You can get away with a lot when you’re writing about the country’s public schools. To say schools are in a crisis, or that the state of public education is on a precipitous decline, requires no substantiation. We simply all know by now that our schools are a mess.
So it was no surprise to read this opening paragraph in the new issue of Newsweek (1/15/14):
It’s no secret that when it comes to education, America gets a D-minus. In the most recent global tests–scored on a 1,000-point scale–the US scored a 481 in math, 497 in science, and 498 in reading comprehension. In comparison, international averages were 494, 501, and 496, and the US lags well behind the world’s leaders, a list which includes some of the usual suspects like China, Japan and the Netherlands, but also has Latvia, Slovenia and Vietnam.
The evidence here is the latest round of international testing, called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Before we go any further, it’s worth pointing out that there’s no reason to take these results as evidence of US decline. As Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post education blog Answer Sheet pointed out (12/3/13), US students have never scored near the top. And there are plenty of reasons to doubt the conventional story that says American kids don’t measure up when it comes to these international tests.
But hold on. Newsweek‘s writer, Chris Weller, is saying that schools get a grade of D-minus for performance that is…average, basically. (In science and reading, in fact, PISA says the US performance is “not measurably different” from the OECD average.) Unless the grading curve has changed dramatically since I last checked, that’s not a D-minus.
But math doesn’t matter, since Weller’s point is so obvious: “Why is the world’s largest economy so bad at teaching its children?”
Well, maybe it’s actually not that bad at teaching its children. But to suggest that would be heresy.
Weller’s main point is that there is a “growing school of thought” that US schools are specifically cheating gifted students, and that might have something to do with that D-minus grade. He calls gifted children “the tiny group smarter than 99.99 percent of their peers.” That would be one student out of 10,000, which would mean you would need a student body of roughly 200,000 to fill one classroom with gifted students.
Other estimates more reasonably suggest they are about 6 percent of the student population. But in either case, how would lavishing more attention on a tiny slice of the student population do much to raise American students out of their D-minus doldrums?
It doesn’t add up. But remember, it’s American kids who are lousy at math.
It might be illuminating to review the funding data for education in other nations.
I have a feeling that there’s likely a fairly strong correlation between being sufficiently resourced and student achievement.
Given the defunding of public education in these here United States, which these bastards either ignore or pimp for, in favor of “market based solutions”
I’d say it’s to schools’ – meaning mainly teachers’ – credit that kids here do as well as they do, wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t you also have to say the Commercialization of the class rooms by the Media have done nothing but exacerbate the issue. One need only look at the fools and troll that post on the Websites, the same garbage that the Fux Snooze Nitwork bleats all the time as if it were Gospel, and it’s obvious that we have an issue.
For the most part I think it is a self fulfilling prophecy, on the part of the Corpse-press Zombies.
I can’t begin to imagine the number of trees that have been destroyed over the past 25 years in order to showcase how many different ways you can write about the same old conventional wisdom.
For another take, try Diane Ravitch on education in Finland.
Subtract the communities ravaged by crime and poverty and public schools do not come off that badly. Since the 1960’s we have known educational outcomes correlate very well with the wealth of the community. The other variable that counts is the importance that is given education in particular societies. As compared to Japan or the Asian countries, it is not much valued in America. If it were, teachers there would not have to tolerate constant blame and invective.
As someone peripherally involved in this research, I’m happy that FAIR is challenging the hackneyed media interpretations of the PISA results. There are so many issues with superficial interpretations. One aspect that gets me incredibly frustrated is the conflation of the Shanghai results — and in fact only 200K students in a city of 15m — with China. China didn’t do well, but the questionably-representative sample of Shanghai students did. And if you compare Shanghai to some US municipailities, the differences are not that pronounced. Perhaps this is a minor point, but it’s sloppy journalism nonetheless.
The US is hugely variable. This is a “feature” of the federalist approach to funding education. Mississippi is just not the same as Connecticut. And even within states the property tax funding for schools means districts right next to each other can have huge differences in populations and funding.
I fully agree that focusing on “gifted” students as the solution is naive and pointless. But in the US in today’s political climate and blind assertion of states’ rights, there is no “US” solution. There is only a bunch of local efforts and lots of noise and little action at the national level.
It is amazing to me that teacher in our schools teach our children at all. There are so many tests and non-English speaking students.
It is said that teachers in LA have students with 200 different languages. This is not our kids being stupid but our government policy of not enforcing our immigration laws.
We have money for 150 countries in the world to “protect them” but little for our own. How dare Americans want money for their schools and communities. How dare we want our laws enforced.
American teachers are expected to be language teachers and give them tests (in English). Anyone thinking this lack of English brings down test scores?
Bob Somerby’ blog, The Daily Howler (http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/) has been unrelenting in his battle against the conventional wisdom of the U.S. having failing schools. He even reads some of the comparative reports. As a contrarian he is unsparing in his criticism not just of those claiming that the nation’s schools are marginal if not failing, but even some defendng the schools and teachers.
I think education is affected by so many othe things, and blaming all problens on teachers seems insane. Just look at what our nation seems to value: celebrity, big houses, fast cars, privatized prisons, crucifying welfare recipent people, but ignoring the corporate ones, and very often it seems that our major media devoted to —— bizarro creative writing as opposed to journalism.
It’s not difficult to see how education is left behind. However, I think this is a very old and ingrained problem. Judging by some of our nation’s past history and currently elected officials, it does seem that major swamps of stupidity seem to be an American tradition. : )
Why do they not teach logical thought early on? most adults cannot detect the basic fallacies- and so fall for all manner of political demogoguery. Both ends of the bell curve as well as the middle are ill served by our educational system.