Pearl Clutching Over PISA

IT'S STILL POVERTY

The latest PISA scores have been released and edu-pundits are clutching their pearls because "our scores are terrible." Yet hardly anyone has mentioned that, just like in the past, the scores in the US are lower than many others in the OECD because the US has a high rate of child poverty.

I wrote about this after the last release of PISA scores...

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.

North Carolina blogger Stu Egan (Caffeinated Rage) did notice it this time and posted...

Poverty Affects Schools, No Measurable Differences in 15 Years, And Reforms Have Not Worked: What The PISA Scores Show Us

What DeVos got wrong is that we as a country are not average. We actually do very well when one considers the very things that DeVos is blind to: income gaps, social inequality, and child poverty.

Egan posted these graphs (along with others) from the latest PISA tests. They show that, within each quartile of the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status, the US scores are near the average for the rest of the OECD. Check out his entire post.

In reading, the US 15-year-olds scored a little above the OECD average at each quartile.

In math, the US 15-year-olds scored slightly below the OECD average at each quartile.

We're not number one. But we're not "failing" either. If our child poverty rate was lower, we wouldn't have so many more scores in the lower quartiles and our average scores would be higher.

Egan also includes a long quote from the Economic Policy Institute (from an earlier version of the PISA) which explains things very well. Here's part of it...

What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?

Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared.

• Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.

We won't be able to climb to the "top" of the PISA rankings as long as we are near the "bottom" of the OECD in child poverty. What we've been doing has actually been making things worse.

• We spend too much time on testing and not enough on teaching. 

• We divert too much of our education funding to the privatization of public schools instead of supporting the common good.

• We're so focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy that we don't have enough money to support our future.

Nothing has changed since I wrote the following in 2017...

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.

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A Report on Reports

Need something to do this weekend?

Here is a chance to get dig deeper into some issues important to public education. Below are links to reports about school inequity, special education, vouchers, segregation, charter schools, and other topics of interest.

You can learn how

• the election of 2016 has caused stress and conflict in the nation's high schools

• public investment in education has declined

• international test scores don't tell the whole story about public education in the U.S.

• charter schools drain money and resources from actual public schools

• socio-economic status continues to be the most accurate predictor of academic success

ISSUES ABOUT MONEY, FUNDING, AND POVERTY

Education inequalities at the school starting gate

Economic inequities abound in the U.S. and schools are not equipped to address all the issues facing children alone. Policy makers and legislators must work with schools by providing funding for wraparound services, a fully funded school curriculum, and strategies to improve economic development in communities. Ignoring inequity, or asking schools to perform miracles without necessary resources is a guarantee of failure.

From Emma García and Elaine Weiss, the Economic Policy Institute

What this study finds: Extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that children’s social class is one of the most significant predictors—if not the single most significant predictor—of their educational success. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that performance gaps by social class take root in the earliest years of children’s lives and fail to narrow in the years that follow. That is, children who start behind stay behind—they are rarely able to make up the lost ground...

What can be done about it: Greater investments in pre-K programs can narrow the gaps between students at the start of school. And to ensure that these early gains are maintained, districts can provide continued comprehensive academic, health, nutrition, and emotional support for children through their academic years, including meaningful engagement of parents and communities. Such strategies have been successfully implemented in districts around the country, as described in this report, and can serve to mitigate the impact of economic inequalities on children’s educational achievement and improve their future life and work prospects.

A Punishing Decade for School Funding

We are ignoring the underfunding of schools and services for our children and the future of the nation is at stake. Instead of planning for the future with an investment in our children, we're living "paycheck to paycheck" and ignoring the fact that we are limiting the future of a huge number of our children...which limits the future of our nation.

From Michael Leachman, Kathleen Masterson, and Eric Figueroa, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Public investment in K-12 schools — crucial for communities to thrive and the U.S. economy to offer broad opportunity — has declined dramatically in a number of states over the last decade. Worse, some of the deepest-cutting states have also cut income tax rates, weakening their main revenue source for supporting schools.

