Literacy Tests Are Bunk

I hold no particular animus towards Cuba. I’m sorry for the people there because I think that whatever their government did a half century ago it is now retarding the country’s development. I wish that the author of this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul E. Peterson, recognized that it’s not just the reports of Cuba’s academic advancement that are bunk:

Bernie Sanders has spent decades preparing to lose the Florida primary. In a 1985 interview, Vermont’s self-described socialist said of Fidel Castro that “he educated their kids.” He still praises the Communist regime’s “massive literacy program.”

Mr. Sanders is not alone in his admiration for Cuban education. In 2016 President Obama quoted himself as telling Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and successor: “You’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education.” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, visited Havana in 2017 and exulted: “Cuba’s education system might as well be considered the ultimate wrap-around institution for children.” In 2007 Stanford’s Martin Carnoy published a book called “Cuba’s Academic Advantage.”

It’s all bunk—though it’s hard to prove, because Cuba refuses to participate in international tests such as the respected Program for International Student Assessment. The only external tests in which Cuba did participate were the 1997 and 2006 waves of the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and nicknamed Laboratorio. This was the main evidentiary basis for Mr. Carnoy’s book.

But the Cuban government supervised the administration of the Laboratorio tests, and the results strongly suggest it cheated. The median language-arts score for Cuban third-graders in 1997 was 343 points, compared with 264 in Argentina, 256 in Brazil and 229 in Mexico. If these scores are to be believed, the median child in Cuba learns by grade three what equivalent students elsewhere don’t learn until at least grade six.

In math, median Cuban third- and sixth-grade students scored 1.5 standard deviations higher than Chileans in 2006. (A standard deviation is about two years’ worth of learning.) Is Cuba a standout within Latin America, even though it won’t subject itself to comparison with developed countries? That seems unlikely. Chile performed only 0.9 standard deviation lower than high-flying Finland on the Program for International Student Assessment’s 2018 math test.

Belying Cuban students’ sky-high scores, they don’t seem to learn much from one grade to the next. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, fourth-graders scored 22 to 25 points higher than third-graders on the 1997 math test. In Cuba an additional year of schooling was good for only five points. Why? One possibility is that teachers corrected the answers so that many students in both grades received perfect or near-perfect scores.

Similarly suspicious is the narrow gap—only 0.05 standard deviation—between urban and rural schools in Cuba. In Mexico and Brazil urban schools do better by 0.62 and 0.66 standard deviations, respectively.

but the whole notion of global academic achievement tests. Nowadays just about every country in the world other than sub-Saharan African countries, Afghanistan, and a few others reports astonishingly high literacy rates including countries in which a large percentage of the population doesn’t have education beyond the primary level at all. How do they accomplish this feat? By fudging. They either redefine literacy to mean something other than genuine literacy (like the ability to read street signs) or they redefine the population by limiting the people who will take the tests.

Heck, I don’t believe Chicago’s reported academic achievement scores. Why should I believe China’s or Qatar’s?