Economic and social failures blamed on schools
For a break from APS news, here’s an op-ed that runs in the Monday print education page that I assemble and edit each week. (Please send essays on education for consideration, 500 or 800 words. )
This piece is by Walt Gardner, who has written for the AJC before on education topics. A teacher for 28 years in Los Angeles, he writes the Reality Check blog for Education Week.
Enjoy his piece:
In the debate over education reform, the charge guaranteed to get the attention of the media is that the U.S. is losing its economic hegemony. The evidence is rankings on tests of international competition, which are offered as proof that the U.S. will not be able to compete globally. Yet a closer look leads to a far more nuanced conclusion.
The first question that should raise eyebrows is who takes the tests. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), for example, tests students who are in their “final year of school.” But the ages of students range from 17 in the U.S. to 21 in other countries. Clearly, the differences are significant, but curiously are not noted in reportage.
Then there is the matter of selecting which students from these age groups actually sit down for the test. The U.S. engages in actual sampling, while other countries are highly selective. Russia and Israel, for example, administer TIMSS to native speakers only. Switzerland gives the test to students in only 15 of the highest performing regions of the country.
Moreover, little attention has been paid to how the tests are constructed. Items that appear on the test are negotiated by the participating countries. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that countries push hard for items that will mesh closely with their curricula in order to look good in the rankings. Asian countries tend to prevail in the test preparation process, giving them a built-in advantage.
Finally, there is the role that poverty plays in the results. Among the industrialized countries of the world, the U.S. has the highest rate of childhood poverty, according to UNICEF. Research has shown time and again that the single most powerful predictor of student performance is poverty. And it is increasing. The Census Bureau reported in September that the share of residents in poverty climbed to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level since 1994. The rise was steepest for children, with one in five now affected.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) serves as another example of the need to carefully read between the lines. PISA focuses on applied knowledge, rather than on school curriculum. It measures learning that has taken place since birth, but not necessarily what students learned during their previous year at school or even during their secondary school years. As a result, it’s difficult to disentangle schools effects from non-school effects.
In spite of these caveats, critics continue to maintain there is a crisis that threatens the prospects for the economy. Actually, this charge is nothing at all new. In 1983, “A Nation At Risk” sounded the same alarm. Yet the U.S. entered into a decade of the greatest economic growth in its history. Singapore’s Minister of Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam told Newsweek in 2006 that his country, which consistently ranks high on these tests, has an exam meritocracy, while the U.S. has a talent meritocracy. Perhaps that’s why the World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development still place the U.S. No. 1 in overall competitiveness.
What further calls into question the link between rankings on international tests and the economy was a study published in the International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership in April 2008. It found that the data from previous studies suggest that the relationship between student achievement rankings on international assessments of reading, mathematics and science, and a nation’s future economic growth is untenable and not causal.
The worse meltdown since the Great Depression should in all fairness put an end to dubious claims about international tests. It points clearly to social and economic policy failures having little at all to do with schools. Dishonest capital markets, lack of corporate accountability and regulatory laxity on an epic scale are to blame. This doesn’t mean that schools play no role in prosperity. On the contrary, 21st century skills are indispensable. But schools alone cannot determine how wealth created by increased productivity is distributed.
Nevertheless, schools will continue to serve as scapegoats to deflect attention away from failures in these other areas. All the more reason to view international test scores with extreme skepticism.
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November 21st, 2010
10:41 pm
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David Sims
November 21st, 2010
10:47 pm
“Research has shown time and again that the single most powerful predictor of student performance is poverty.”
No. There is another indicator that is even more “powerful” (i.e., reliable) than poverty: race. Poverty and poor academic performance are both correlates of hereditary variables. Poverty and poor academic performance are related to each other only secondarily; their primary relationship that both are the result of racial differences in brain size and neural efficiency.
There’s nothing about being poor, per se, that causes poor scholastic performance. My own family was so poor that I grew up in a trailer located in a cow pasture that my father did not even own. It didn’t stop me from doing very well indeed in school. However, if I’d been born with a low IQ, rather than to poor parents, then an inherited weak brain would certainly have held me back.
Intelligence is about 80% heritable and about 20% due to environmental causes. That small leeway for social interventions continually gives leftists a false hope that they can be finagled somehow, focused better, adapted, so that miracles occur—such as closing the racial gaps in academic achievement. Forget about it. There are a few ways you can seem to close the racial gaps, and here they are:
1. Follow the trend that has been going on all over the United States since the passage of the No Child Left Behind law: “progressively” remove all of the required learning from curricula; i.e., remove all of the difficulty from tests, and then attribute the resulting narrowing of the racial gaps in academic achievement to “reforms.”