Separate and Unequal: A Comparison of Student Outcomes in New York City’s Most and Least Diverse Schools

Yet another study which shows that diverse school populations helps children and segregation harms them. Have we given up trying to abide by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling?

From David E. Kirkland and Joy L. Sanzone, NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of School

Diversity along lines of race and socioeconomic status seemed to modestly close achievement gaps (i.e., opportunity gaps), while hyper-segregation seemed to greatly exacerbate them (i.e., opportunity barrier). 

Deconstructing the Myth of American Public Schooling Inefficiency

Betsy DeVos continues to use international rankings in order to criticize, blame, and demean our nation's public schools. Rarely, if ever, does she include the fact that poverty has been, and continues to be, the societal problem which contributes the most to our average achievement. She rarely discusses the fact that American students from low-poverty schools score higher than any students in the world. She only uses the "failure" of public education as a tool to transfer the billions of education dollars into private pocketbooks.

The following report discusses some of the apples-to-oranges problems of comparing the U.S. to other advanced nations.

From Bruce D. Baker and Mark Weber, the Albert Shanker Institute

The United States is faced with a combination of seemingly high education expense, but noncompetitive compensation for its teachers, average to large classes, and high child poverty. Again, it’s hard to conceive how such a combination would render the U.S. comparable in raw test scores to low-poverty nations like Korea or Finland, or small, segregated, homogeneous enclaves like Singapore or Shanghai...

Finally, it is equally important to understand the magnitude and heterogeneity of the U.S. education system in the context of OECD comparisons, which mainly involve more centralized and much smaller education systems. Lower-poverty, higher-spending states that have been included in international comparisons, like Connecticut and Massachusetts, do quite well, while lower-spending higher-poverty states like Florida do not. This unsurprising finding, however, also tells us little about relative efficiency, and provides little policy guidance for how we might make Florida more like Massachusetts, other than by waving a wand and making it richer, more educated and perhaps several degrees colder.

POLITICS AND ITS IMPACT ON EDUCATION

Teaching and Learning in the Age of Trump: Increasing Stress and Hostility in America’s High Schools

During the years I taught I often stopped to reflect upon how politicians and policy makers seemed intent at making the job of teaching harder.

Today's political climate is no different. The election of 2016 has had an impact on our public schools beyond policy...

From John Rogers, UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access

VI. Educators can mitigate some of these challenges, but they need more support. Ultimately, political leaders need to address the underlying causes of campus incivility and stress.

• 72.3% of teachers surveyed agreed that: “My school leadership should provide more guidance, support, and professional development opportunities on how to promote civil exchange and greater understanding across lines of difference.”

• 91.6% of teachers surveyed agreed that: “national, state, and local leaders should encourage and model civil exchange and greater understanding across lines of difference.” Almost as many (83.9%) agreed that national and state leaders should “work to alleviate the underlying factors that create stress and anxiety for young people and their families.”

PRIVATIZATION

Charters and Consequences: An Investigative Series

The Network for Public Education reports on charter schools and their impact on real public schools, public school systems, public educators, and our nation's students, the vast majority of whom attend public schools.

[Full disclosure: I contribute to, and am a member of, the Network for Public Education.]

From the Network for Public Education

• An immediate moratorium on the creation of new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools
• The transformation of for-profit charters to non-profit charters
• The transformation of for-profit management organizations to non-profit management organizations
• All due process rights for charter students that are afforded public school students, in all matters of discipline
• Required certification of all school teaching and administrative staff
• Complete transparency in all expenditures and income
• Requirements that student bodies reflect the demographics of the served community
• Open meetings of the board of directors, posted at least 2 weeks prior on the charter’s website
• Annual audits available to the public
• Requirements to follow bidding laws and regulations
• Requirements that all properties owned by the charter school become the property of the local public school if the charter closes
• Requirements that all charter facilities meet building codes
• Requirements that charters offer free or reduced-price lunch programs for students
• Full compensation from the state for all expenditures incurred when a student leaves the public school to attend a charter
• Authorization, oversight and renewal of charters transferred to the local district in which they are located
• A rejection of all ALEC legislation regarding charter schools that advocates for less transparency, less accountability, and the removal of requirements for teacher certification.

