RALEIGH – Just to demonstrate how life at a think tank is always swingin’: While studying several new reports on international health-care comparisons last week, I got to thinking about how simplistic assumptions about political philosophy plague the analysis of differences in American, European, and Asian public policies. So I checked several data sets and assembled a spreadsheet.

Then I danced the limbo – but that’s another story.

One simplistic assumption is that because government takes up a smaller share of the economy in America than in most other industrialized countries, the U.S. always relies more on markets and the private sector to deliver public services than Europeans and Asians do. In health care, as I’ll discuss in a subsequent column, this assumption is not entirely borne out when you look at all aspects of medical care and health policy in each country, rather than just at the ownership of hospitals and insurance networks.

But in education, the assumption is entirely unwarranted. Government schools have a larger market share in the U.S. than in most other industrialized countries.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes a regular compilation of education data for developed and some developing countries. Using 2005 data, it found that the share of students enrolled in government-run schools was about the same as in European Union countries for elementary grades (90 percent). But at the secondary level, European students were less likely (82 percent) than American students (91 percent) to be enrolled in government schools.

The comparison gets even more interesting when you zero in on key European and Asian competitors.* Here’s the ranking, based on share of non-government enrollment:

Britain-75 percent
Korea-49 percent
Japan-31 percent
France-30 percent
Spain-22 percent
Australia-21 percent
USA-9 percent
Germany-8 percent
Italy-5 percent

Now, let me hasten to add that I’m not suggesting that America should necessarily emulate the models used by some of these countries to fund private or parochial schools. In some of them, church schools are directly subsidized by the state, regardless of parental choice, and in others independent schools are closely supervised by the state in a way that American private educators would (and should) disdain. Still, it’s worth noticing that, contrary to what the school-choice debate in this country might lead you to believe, most of the big industrialized countries that outperform America on international tests actually rely more on the private sector to deliver educational services than we do. Consider the latest mean scores from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in mathematics:

Korea-547
Japan-523
Australia-520
Germany-504
France-496
Britain-495
Spain-480
USA-474
Italy-462

And in science:

Japan-531
Australia-527
Korea-522
Germany-516
Britain-515
France-495
USA-489
Spain-488
Italy-475

I’ll make no claims about causality today, though you can read about studies of the effects of choice on international test scores here and here. At the very least, though, it would be exceedingly hard to prove that the U.S. reliance on government-monopoly provision of secondary education generates better outcomes. Perhaps America does have something to learn from other countries and should end its arrogant, “go it alone” mentality!

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.

* Before anyone accuses me of leaving out the other obvious country peer, Canada, just to make a point, it turns out that comparable data on Canadian educational enrollment were not available. The same was true of the Netherlands, which famously has a voucher-like system enrolling most of its students in private education.