International evaluations of education policy have led to tremendous debates and sometimes even groundbreaking reforms in national education policies across Europe and beyond. In Germany, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) triggered the greatest reform process in secondary education for decades and prompted a turn toward evaluation-based education policy. In the U.S., however, education policy has constantly been under reform and unlike in Germany, international evaluations have not played any particular role. Rather, the U.S. follows the old Sinatra “I did it my way” doctrine and undertakes system reforms in isolation. What goals do current reform processes in the U.S. have? And why are such reforms carried out independently of international studies?

The U.S. has thus far participated in all of the PISA surveys. Compared to the other PISA participants, however, the U.S. is one of the countries in which student performance in the OECD’s comparative study has gone virtually unnoticed (1). Although American results have been consistently below the OECD average in all PISA surveys, hardly any reactions to PISA were noted. It was only with the publication of the PISA 2009 study in December 2010 that comparative results raised an interest within the American education policy sphere. Because Chinese students scored better than any OECD country and far better than American students, the PISA report raised awareness in the U.S. Regarding U.S. schools, however, PISA has not contributed any significant new information: the low quality of schools has long been common knowledge, and PISA only confirmed knowledge of these shortcomings rather than provoking any strong reactions.

In fact, the U.S. education system has been under constant reform processes since the 1980s when the Reagan administration appointed a national commission to investigate the progress of the education system twenty-five years after the Sputnik shock. The final report, A Nation at Risk: Imperatives for Educational Reforms (2), triggered widespread public unease over the quality of education and concern for the essentiality of evaluating schools, standards, and teachers. Viewed in this light, the U.S. had already experienced its “Bildungsshock” decades before other nations like Germany, Switzerland, or Mexico, for example, did with the PISA study (3). The shortcomings of the American school system have ultimately become an undisputed matter of fact, with the consistent implementation of many reform processes and new strategies. However, their success has been only moderate, resulting in increasing disillusion.

The current federal education act is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002 which went into effect under the Bush administration but is supposed to be renewed under President Barack Obama soon. It authorizes several national programs to further improve the performance of American primary and secondary schools by increasing the responsibilities of federal states vis-à-vis school districts and schools themselves. In particular, it obligates federal states that apply for school sponsorship to establish assessment criteria that measure students’ basic competences for the respective level of education. However, the act avoids the establishment of a national performance standard. On the contrary, each federal state can – in accordance with the principle of school autonomy – set its own standards.