Last month, the Program for International Students Assessment released its 2012 databases. The results came as a shock to the United States education researchers and policymakers, as the mainstream media have been widely reporting that U.S. teenagers made average scores in reading and science and their scores were below average in math compared to 64 other countries participating in PISA. 

PISA was designed by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club for primarily rich economies. The test has been given every three years around the world to compare math, science and reading proficiency of 15-year-olds since 2000. What concerned educators most was not that the U.S. students were lagging behind the international average on these tests, but that American students’ performance has continued to slip throughout the past decade. 

Not surprisingly, East Asian countries and Scandinavian nations dominated the top five spots in the race. Students in Shanghai stood out compared to the rest of the teenagers in 64 countries, with 55 percent of students achieving the highest level of proficiency in math, 25 percent in both science and reading. 

Shortly after the release, American media started attacking the current school system, calling for an overhaul on education policy. Many are advocating an agenda that will take steps to improve teacher education and establish a standard test for final high school exams, just as Germany has done since 2000. 

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said the country should end its divisive debate about policies and adopt methods that are working in top-scoring nations. 

But on the other side of the arena, concerns about the validity of PISA have arisen. Aside from the sampling and statistical method that PISA used, the hard data in the result are quite reliable. However, another set of data show a completely different perspective. 

Despite excellent performance in the tests, an increasing number of Chinese and Korean parents have been sending their kids to the U.S. for high school during the past five years. According to The Seattle Times, underpopulated high schools across the country are taking tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China. As international students, federal laws require public school to charge foreign students the full cost of their education. The number of tuition-paying foreign students in U.S. public high schools has jumped from a few hundred to nearly 3,000 last year, according to the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel. The vast majority of tuition-paying international students still study at private schools. Most of them are from China and South Korea. 

This trend of increasing number of tuition-paying East Asian students raises a question: If their performance is so good, why do they still flock to schools in the U.S.? 

To understand this seemingly contradictory fact, one must understand the educational system in China. It still has a culture where critical thinking and creativity are stifled. Parents who want more for their children send them abroad to avoid this traditional rank-and-file teaching approach. In many East Asian countries, students are involuntarily trained to be professional test-takers. Solving test problems occupies a significant amount of their time at school. Even if free thinking was allowed, doing it would not be cost effective. 

American students are believed to outperform Asian students when it comes to critical thinking and creativity, but no standardized measurement of this area currently exists. 

The structure and design of PISA are also worth questioning. 

Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford University, and Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, examined the adolescent reading and mathematics results from four test series in the last decade. They pointed out that average U.S. scores in reading and math on the PISA are low partly because a disproportionately greater share of U.S. students comes from disadvantaged social groups, whose performance is relatively low in every country. In other words, the sampling of PISA is problematic in the U.S. 

Another intuitive reason is that there are fewer coercive elements in curriculums in U.S. educational system compared to China and South Korea. 

Americans should treat the PISA results cautiously. If they ignore the complexity of the test results and oversimplify the conclusion, it may lead policymakers to pursue inappropriate and even harmful reforms.