SPECIAL EDUATION

Federal Actions Needed to Ensure Parents Are Notified About Changes in Rights for Students with Disabilities

Two things in this section, first, an article discussing the GAO Report. Then a short blurb from the report itself.

From Elise Helgesen Aguilar, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

A New Government Report Shows Private School Voucher Programs Fail To Provide Information, Especially To Families Of Students With Disabilities

Specifically, it found that most private school voucher programs do not provide necessary or even accurate information to parents of students with disabilities about the rights those students forfeit by enrolling at a private voucher school.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) ensures that students with disabilities are provided with certain rights and services in public schools, including a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) that is tailored to their individual needs.

But students who leave the public schools with a voucher forfeit many of those protections because they are considered parentally placed in private schools. For example, students accepting vouchers are not entitled to FAPE or to the due process rights that students in public schools have.

Many parents are not aware that they are giving up those rights when enroll their child in a private school voucher program. In fact, the report found that one-third of all voucher programs across the country do not provide any information to parents about the loss of procedural safeguards and due process protections under IDEA.

From the U.S. Government Accountability Office

Our draft report also included a recommendation for Education to require states to notify parents/guardians of changes in students’ federal special education rights, including that key IDEA rights and protections do not apply when a student with a disability is moved from public to private school by their parent. In response, Education stated that IDEA does not include statutory authority to require such notice, and suggested that the department instead encourage states to notify parents. However, as noted in our draft report, Education already strongly encourages states and school districts to provide such notice. Despite these efforts, we found that in 2016-17, more than 80 percent of students nationwide who are enrolled in private choice programs designed for students with about changes in IDEA rights, or provided some inaccurate information about these changes. We therefore continue to believe that states should be required, not merely encouraged, to notify parents/guardians about key changes in federal special education rights when a parent moves a child with a disability from public to private school. To this end, we have converted our recommendation into a Matter for Congressional Consideration to require such notice.

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The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools

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

• Reduce class sizes

• 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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Time to Teach and Learn

AMERICAN TEACHERS NEED MORE TIME

High achieving nations around the world have shown that less is more...less teaching time with students and more learning time for teachers results in higher learning for students.

10 Ways to Fix Education: #1 – Increase Planning Time

One thing that [high achieving nations of China and Finland] did have in common – as do most of the top schools in the PISA – is that they provide ample time for teachers to plan and prepare. And they’re compensated for it.

The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education released a report in August 2010 comparing how little time the United States has dedicated to teacher planning and preparation (3-5 hours per week) to how international educators average 15-25 hours per week to plan. In fact, the United States is put at a major disadvantage because more than 80% of our teacher time is spend educating and interacting with students, not on planning or development of curriculum.

...In Finland, the best way to learn about the stark contrast between the stressed American teacher and the relaxed one there is to read a blog titled Taught By Finland, in which Tim Walker, an American teacher comments on what he’s learning while teaching in the Scandinavian country. His posts are both insightful and reflective of the lack of prep time in America. For example, one post notes how colleagues insist he take a coffee break for 15 minutes instead of grading papers. In another entry, he struggles over the fact that he’ll see his students in class just 600 hours per year (in comparison to America’s 1,080). Finnish teachers receive about 40% of their time to plan. I know what you’re thinking – unbelievable.

Believe it. In educational systems across the world, teachers have more time to plan than their American counterparts. Period.

Tim Walker, who now teaches in Finland, wrote the following about his teaching in the U.S. I don't doubt that every American public school teacher will recognize the pattern...

