Politico Doesn't Buy the "Schools Stink" Shtick

Stephanie Simon in Politico wrote, "Do American public schools really stink? Maybe not"

The drumbeat is hard to miss: Our schools are failing. Public education is in crisis. Our students are falling further and further behind.

The rhetoric comes from the left and right, from educators and politicians and lobbyists and CEOs and even Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The deep dysfunction of our public schools is said to threaten not only America’s economy but also its national security.

But a vocal group of contrarians is challenging that conventional wisdom. The latest weapon in their arsenal: A new book out this week by education historian Diane Ravitch, who argues that the biggest crisis facing public education is the relentless message that public education is in crisis.

It’s a debate with broad power to shape the nation’s $600-billion-a-year investment in public education. Where’s the truth? That’s not always easy to discern. Here’s a look at four key talking points — and the facts (and spin) behind them.

1. China is eating us for lunch

A new video about the failures of public schools making the rounds on social media starts by introducing viewers to “the most important number in all of education…32!”

Why 32?

Well, that’s where the U.S. came out in the PISA international math test, given to 15-year-olds around the world in 2009. Only 32 percent of American kids scored proficient, which put us at 32nd in the world, miles behind perennial powerhouses like Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea — and also far behind nations less frequently thought of as academic superstars, including Estonia, Iceland and Slovenia.

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Sounds grim. And Harvard education professor Paul Peterson argues that it is. “If we’re 32nd in the world, that’s a pretty serious matter,” said Peterson, a co-author of the new book “Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School,” which the video was produced to promote.

Then again, we’re 32nd on just one test. American kids do better relative to the world — though they’re still far from elite — on the PISA science and reading exams.

And they do better as well on a different, equally respected, international math test known as TIMSS.

On the most recent TIMSS test, from 2011, American eighth-graders handily outscored seven nations that had the edge on the U.S. in the 2009 PISA exam, including Great Britain, Australia — and, yes, Slovenia. Fourth-graders rocked the TIMSS test even more: They came out ahead of a dozen countries that had beaten the U.S. on the PISA exam.

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As for China, it doesn’t participate as an entire nation; only students from three relatively wealthy regions — Shanghai, Macao and Hong Kong — are tested. That’s important to note because income correlates with success on standardized tests. Finland, often at the top of the global rankings, has a child poverty rate of just 5 percent. In the U.S., it’s 23 percent.

One more point: Any test contains sampling error, so the precision of global rankings is an illusion. On the 2009 PISA reading assessment, for instance, the U.S. officially ranked 15th among the 34 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which sponsors the exam. But an OECD official told POLITICO that the U.S. might actually have been as high as 8th — or as low as 20th.

2. Our kids can’t do math and that’s killing our economy

In her new book “Reign of Error,” Ravitch notes that the U.S. has done poorly on every international math test since the first one was given in the mid-1960s.

The low rankings don’t concern Ravitch. Bad test scores, she points out, haven’t stopped the U.S. from driving major scientific advances decade after decade. American innovation has been so impressive that China’s ministry of education is pushing its schools to stop fixating on standardized tests and embrace a more hands-on model of education — the American model.

“The whole thing about being first in the world is nonsense,” Ravitch said. “I don’t think we should worry that much about Singapore taking over the world.”

Peterson, though, does worry — a great deal. He and his co-authors calculate that if the U.S. could just boost its math scores to the level Canada attained on the 2009 PISA test, our economy would grow stronger over the coming decades. How much stronger? The average income of every worker in the U.S. would be 20 percent higher than if we continued to languish at No. 32 in the world rankings, Peterson said. And that’s achievable just by matching middle-of-the-pack Canada.

“You would think that would be a reasonable goal to have,” Peterson said.

In Peterson’s view, it’s irresponsible to argue that international rankings don’t matter. Sooner or later — and he’s betting sooner — poor math scores will catch up to us, he said, as they signal the population is not well-equipped for the jobs of the future. He’s particularly concerned that just 7 percent of U.S. students (including just 12 percent of students with college-educated parents) scored “advanced” on the PISA math test, compared with 44 percent of students in Shanghai, 30 percent in Singapore and nearly 14 percent in Canada.

