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.

(Also on POLITICO: The Common Core money war)

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.

(Also on POLITICO: Online courses don't live up to hype)

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.”

Poverty is the problem that must be solved... Our Schools Are Not Broken...

Poverty is the problem that must be solved... Our Schools Are Not Broken...

Stephen Krashen - June 10, 2011

[Prof. Krashen co-authored a 10 question quiz with Susan Ohanian in The Progressive, "Test Your Public Education Savvy." His speech below echoes a theme that principal Mel Riddile wrote on when addressing the class gap on the international PISA tests, in "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid," in The Principal Difference, December 15, 2010. Earlier this summer Deborah Meier likewise asked, "Why Don't We 'Fix' Poverty While We're at It?." I have addressed the class factor behind student and test performance in "More Stats Illustrate: U.S. Student Test Score Gap is Reflection of Class and Poverty," pointing to an international correlation between class inequality and PISA performance. This February the New York Times recognized the increasing role income disparity is playing in educational performance. PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment.
The education "reform movement" is taking off in countries with income disparities similar to the United States' disparity levels. Note the hounding of teachers in the United Kingdom, feeling like criminals; and in Chile, where Charlotte Danielson has hawked her teacher evaluation wares.]
From Substance News, undated:

[Editor's Note: The following — Our Schools are Not Broken: The Problem is Poverty — by Stephen Krashen was originally given as the Commencement Speech, Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Lewis and Clark College on June 5, 2011. All footnotes appear at the end].

"Broken" schools?

We have been told repeatedly that our schools are "broken," that our teachers are inadequate, that our schools of education are not doing their job, and that teachers unions are spending all their time protecting bad teachers. The evidence is the fact that American students do not score at the top of the world on international test scores. One observer claimed that American students are "taking a shellacking" on these tests. (1)

The impact of poverty

Not so. Studies show that middle-class American students attending well-funded schools outscore students in nearly all other countries on these tests. (2) Overall scores are unspectacular because over 20% of our students live in poverty, the highest percentage among all industrialized countries. High-scoring Finland, for example, first on the PISA science test in 2006, has less than 4% child poverty. (3)

Reduce poverty to improve education, not vice-versa

The fact that American students who are not living in poverty do very well shows that there is no crisis in teacher quality. The problem is poverty. The US Department of Education insists that improving teaching comes first: With better teaching, we will have more learning (higher test scores, according to the feds), and this will improve the economy. We are always interested in improving teaching, but the best teaching in the world will have little effect when students are hungry, are in poor health because of inadequate diet and inadequate health care, and have low literacy development because of a lack of access to books. (4) Also, studies have failed to find a correlation between improved test scores and subsequent economic progress. (5)

The relationship is the other way around: "We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.” (Martin Luther King, 1967, Final Words of Advice).

At least: Protect children from the effects of poverty

If poverty is the problem, the solution is full employment and a living wage for honest work. Until this happens, we need to do what we can to protect children from the effects of poverty. This means (1) continue to support and expand free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs ("No child left unfed," as Susan Ohanian puts it). It means (2) make sure all schools have an adequate number of school nurses; there are fewer school nurses per student in high poverty schools than in low poverty schools. (6)

It means (3) make sure all children have access to books.

Access to books > more reading > literacy development

There is very clear evidence that children from high-poverty families have very little access to books at home, at school, and in their communities. (7)

Studies also show when children have access to interesting and comprehensible reading material, they read. (8)

And finally, when children read, they improve in all aspects of literacy, including vocabulary, grammar, spelling, reading and writing ability.9 In fact, I have concluded that reading for pleasure, self-selected reading, is the major cause of literacy development. Making sure that all children have access to books makes literacy development possible. Without it, literacy development is impossible.

The power of libraries

In support of this chain of logic, a number of studies show that school library quality and the presence of credential librarians are related to reading ability. The leader of this research in the United States is Keith Curry Lance, who, with his associates, has reported that school library quality is related to reading achievement in a number of different states. (10)

Related to the poverty issue, the results of some recent studies have suggested that access to books, either at home or at the school library, can mitigate or balance the effect of poverty: The positive impact of access to books on reading achievement is about as large as the negative impact of poverty. (11)

Access can close the gap

A stunning example of the power of books to close the gap between different groups is Fryer and Levitt's (2004) analysis. They reported that white children did better than African-American children on tests administered on entrance to kindergarten. When socio-economic status was added to the analysis, about 2/3 of the gap was closed. When books in the home was added to the analysis in addition to socio-economic status, the entire gap was closed: There was no difference between the groups. (12)

Unfortunately, public and school libraries across the country are suffering tremendous budget cuts, and school librarians' hours are being reduced. (13)

As Isaac Asimov wrote, "When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself" (from his autobiography, I, Asimov).

How to pay for it: Reduce testing

We can easily afford to protect children from many of the effects of poverty. The obvious step is to halt the drive toward increased testing and reduce the amount of testing we are paying for now.