Work-Life Balance in Finland: Americans on a Different Planet

At the time, Johanna’s friend and I shared several things in common. We were both first-year teachers at the first grade level and we were under 25 years old. But that’s really where our similarities ended.

My first graders’ 7-hour school day was nearly twice as long as her students’ school day. By the time she had left school, I hadn't even completed my last class. And I had a mountain of planning waiting for me as soon as I waved goodbye to my kids.

In my first year of teaching, I would typically spend about two hours planning before school and three hours planning afterschool. I had virtually no boundaries, spending these additional hours of work either at the classroom desk or the kitchen table at home. And even when I had the chance to enjoy a break during a lunch block, I'd often work through this time, zigzagging across my classroom with a peeled banana in one hand, nibbling on-the-go.

All told, I was putting in 12-hour days of work. It’s no wonder why I was bothered by the hours of Johanna’s friend in Finland. My workday was twice as long.

Given her lighter workload, I was arrogantly convinced that she was an inferior teacher. I believed that teachers proved their strength by the number of hours they devoted to the teaching profession. By my estimation, she didn't measure up.

By the end of my first year of teaching, I discovered that I was, by far, the weaker one. A dreadful lack of work-life balance had caught up to me. I was brimming over with stress and anxiety. And worst of all, the job of teaching was no longer joyful.

We spend so much more time with our students than in Finland, yet, on average, our achievement levels are lower. Why?

The short answer is that teachers who spend time in collaboration with colleagues, planning lessons, and increasing their own learning, are able to help students learn better. Teachers who work 11 hour days trying to keep up with planning, grading, and data collection, become overstressed, overworked, and less able to do what they were trained to do.

There are other factors, of course, including student SES, and cultural differences in the attitude towards education, but teacher quality is the most important in-school factor for learning. We don't give our teachers time to improve their quality of teaching because they're so busy trying to keep up with the huge class sizes and mountains of paperwork dumped on them.

Linda Darling-Hammond, in The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, wrote...

Whereas teachers in high achieving nations spend 40 to 60% of their time preparing and learning to teach well, most U.S. teachers have no time to work with colleagues during the school day. They typically receive only about 3 to 5 hours weekly in which to plan by themselves, and they get a few "hit-and-run" workshops after school, with little opportunity to share knowledge or improve their practice. A far greater percentage of U.S. teachers' work time is spent teaching than in most countries -- about 80%, as compared to 60% on average for secondary teachers in the 31 OECD countries. U.S. teachers have more net teaching time -- nearly 1,100 hours per year -- than any other OECD country, far greater than the OECD average of 800 hours per year for primary schools and 660 hours per year for upper secondary schools.

She reports on high achieving nations...

Ongoing professional learning, embedded in 15 to 25 hours a week of planning and collaboration time at school, plus an additional 2 to 4 weeks of professional learning time annually to attend institutes and seminars, visit other schools and classrooms, conduct action research and lesson study, and participate in school retreats.

The OECD comparison between Finland and the U.S. is clear. More time for teachers pays off...

Teachers in the U.S. spend so much time trying to keep up with the workload that they don't have time to improve their skills, or share what they've learned with other teachers.

WINTER

Winter 2014. Lots of snow all over the country. My local school district in northeast Indiana has cancelled school 12 times because of snow or bitterly cold temperatures.

What does this have to do with teaching and learning time?

Our teachers get about a half hour a week for colleague collaboration and about 5 hours a week for planning. Instead of adding more days to the school calendar, the school system will likely cancel collaboration time, and extend the school day reducing the amount of time for teachers to collaborate and reducing the amount of in-school planning time. Many teachers are in favor of this as an alternative to adding days to the calendar at the end of the year. The school systems are caught by the demand for student contact time...the requirement that, in order for a year to be "valid" students have to be in attendance for 180 days.

Other OECD nations, however have shown that to be unnecessary.

