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By Jill Barshay

Andreas Schleicher, an international education expert based in Paris, attended a summit at the White House last month and left feeling frustrated by the anti-testing backlash in this country.

“I listened to several presentations. You got this impression, if they would only get rid of tests, everything would improve,” said Schleicher, who oversees the education and skills directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “That certainly isn’t the bottleneck for improvement. The U.S. is not a country of heavy testing.”

That last statement would shock many parents and activists who believe the opposite. But according to Schleicher’s reading of the data from more than 70 countries, most nations give their students more standardized tests than the United States does.

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