The greatest job growth in the U.S. over the next decade is likely to be in service jobs that don’t require advanced math or science, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But those are low-paying jobs. The most lucrative high-growth professions will require strong math and science skills — think software developer, optometrist, bioengineer, veterinarian.

3. We’re spending more, but schools are getting worse

Warnings on this theme are generally accompanied by graphs showing steep growth in per-pupil spending — juxtaposed against a flat line representing academic achievement.

That’s misleading, however, on two fronts.

Spending has certainly jumped. But a huge part of the increase — about half, according to economist Richard Rothstein — has been dedicated to serving students with disabilities who were not guaranteed (and often did not receive) a free public education until the 1970s. Schools are also serving far more immigrant students who come in speaking a dizzying array of languages.

As for the academic flat line: The percentage of kids scoring “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — widely considered the most reliable measure — has plummeted in both reading and math in both fourth and eighth grade for every racial group except Native Americans. Average reading and math scores for each subgroup in the fourth and eighth grades have also climbed steadily over the past 20 years.

But demographic changes in U.S. schools mean that a greater percentage of test takers now come from groups that traditionally score lower on the NAEP tests, such as Hispanic students. So when test scores are aggregated nationwide, it doesn’t look like there’s been much progress — even though taken individually, each group of students has dramatically improved.

The NAEP tests do show one clear trouble spot: high-school students. NAEP reading and math scores for 17-year-olds haven’t budged much since the 1970s. Ravitch suggests that’s because it’s hard to get older teens to take a no-stakes test seriously; she points to other gains, such as improvement in the high-school graduation rate, to show progress.

Peterson is more pessimistic. What good are the gains in fourth and eighth grade, he asks, if they’re not sustained through high school?

Another red flag comes from ACT scores. The College Board, which gives those tests, recently calculated that just 66 percent of high school graduates are prepared for college-level English, 45 percent for math and a woeful 30 percent for science.

The Common Core, which 45 states and D.C. have adopted to guide instruction in math and language arts, aims to improve those numbers by setting uniformly high standards instead of the state-by-state patchwork that now prevails. Ravitch opposes the standards but they’ve been embraced by a broad coalition from businesses to unions, President Barack Obama and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

4. It’s not an education problem, it’s an equity problem

On nearly every measure of academic performance, poor kids fare poorly.

To Ravitch and her supporters, the solution is obvious — schools in poor communities need more money and more resources to support families struggling with hunger, unemployment and unmet medical needs.

Reformers counter that it makes no sense to pour more money into schools with a long history of low test scores or dismal graduation rates. Instead, they push to close the worst performers and open the system to competition from alternatives like charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, sometimes by for-profit firms. They also push to weed out bad teachers by evaluating K-12 educators in significant part based on how much they raise their students’ scores on standardized tests.

The evidence here is muddy. Some charters have done exceedingly well at raising the test scores of low-income students. Others have not. Some of the most successful don’t serve anywhere near as many of the hardest-to-reach kids — those who are disabled, destitute or still learning English — as the struggling neighborhood schools all around them.

As for the new teacher evaluation systems, they have identified more low performers. But they’re far from precise.

When New York City calculated teacher “value-added” ratings last year, city officials acknowledged that a teacher rated at the 50th percentile of her peers might actually have been as low as the 23rd — or as high as the 77th, a huge margin of error that persisted even when the city used three years of student test data to smooth out bumps, city officials said.

So what’s the bottom line here?

Ravitch argues that “corporate reformers” and “privatizers” have a vested interest in making it sound like teachers and schools are failing so they’ll be invited to run their own schools or sell educational technology at a profit. Reformers say that’s ridiculous and accuse their critics of prioritizing adult concerns like teacher union jobs over children’s needs.

The debate has grown so contentious — even nasty — that the two sides often talk past one another, except to hurl insults. That frustrates Duncan.

He has been blunt in his critiques of public schools, arguing that too many have unacceptably low standards for their students.

Yet in an interview with POLITICO, Duncan said he has little patience for those who argue that public education is a failed enterprise. Acceptance of the status quo bothers him just as much, he said.

“Yes, the trends are very encouraging, but yes, relative to our international counterparts we have a long way to go, so I feel a fundamental sense of urgency,” Duncan said. “We have to continue to get better — faster.”