Obviously the Finnish system, or any other high achieving country's school system, can't easily be transplanted into the U.S. The Finns, for example, spent years improving teacher education and developing a national school system which was equitable. They provide broad safety nets for the few children who live in poverty (about 4% compared to the U.S. 23%). They don't waste resources testing every student every year. Unlike the U.S. they have a culture which understands that education is "paying it forward" to improve the future.

Meanwhile we're wasting our money on an obsessive reliance on tests and punishments, lowering standards for teachers, ignoring the massive number of students living in poverty, fighting each other over providing health care for our children, and privatizing the public school system which is one of the foundational institutions of our democracy.

Until the U.S. becomes serious about public education and the educational future of the nation, we're stuck with overworked teachers -- and students -- and making up snow days by extending already long school days.

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Our Nation is More Than a Test Score

Here's an excellent video from the AFT discussing the recently released PISA scores. Our nation is more than just a test score!

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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The Myth of the Failing Public Schools

This morning Diane Ravitch posted A Frightening Vision of the Future, in which she commented about a post by David Warlick from last June.

Warlick's article posed some disturbing projections about not only the privatization of public education, but the concentration of power over public education into relatively few corporate pockets.

One interesting aspect of his article is the discussion of myths regarding the failure of public education in America which have been accepted by the general public. He wrote...

We’re being convinced that:

• The U.S. is falling behind other nations in education – that our schools are failing.
• The success of schools and education can be precisely measured and quantified by a corporate testing industry and the constant testing of our children.
• Teachers, protected by labor unions, do not know what they’re doing.
• Business can do it better.

Warlick went on to say that...

Each of these are so easily debunked.

Warlick ends his article without debunking the myths which prompts a commenter, Paul, to ask him...

June 22nd, 2012 @ 9:22 am

I am interested in how you can easily debunk the 4 points. Schools appear to be failing. College has to re-mediate most incoming freshman, and businesses need to re mediate most incoming employees. Not to mention what is happening in the poor districts near me.

Public schools dumb down the masses and create compliant “acceptors” of whatever is put in front of them. Perhaps corporations will try to create innovative creative, thinkers. I am sure that is who they would rather hire.Or, are you subconsciously just protecting your job?

Warlick replied...and it is in his response that the important information from this article appears.

David Warlick reply on June 23rd, 2012:

@Paul, I’m glad that you’ve challenged me on this, because it gives me a chance to dig deeper into my own research and thinking.

First, and perhaps the most continually touted and thoroughly debunked rant, is that the U.S. embarrassingly trails behind other industrial nations in education, most often pointing at 2009 PISA scores. The fact is that in Math, the U.S., number 17, actually reported identical scores as Poland and Iceland, 15 and 16 — making us tied for 15th. If we might consider some small margin of error, say 2 points, then we also tie with Norway, Estonia and Switzerland, for position 12. Other countries within that margin of error are New Zealand and Japan, and Netherlands and Belgium, putting us in position 10. Like Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies! Damn lies! ..and statistics.”

If this sort of measure really were important, then we might dig deeper, comparing U.S. schools with specific poverty rates with other countries reporting similar rates. Then U.S. schools climb to or near number one in every range. Schools in the U.S. with fewer than 10% of their students living in or near poverty scored 551 on the PISA math test, second only to Shanghai, China. U.S. schools with between 10 and 25 percent in or near poverty scored 527, higher than Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, etc.

I agree that in many ways our schools are failing. But I do not acknowledge claims of failure based on measures from standardized tests. There are too many innovative, passionate and inspiring leaders around us, who did not pass tests in school. There is too much evidence of curricula that’s become too wide and too shallow, because of these tests, for me to believe anything other than, we must end them –– if we are to save education.

In fact, it is partly this belief that success can be measured with multiple-choice tests and their demand for regimented (and life-sucking) schools that prevents success. ‘nough said.

