Betsy DeVos, who recently bought the office of U.S. Secretary of Education, spouts the same myth that's been going around for decades...that American public schools are "failing."
The Answer Sheet, in
DeVos: Outcomes at U.S. schools are so bad, they probably can’t get much worse, reported
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said on Wednesday that U.S. public schools nationwide are in such bad shape that she isn’t “sure how they could get a lot worse.”
And, like other myth-spouters in the "education reform" movement, she invoked international tests, adding,
“I’m not sure how they could get a lot worse on a nationwide basis than they are today. I mean, the fact that our PISA scores have continued to deteriorate as compared to the rest of the world...
She's wrong.
The U.S. is regularly in the "middle of the pack" when it comes to the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test administered by the
OECD. In 2015 U.S. students were 31st, 20th, and 19th in Math, Reading, and Science respectively. This score, and previous, similar scores, have been used by politicians and policy makers to claim that America's public schools are failing.
The problem that DeVos and others don't understand, or just simply ignore, is poverty. American public schools
accept everyone and test everyone. Not all countries do that. We don't weed out our poor and low-achieving students as they get older, so everyone gets tested. To be fair, Secretary DeVos might not know this. She never attended a public school and never sent her children to public schools. In her experience, children who weren't achieving academically might have been weeded out of her private schools. She probably never realized that they were then sent to public schools, where all students are accepted.
The fact is that students who come from backgrounds of poverty don't achieve as well as students from wealthier backgrounds. And we, in the U.S. are (nearly)
Number One in child poverty.
PISA
Putting PISA Results to the Test
According to a 2015 report by UNICEF, the U.S. has the second-highest child poverty rate (23.1%) among industrialized nations from the European Union and OECD; only Romania’s is higher (25.5%).
...the majority of children attending U.S. public schools – 51% – are growing up in low-income households, the highest percentage since the federal government began tracking the figure.
Poverty matters when it comes to achievement. Students who live in poverty in the United States come to school with issues that don't affect wealthier students.
Stress, for example...
Children growing up in poverty often experience chronic stress…chronic stress can affect the developing learning centers of the brain, with impact on attention, concentration, working memory and self-regulation.
In other words, the simple fact of growing up in poverty affects a child's ability to learn. In addition, there are factors outside of school which contribute to low achievement.
David C. Berliner examined the impact of out-of-school factors on achievement. In
Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, Berliner wrote,
OSFs are related to a host of poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems that children often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and oppositional behavior.
These factors include conditions having an impact on developing fetuses, such as the medical care given to the mother, the mother's general health, and any toxins ingested by the mother either through drug or alcohol abuse, or through environmental toxins in the environment. After the child is born things like low birth weight, inadequate medical care, food insecurity, environmental pollutants like
lead poisoning, family stress, and other characteristics of high-poverty neighborhoods all have an impact on a child's ability to learn.
To place all the blame for low achievement on public schools serving large numbers of students living in poverty is unfair to the schools, teachers, and students.
TEST SCORES REFLECT ECONOMIC STATUS
Mrs. DeVos probably doesn't know that low test scores correlate exactly with high poverty (see
here and
here). Children from American schools where less than 25% of the students qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch, score high on the PISA test. In fact, they would rank first in reading and science and third in math among OECD nations.
On the other hand, American students from schools where more than 75% of the students qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch, score much lower. Because the U.S. has a much higher percentage of students in poverty than nearly all the other OECD nations, the overall U.S. average score is below the median.
We can show these results using graphs from
PISA: It’s Still ‘Poverty Not Stupid’.
The first graph shows where schools with various percentages of students in poverty would fall if only those schools were compared to other countries in the OECD.
This graph compares schools with various percentages of students in poverty to countries in OECD with similar poverty levels. The left side, for example, shows how students from schools with a poverty rate of less than ten percent compare to nations with a poverty rate of less than ten percent.
These two charts from
PISA: It’s Still ‘Poverty Not Stupid’ clearly show the impact that poverty has on American students' test scores. In every case, students who attend schools with a given percentage of children in poverty 1) score higher than students who attend schools with lower percentages of children in poverty and 2) score higher than countries with similar rates of poverty.
At the very least we can say that the child poverty rate, over which schools have no control, has an impact on student learning. In his blog post,
Why Invest in Libraries, Stephen Krashen, USC Professor Emeritus, wrote,
Poverty means, among other things, inadequate diet, lack of health care, and lack of access to books. Each of these has a powerful impact on achievement (Berliner, 2009; Krashen, 1997). The best teaching in the world has little effect when children are hungry, undernourished, ill, and have little or nothing to read (emphasis added).
FINDING SOLUTIONS
Can schools do nothing to overcome the impact of poverty on student lives? Not alone. However, with the help of legislators, taxpayers, and parents, support for students struggling to succeed can help.
Here are some suggestions – most of which cost money – to help raise student achievement. These ideas come from various sources, including
The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids,
Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence, and
The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve.
Legislators should help by fully funding public education in order to
- Develop age-appropriate Pre-K programs
- Provide a well rounded, age-appropriate curriculum
- Include the arts, recess, and physical education in the curriculum
- Eliminate unnecessary testing (this one saves money)
- Recruit experienced and diverse staff including classroom teachers and specialists
- Include non-teaching staff when needed, such as nurses, counselors, and social workers
- Maintain high quality facilities
- Introduce parental support programs
THE CHALLENGE TO POLICY MAKERS
When she looks at the U.S. international test scores, Secretary DeVos, and other policy makers see "failing schools." This is wrong. The low average scores, and the even lower scores aggregated for low income students, indicate that economic inequity is overwhelming the infrastructure of our public school systems. Instead of blaming public schools,
politicians and policy makers must take responsibility for ending the shameful rate of child poverty and inequity in America.
In his
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, on August 16, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said,
...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.
Special thanks to Meg Bloom, Phyllis Bush, and Donna Roof, all members of the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education, for their help in preparing the presentation from which this blog post was adapted.
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