2. Do what the Atlanta Public Schools did between 2003 and 2005: Remove the lowest performing segment of the generally low-achieving races from the student enrollment, and then attribute the resulting narrowing of the racial gaps in test scores to “reforms.”
3. Do what the Atlanta Public Schools did in 2009: Upwardly cheat the test scores of students belonging to generally low-achieving races, and then attribute the resulting narrowing of the racial gaps in test scores to “reforms.”
4. Do what Florida has been doing for the past decade: retain students belonging to generally low-achieving races in the grade prior to the grade customarily tested by a standardized test, thus giving those students twice the normal amount of time to learn the material, and then attribute the resulting narrowing of the racial gaps in academic achievement to “reforms.”
5. Locate all of the smartest students of generally low-achieving races and put them all into the same school, and then attribute the narrowing of the racial gaps in academic achievement in that school to “reforms.”
Patrick Crabtree
November 21st, 2010
10:51 pm
Education has always been a SERVICE, not for profit, for our society. People want to get a hold on that money. The only savings will be salaries, yet everything else will go up and not save taxpayers a dime. Can we remember the $2,000.00 toilet seats? Privatizing education will result in the bottom line, profit, instead of what is best for our children. That is why big contibutors to private schools have such power and their kids get away with anything. It is political. We are sold the lie, that private companies do things better. Can we say Enron? If the only way to make profit is to cheat employees and cut quality, then whay would we support this foolish notion? Education should not be relinquished to the ones who can afford it. Just look at Chile. We educate to bring up society. The biggest lie of all is that our schools are failing. We have problems, but we educate all, not just those who can pass a test in 5th grade.
Teach2Learn
November 21st, 2010
10:59 pm
Excellent insight.
Dekalbite
November 21st, 2010
11:17 pm
Any country that educates only a certain segment of its population will be at a competitive disadvantage. Look at countries that do not believe in education for women. They are at the bottom of the economic barrel. Why? Because you can’t discount the brains of 50% of your population and expect to perform as well economically as countries that educate 100% of their population. Public education is the great equalizer. No group should be shut out of public education. Mental ability is found everywhere – it does not respect gender, race, creed, culture, or income. Poverty is a roadblock to academic performance, but mental ability hides there as well. Look at the dropouts who run complicated schemes outside the law. Go into any neighborhood in the world, no matter how poor, and you will find that mental ability is respected – the outcome may not be what middle class people are looking for, but it’s there nevertheless. Our species is special because we teach and learn. It’s in our DNA. Hijacking who learns and what is learned has been a constant struggle throughout history. Guttenberg changed the the world with his printing press. Russia learned this and China is learning it now. You can’t educate your populace and then expect them to still be sheep. Education is the most powerful and dynamic cultural force.
mike
November 22nd, 2010
4:01 am
What good ideas David Sims has. Lets go back to the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s when there was segregation and and all those lim crow laws. We can do what Hitler did and just racially exterminate those who the one group determines are acceptable and who the group thinks are smart enough. In keeping with what our country does today, we can then force this mindset on the rest of the world. Then we can eventually seek world dominance and determine who lives based upon our standards of who is smart and who isn’t and on the way we can just kindly get rid of those people we consider inferior.
APS nameless
November 22nd, 2010
5:31 am
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so they say. As for testing, who makes the test? What are the criteria? Who writes the textbooks? What are they about? Who decided what questions determine intelligence? Who gave them that authority? Poverty has it’s gradations also. My poverty included Black parents who wanted us to be better than what they were. I have no teacher role models. My mother was my role model and my dad came in second. My father was a penny pincher and he worked until his late sixties when his eyesight failed. You won’t read about him in textbooks but his hard work and frugalness left his family almost a million dollars when he died.
I feel sorry for people who judge others by their own human brain. If there were real differences between the races then we would not be able to mate. We are not objective intellectual spheres. Statistics don’t mean anything. We are born, we live and we die. I don’t see anyone of one particular race being immortal. Did I miss something?
Elizabeth
November 22nd, 2010
6:34 am
The schools are blamed for everything else– might as well tag this on also. Never mind parents– they have no responsibility anymore. Never mind students who have no desire to learn, no parental supervision, but rather over indulgence, lack of respect for adult authority AND for the value of an education. We have the education system most people want in this county–pass the test, get the grades, go to college, get a job. But do not dare tell my child no or give him/her a failing grade or hold him.her accountable for behavior and learning. By all means, BLAME THE SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS WHO HAVE NO POWER TO CHANGE ANYTHING. This article is so ridiculous that I refuse to comment further.