Certainly there are poor teachers – as there are poor engineers, electricians, farmers and bankers. But during a conversation I had recently with a group education leaders, all of whom had been principals at one time (in union states), they all agreed that firing a bad teacher is easy. It’s keeping the good ones that’s hard. I looked hard for a breakdown of individual states performance on the PISA and could not find any. I did find one report that correlated scores of another test with comparable PISA scores and Massachusetts and Vermont moved into positions 5 and 7, topped only by Shanghai, Korea, Finland Hong Kong and Singapore. Both states require collective bargaining. Of the five U.S. states that prohibit collective bargaining, only one showed up in the listing, North Carolina, dead last.

Teachers do need to be better prepared, with more study and more time in classrooms with good master teachers before they are given their own classrooms — and they need on-going and on-demand professional development. Teachers also need to be empowered as teacher-philosophers, not held accountable as teacher-technicians. In Finland, they do not talk about teacher accountability. Their conversation is about teacher responsibility.

Finally, business. Why should they be able to do it better? Does business not make mistakes. Does business not waste resources? Why should they know the answers any better than professional educators. In my consulting days, I worked with businesses in the education market, and they were just as clueless as everyone else. We do not need better run schools resulting in students who outscore the Chinese. We need different schools that are retooled to address a dramatically new environment. There’s no guarantee that Educators are much more qualified to accomplish this. But it’s where my money is.

(Emphasis added)

Debunked indeed.

[Two other commenters replied to @Paul, Mano Talaiver and Diane Ravitch. You can read their responses in the comments following the article.]

The truth must be told and told again. American public education is not failing...the vast majority of teachers are hard-working, dedicated professionals...teachers unions do not harm students and prevent bad teachers from being fired and the people who gave us the financial collapse of the last 4 years are not better at running schools that education professionals!

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Krashen on Video

Here's an interview with Stephen Krashen (29 minutes)

Highlights:

• America's international test scores are "mediocre" (not bad) because of the high number of students in poverty, not because our schools are "failing."
• Research shows that education can be improved by counteracting the effects of poverty. He speaks specifically about access to books, reminding us that access to books increases the amount of reading (pleasure reading is the key)...the quantity of reading improves reading and a host of other benefits.
• Poverty, the percentage of children who were allowed to do free reading (pleasure reading) in school, the presence of school libraries of more than 500 books, and access of books in the home are proven to improve reading scores.
• Teacher evaluation of students (formative testing) is more accurate than standardized testing.

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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Can't they hear?

Editorialists, politicians, and pundits...non-educators all...can't seem to hear or admit out loud that one of the biggest problems facing American schools in the 21st century is poverty. It's been said over and over and over again, yet it needs to be repeated again and again. Thank goodness that Stephen Krashen keeps saying it.

Not Just Cleveland

Poverty is the major factor everywhere, not just Cleveland.

Sent to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 5, 2010

When discussing the Cleveland schools, Brent Larkin understands that it is hard to improve school achievement in the presence of "abject poverty" ("Peter Raskind starts atop bottomed-out Cleveland public schools," Feb. 5). But when Larkin discusses American students' performance on international tests, he appears to be unaware that the same factor is at work.

On the recent PISA tests, American 15-year-olds attending schools with less than 10% of students living in poverty averaged 551 on the reading test, second in the world. Our overall scores are unspectacular (tied for 10th out of 60 countries on the reading test) because we have a high percentage of children living in poverty, over 20%. This is the highest among all industrialized countries. In contrast, child poverty in high-scoring Finland is less than 4%.

For Cleveland and for the US as a whole, the major problem is poverty. Before we worry about teacher quality, institute longer school days, and increase testing, we need to make sure that all children are protected from the effects of poverty: This means adequate health care and nutrition, and access to books. When we do this, American test scores will be at the top of the world.

Stephen Krashen

Original article at:
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/02/raskind_starts_atop_bottomed-o.html

Response to the State of the State of Education in Indiana

Last Tuesday, January 11, 2011, Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, gave his State of the State address to the dominantly Republican Indiana state legislature. You can read the entire address here.

