Professor Martin Carnoy

The Stanford Challenge

Professor Martin Carnoy answers his phone in English, but switches to Spanish to arrange a meeting with visiting education officials from Mexico. They are eager to consult with Carnoy and his colleagues in Stanford's School of Education. In particular, the Mexican government is concerned about presenting the results of national testing to a public that is preoccupied with global competition.

The shift to a global economy and to knowledge-based industries means more competition for jobs that require more schooling, Carnoy explains. "There's a great fear out there of not getting a good job." As a result, he says, "You've got a tremendous expansion of education. It's worldwide."

In his 40-year career, Carnoy, who serves on the executive committee of the International Initiative, has studied education in countries throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Trained as a labor economist, he has a special interest in how changes in the world economy affect education and how education affects a country's competitive prospects. Lately, he has turned his attention to the Middle East, a region that recalls an earlier surge of attention to his field, inspired by a different form of competition.

"In the 1950s, there was an enormous interest in economic development, because the United States was competing with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of people around the world," he says. Education came to be seen as part of that effort. "It was considered sort of a missing link."

"Not much has changed if you look at Iraq today," Carnoy continues. "The argument is that if you improve the educational system, if you create democratic institutions, if you figure out ways to organize society and the economy in a way that will be both just and efficient, then there's no reason for people to turn to ideologies like communism or fascism or Baathism."

What has changed is that the relationship between education and other forms of development has proved extremely complex. Carnoy, for instance, recently studied how education and economic growth correlate—or fail to—in Arab countries, compared with countries in Asia and Latin America.

"In East Asia, they invested a lot in education, and they had a lot of economic growth," he says. "But they also pursued very effective policies promoting investment and creating economic development." Many Arab countries have invested heavily in education and have the test scores to prove it. But without corresponding economic reforms, education has not fostered growth.

Economic reforms depend in part on political stability, which is comparatively rare in the Middle East. Stability fosters both coherent policy and foreign investment. But in Arab countries, Carnoy explains, what stability exists often takes the form of a compact between dictatorships and their citizens: "The government provides for everybody, but won't open the economy to competition. So the industrial sectors are very small, and there's little opportunity for a highly educated person to get a job."

Still other factors can limit education's impact. Carnoy recently completed a book on why Cuban students do so much better in school than their counterparts in Brazil and Chile. One reason is the superior nutrition that makes Cuban children readier to learn. Conversely, education can be vital to good health. In South Africa, for example, schools have come to serve as a primary conduit for information about HIV/AIDS, a conduit lacking elsewhere in a region throughout which the epidemic threatens to derail development.

"I think the old story, 'Just invest in education, and everything is going to be okay; just invest in better health care, and everything is going to be okay'—it's not accurate," Carnoy says. "Each of those is necessary but not sufficient conditions. Education, economic growth, and health are very closely interconnected."

These topics should be connected in universities, too, Carnoy argues. That's the purpose of the International Initiative, which promotes multidisciplinary research and education on complex international problems. "Normally, people study one issue at a time. I think tying these subjects together gives Stanford a real edge."

Already, the PhD students that Carnoy teaches in Stanford's program in International Comparative Education are exposed to faculty from throughout the university. Those students earn not only doctoral degrees in education, but also master's degrees in a social science, such as economics. And they become intimately involved in work like Carnoy's. Four of his students wrote dissertations based on their participation in Carnoy's comparative study of educational reforms in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Another former student—one of several now employed at the World Bank—commissioned Carnoy to propose a new financial model to expand Moroccan universities.

Whether he's sitting in a lecture hall in Morocco or advising visitors from Mexico, Carnoy has faith that the complexities of education, with all its potential to transform lives and societies, will yield to the right approach. "It's a big puzzle. It's daunting," he says. "But I believe these things can be analyzed." His confidence, like his experience, is an asset to international studies at Stanford.