Heard it all before
November 22nd, 2010
6:36 am
David Sims, please show us the research that proves “Intelligence is about 80% heritable and about 20% due to environmental causes.” And until you do, shut up and go away.
The Whole World is Laughing
November 22nd, 2010
7:16 am
Asians who migrate here often lived in conditions that would make ghetto houses look like palaces. Funny how they absolutely excel in schools when they get here. Welcome back David Sims.
teacher&mom
November 22nd, 2010
7:56 am
Here’s an interesting editorial in the LA Times that offers a different view:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hymowitz-families-20101111,0,6462852.story
Of course the titans on Wall Street and in Washington would love to deflect the blame for the economic mess on education. I mean we all know they had NOTHING to do with the current mess. Right?
catlady
November 22nd, 2010
8:01 am
David, please explain the test results in my system. We have less than 10 black students. Therefore, everyone should be low average to above, right? Yet we have our share of l-o-w performing children. What do they all have in common? Poverty. Our children with serious behavior issues? Poverty. I believe in your world we would not see these things; after all, with virtually no black or even mixed-race kids, we should have the best IQs, right? But we DO have 70% free lunch. And those 30% who do not receive free lunch–almost without exception they are the gifted kids, the principal’s honor roll kids, the honor graduates, the Beta club members, the takers of AP courses.
To test your theory, David, come to a place without those pesky black folks. See if your racial superiority claims hold up. I imagine you will find there is a BIG hole in that bucket!
The Whole World is Laughing
November 22nd, 2010
8:22 am
Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected
New York Times
Published: November 9, 2010
“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=black%20students&st=cse
Keep on ignoring the truth catlady and others, though it is becoming more and more apparent by the day, despite the taboo of discussing it. The refusal to accept it is bringing our educational system, and country, to its knees.
PLC
November 22nd, 2010
10:24 am
Is race a part of this? I believe so. Not because there is a difference in intelligence, but because of other factors, such as testing bias. I see my black students working just as hard as anyone, but my Hispanic students are the ones who struggle. The parents want to help out, but the communication barrier is a huge one to cross.
I also see these issues impacting our international testing results. How many of those other countries are as diverse as we are with all of these issues impacting education? I’d like to see data on those numbers.
Until education is no longer the scapegoat and all parties are invited to the table to talk true reform, nothing will happen. Our society has had major changes and our educational policy isn’t keeping up in order to meet the needs of all of our students.
Want to see an interesting video about all of the international competition our students will face? It’s an eye opener.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emx92kBKads
bootney farnsworth
November 22nd, 2010
10:30 am
David,
enough.
for God’s sake, enough.
while race does play a role in this mess, its a political
role, NOT a intellectual one.
every time to take off on one of these rants, you muddy the
waters and make a reasonable discussion of how race does
fact in impossible.
bootney farnsworth
November 22nd, 2010
10:41 am
hell yes, ecduation/schools are to blame.
we’ve quit pushing kids to excell, we’ve become far too obsessed
with stupidity like: diversity, political correctness, standardized
testing, feelings, ect
instead of pushing launguage skills, we fiddled with ebonics.
how many new maths have we had in the last 30 years?
we don’t require civics
we don’t require economics
we don’t teach history – we teach revision.
when you raise an uneducated society, you are begging society to
collapse under you.
ScienceTeacher671
November 22nd, 2010
10:48 am
The part about who takes the tests sounds an awful lot like what the late Gerald Bracey said for years. Not that anyone listened to him either.
another APS teacher
November 22nd, 2010
11:16 am
Hey Bootney, until we go back to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic before we try to do anything else we will have these issues. I can’t tell you how many courses and seminars I’ve been forced to attend over the years where I was told how to get information off of a page without really “reading” it. Or how to teach testing “strategies” that will somehow make up for the lack of a solid math or grammar background. The problem is that we don’t demand enough of the students. Anytime people are claiming testing bias on a test that a student can pass with only 43% correct, those people need a hard shake and a reality check. Not only do students have to pushed to learn (no, it’s not supposed to be ‘fun’, knowing it afterward is the fun part), but their parents need to be held accountable too. There is a correlation with poverty because most poor parents do not have books, crayons, coloring books, etc in the house. The biggest predictor of student success is the mother’s level of education. A well educated mother does not generally correlate with a mother in poverty. Sometimes, but not generally.
Lisa B.