Much of the Governor’s speech dealt with Education. He made some points that I was expecting...he mentioned charter schools, collective bargaining, and evaluating teachers using test scores -- among other things.

Let's look at his points one at a time.

ONE: TAXES
Governor Daniels said:

One, I just mentioned; no tax increases. Can I get an “amen” to that?

I think it’s important that people understand that you have to pay for services. The tendency in the United States is towards a knee-jerk reaction against taxes. I know taxes are no fun, but they pay for what we need. You want good roads, good schools, national guard, fire and police protection, and clean parks? You want the health department to make sure restaurants and grocery stores are clean? You want our soldiers to be well equipped when we send them off to war? Then you have to pay for them. If we don’t, we’ll end up like the guy who watched his house burn because he hadn’t “hired” the fire department for $75.

If you don't want services from the government you can get away without paying taxes. Think about that.

TWO: MONEY FOR SCHOOLS
Governor Daniels said:

We put an end to practices like raiding teacher pension funds, and shifting state deficits to our schools and universities by making them wait until the state had the cash to pay them. That’s a form of waiting we should never impose again.

I just retired. I’m glad he said he was going to leave the pension fund alone. But, where’s the money going to come from for schools and universities, though? And let's not forget libraries...See #1.

THREE: WE LOVE OUR SCHOOLS, OUR TEACHERS, BUT OUR STUDENTS ARE NOT AS GOOD AS STUDENTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES.
Governor Daniels said:

So let’s start by affirming once again that our call for major change in our system of education, like that of President Obama, his education secretary and so many others, is rooted in a love for our schools, those who run them and those who teach in them. But it is rooted most deeply in a love for the children whose very lives and futures depend on the quality of the learning they either do or do not acquire while in our schools. Nothing matters more than that. Nothing compares to that.

Some seek change in education on economic grounds, and they are right. To win and hold a family-supporting job, our kids will need to know much more than their parents did. I have seen the future competition, every time I go abroad in search of new jobs for our state, in the young people of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China. Let me tell you—those kids are good. They ought to be. They are in school, not 180 days a year like here, but 210, 220, 230 days a year. By the end of high school, they have benefited from two or three years more education than Hoosier students. Along the way, they have taken harder classes. It won’t be easy to win jobs away from them.

Well, I agree that we should focus on what’s best for students. I spent 35 years in public education. I lived through the rich times and the poor times. I had classes as large as 38 and as small as 15. I was a classroom teacher and a specialist working with 1 to 5 students at a time. Unlike the President, Governor, and Secretary of Education I know what it's like to work in a public school. They don't have to talk to me about wanting to do what's best for children. They don't have to remind me that the adults who work in our public schools are dedicated and hard working.

Now, about the foreign students - the kids in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China (and let's not forget Finland) are good at taking tests. They score among the highest in the world. If you're looking for high test scores then those countries do well. I don't disagree with that. Actually, so are we in the US. When you look at the test scores of our students in schools with low poverty rates you’ll see that they are the best in the world.

Diane Ravitch wrote:

We have many outstanding schools and students, but our overall performance is dragged down by the persistence of poverty. Poverty depresses school achievement because it hurts children, families, and communities.

Ravitch continues…

At a time of fiscal stringency, it seems crazy to talk about helping lift children and families out of poverty. Critics say, "We can't afford to do anything anymore," "Sorry, the money is all gone," "No one should pay any new taxes," "This is not a time for social innovation; it is a time for educational innovation." But in light of the overwhelming evidence of the dire consequences of persistent poverty, it seems even crazier to ignore it and to assume that we can reach the top of the international achievement tables by closing schools, firing teachers, and hastening privatization. These strategies will shatter already fragile communities. They will not give us schools that foster the creativity, originality, self-discipline, and initiative that we claim to value. They are strategies that avoid the hard, incredibly hard, task of economic improvement. Today's school reformers scoff at the idea of attacking poverty; it is so much easier to fire teachers. So long as we continue to avert our gaze from the festering problems bred by deep poverty and racial isolation, it seems unlikely that any school reform agenda can produce the transformation that our society seeks.

