankings. Such comparisons need to be interpreted with care, because the differences in scores may say more about differences in countries' educational systems than they do about students' abilities. For example, in the United States, virtually all young people attend high school (and around seven out of eight graduates). In contrast, in most other countries only the better students attend institutions equivalent to U.S. high schools (that is, schools that prepare students for admis¬sion to institutions of higher education); other students take different educational paths, such as into vocational education. International comparisons of high school students, then, sometimes contrast virtually all Americans (both the highscoring better students and the low-scoring poorer students, producing an average score somewhere in the middle) with only the better students in other countries (who have relatively high average scores). The students in the different countries may take the same test, but if the samples of students being tested are very different, apples will again be compared to oranges.' Obviously, the point is not that U.S. students are more or less able than students elsewhere-there is considerable debate over this issue but that making such claims requires thinking carefully about the nature of the comparisons being made.