The astonishing increase in testing

It is widely acknowledged that NCLB (No Child Left Behind) required an excessive amount of testing. Not well known is the fact that the US Department of Education is planning to spend billions on a massive new testing program, with far more testing than ever before, all linked to national standards. The new plan will require, as before, tests in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school, but it also includes interim testing, and may include pre-testing in the fall to be able to measure growth during the year. In addition, the US Department of Education is encouraging testing in other subjects as well. The tests are to be administered online, which means a huge investment in getting all students connected. (14)

No evidence supporting the increase in testing

There is no evidence supporting the idea that tests to enforce national standards will have a positive impact on student learning. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that it will not: States that use more high-stakes tests do not do better on the national NAEP test than states with fewer, (15) and the use of the standardized SAT does not predict college success over and above high school grades. (16)

Countries that use standardized tests for course examinations did only slightly better on the PISA, a test of reading given to 15 year olds, and the use of such tests to compare schools and to make curricular decisions has a near- zero correlation with PISA scores. (17)

Of course, the administration has argued that these will be new and better tests, more sensitive to growth in learning, able to chart student progress through the year, and able to probe real learning, not just memorization. Before unleashing these "improved" tests on the country, however, there should be rigorous investigation, rigorous studies to show that these measures are worth the investment. Right now, the corporations and politicians insist that we take on faith the claim that these tests are good for students. Such claims exhibit a profound lack of accountability.

In contrast, there is overwhelming evidence that dealing with poverty is an excellent investment, one that will not only improve school achievement but also affect quality of life and personal happiness.

To summarize:

1. American education is not broken. Our less than spectacular international test scores are not because of bad teaching, but are because of our high rate of child poverty.

2. Reducing poverty will improve educational attainment, not vice-versa.

3. A reasonable first step is to protect children from the effects of poverty: No child left unfed, more health care, improve access to books.

4. We can easily pay for much of this by reducing testing.

Notes

1. Bonstell, A. 2011. America's academic meltdown, Orange County Register, May 5, 2011.

2. Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report; Berliner, D. The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., and Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. In press.

3. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_chi_pov-economy-child-poverty.

4. Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder

and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2); Rothstein, R. (2010). How to fix our schools. Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief #286. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286; Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22; Martin, M. 2004. A strange ignorance: The role of lead poisoning in “failing schools.” http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm.

5. Zhao, Y. 2009. Catching Up or Leading the Way? American Education in the Age of Globalization. ASCD: Alexandria, VA.; Baker, K. 2007. Are international tests worth anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104.

6. Berliner, D. 2009. op. cit.

7. Di Loreto, C., and Tse, L. 1999. Seeing is believing: Disparity in books in two Los Angeles area public libraries. School Library Quarterly 17(3): 31-36; Duke, N. 2000. For the rich it's richer: Print experiences and environments offered to children in very low and very high-socioeconomic status first-grade classrooms. American Educational Research Journal 37(2): 441-478; Neuman, S.B. and Celano, D. 2001. Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26.

8. Lindsay, J. 2010. Children's Access to Print Material and Education-Related Outcomes: Findings from a Meta-Analytic Review. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates. http://bit.ly/9lKPPa

9. McQuillan, J. 1998. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Company; Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Portsmouth: Heinemann and Westport: Libraries Unlimited; Lindsay, J. 2010. op. cit.

10. Lance, K. 2004. The impact of school library media centers on academic achievement. In Carol Kuhlthau (Ed.), School Library Media Annual. 188-197. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. (For access to the many Lance studies done in individual states, as well as studies done by others at the state level, see http://www.davidvl.org/research.html).

11. Achterman, D. 2008. Haves, Halves, and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement in California. PhD dissertation, University of North Texas. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9800:1; Evans, M, Kelley, J. Sikora, J. and Treiman,D. 2010. Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28 (2): 171-197; Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2010. An analysis of the PIRLS (2006) data: Can the school library reduce the effect of poverty on reading achievement? CSLA (California School Library Association) Journal, 34 (1); 26-28; Schubert, F. and Becker, R. 2010. Social inequality of reading literacy: A longitudinal analysis with cross-sectional data of PIRLS 2001and PISA 2000 utilizing the pair wise matching procedure. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29:109-133.

12. Fryer, R. and Levitt, S. 2004. Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school. The Review of Economics and Statistics 86 (2): 447-464.

13. American Library Association, 2010. The State of America's Libraries. American Libraries (Special Issue).

14. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. (2010) ESEA Blueprint for Reform, Washington, D.C.; Krashen, S. and Ohanian, S. 2011. High tech

testing on the way: A 21st century boondoggle? http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in- dialogue/ /2011/04/high_tech_testing_on_the_way_a.html. Apparently even the president of the United States has not been aware of the amount of testing the Department of Education was planning. On March 28, 2011, the President, in response to a question at a townhall meeting, commented that "we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids" and suggested that we "figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years," as well as use other criteria. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-univision-town-hall

15. Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/.

16. Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.ed; Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

17. OECD 2011. Lessons from PISA for the United States, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264096660-en