Researchers at the National Association for Secondary School Principals have a very informative article in which they have disaggregated the PISA scores by income. Definitely worth reading.

President Bill Clinton is famous for his campaign slogan, "It's the economy stupid!" When it comes to student achievement and school improvement, it's poverty not stupid! Researchers report that perhaps the only true linear relationship in the social sciences is the relationship between poverty and student performance. While there is no relationship between poverty and ability, the relationship between poverty and achievement is almost foolproof. To deny that poverty is a factor to be overcome as opposed to an excuse is to deny the reality that all educators, human services workers, law enforcement officers, medical professionals and religious clergy know and have known for years.

PISA reports average scores. The problem is that the U.S. is not average. While the U.S. is the top country in global competitiveness, we also have the highest percentage of students living in poverty and, regretfully, poverty impacts test scores.

It would be nice if the policy makers were brave enough to admit that the largest obstacle facing achievement in the country (as based on standardized test scores) was something that was out of the realm of the public schools to fix.

President Obama (or Bush, or Clinton) and Governor Daniels, let's have no child without adequate health care...and no child going hungry...and no child living through violence...and no child homeless...then we'll be able to have No Child Left Behind.

Oh...and one more thing that goes in this section:

"If people want higher test scores, they'll get higher test scores. I just hope they don't complain when that's all they get." -- Richard Mandl

Next time I’ll continue with responses to other assertions Governor Daniels made during his speech.

His belief about the importance of Teacher Quality.
The assertion that teaching experience is not worth paying for.
His desire to weaken the rights of teachers to full collective bargaining.
His implication that charter schools are “the answer.”

Read more in Response to the State of the State of Education in Indiana Part 2

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Video to Assess Teachers

iamcompucomp has posted this video on YouTube.

News about new video evaluation system of teachers. . . so teachers can be held accountable for delivery of results.

School Reform Foundation and Charter Teachers for the Future of America have a plan for teacher evaluation. Every reform cliche is turned on its head here, starting with "the strong correlation between student low performance and teachers having desks."

Some other highlights...

"We need an inquisition to make schools strong again."

..."with video replay and stop motion we can analyze every last twitch or spasm in transforming student outcomes."

"You're not hiding something are you?"

iamcompucomp says...

This stuff is for real. The Gates Foundation has invested $335 million in video evaluation of teachers: "The goal is to study what is taking place on a scientific level; to note what is working and what is not working... While we all wait for Superman to come along for our children and for the economy, we are fortunate to have those with the means reach out and do something about our failing schools http://groundupct.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/gates-foundation-invest-335-million-in-teacher-evaluation/."

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PISA scores prove what Krashen has been saying.

Stephen Krashen has been talking about poverty as a factor in student achievement for a long time. Now, another source for proof that he is right is available. It's the latest results from PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, supports his contention that poverty, not the quality of teaching in the United States, has the biggest effect on student learning.

Poverty has a huge impact on American PISA scores
by skrashen

“Two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results,” Ángel Gurría, the O.E.C.D. secretary general, said in a statement on Tuesday. “This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated countries is now out of date.” (New York Times, "Western Nations React to Poor Education Results," Dec. 8).

I have not yet seen an analysis of the impact of poverty on overall PISA scores (I have sent for the full set of data; they tell me it will come in ten days or so). But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

This makes sense. Among other things, high poverty means less access to books at school, at home and in the community (e.g Krashen, 2004, The Power of Reading). Less access means less reading, and less reading means lower performance on tests such as the PISA.

The PISA data can be found on page 15 (table 6) of Highlights From PISA 2009, available on the internet.

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