November 22nd, 2010
11:33 am
Education doesn’t mean anything to many young people. Too many of them have grown up seeing that those who don’t work get about the same or sometimes more than those who do work. Schools can’t change this. I am afraid it will take a very hard economics lesson to make our citizens again appreciate the basics of hard work. As my grandparents used to tell me, the Great Depression and World War II were huge economics and civics lessons for their generation.
bootney farnsworth
November 22nd, 2010
12:05 pm
@ another APS
I totally agree.
the only thing I would add is the attitude parents and the
community have towards education.
as long as some communities devalue education, the kids in
those communities are doomed to poverty, unemployment, and
failure
What if
November 22nd, 2010
2:12 pm
David, wrong. The research is quite consistent: variables that are measures of economic status (or proxies thereof, such as free & reduced lunch) are FAR more powerful predictors of various success outcomes (pass rates, test scores, high school graduation, college survival, employment, income, etc.) than race or ethnicity.
JB
November 22nd, 2010
3:14 pm
” In 1983, “A Nation At Risk” sounded the same alarm. Yet the U.S. entered into a decade of the greatest economic growth in its history.”
Let’s take a closer look at that statement for a more nuanced conclusion. There may be a correlation, but no causal relationship. The economic boom in the 80s can largely be attributed to the increase of debt-financed consumer spending (Grep Ip, The Economist). Think of Chris Rock’s routine about building wealth vs. buying rims. While I do agree that education alone is not the only problem we are facing, let’s not pretend that just because it is one of many problems, it shouldn’t be addressed.
jj
November 22nd, 2010
3:31 pm
I believe the home is the greatest equalizer. With 70% of African American children being raised with only ONE parent what results should we expect?
Ole Guy
November 22nd, 2010
4:26 pm
How bout’ lets stop with the “woe is me” excuses. Poverty, crummy up-bringing, etc, etc, ad nauseum is, and always has been a fact of life. Lets stop concentrating on the road blocks and start concentrating on the battering rams with which these road blocks can be neutralized. OR IS THAT TOO DAUNTING A TASK?
Ashley
November 22nd, 2010
4:51 pm
Kids today seem to live in a cliff-note society, they believe there are short cuts to getting a good education. I’m always amazed by student who can text and chat on the computer at lightning speed but can’t read or spell simple sentences or do basic math. Civics and history are unheard of and their use of the english vernacular is atrocious. No one said that getting an education was easy , it was’nt easy when our ancestors had to walk to school or get after-school jobs or using manual typewriters and writing long-hand. These students made our country great . What is going to be the legacy of these 21st century students? Most are ill-prepared and aren’t use to hard work , cuddling them and and accepting mediocre work does’nt prepare them for the challenges they will face. Education may not solve all the woos of this world , but it certainly can’t hurt it. Without education where would we be? We need to do better by our kids, race and poverty should’nt get in the way of that. Our future depends on it.
Patrick Crabtree
November 23rd, 2010
6:26 am
SHUT UP Kaseem Reed! You tell us not to discuss Beverly Hall since people may not want to move to Atlanta. As I recal Mr. Reed, when NPU-S was interviewing you, you stated that YOU introduced the legislation that changed the charter when you were in the state house. YOU helped give Beverly all her power and take it away from our local elected officials. You are part of the problem, not the solution, especially since you keep supporting the lies spewing from APS. We need to correct this with integrity and THEN people will want to move to Atlanta. All the gloss will not stop what employees are telling the public. Word of mouth will destroy a business faster than any scandal. Stop blaming and meddling with education, something YOU have no knowledge of. When and where did you get you education degree???????
Tony
November 23rd, 2010
9:40 am
The problem with the facts as presented in this essay (and as they have been presented many times through the years) is that they contradict the “crisis” mentality that prevails amongst politicians. Even before “A Nation at Risk” there were reports about the mediocrity of American education. In the 1950s a leading magazine of the time did a comparative report on American and Russian students. Of course, in the US the article picked out a less that stellar student to feature and in Russia they chose a top student. These kinds of skewed presentations help hammer the point that American schools must be fixed or we will be taken over by the big bad monsters from the other country. (Note that the recent Superman movie did the exact same thing except it focused on Charter versus inner city schools.)
The fact is that American schools do a damn good job of educating the masses. There is plenty of evidence that supports this claim. As already mentioned, Gerald Bracey always did a great job of sifting through the bad interpretations and the doom and gloom spin of international testing. He would take apart the comparisons piece by piece to show exactly how well American students were doing. One claim he made regarding economics and test scores was that if there was a relationship between the two it was an INVERSE one rather than positive. To make this claim he followed the results from the 1960s to the present.
What if the politicians actually focused on the policies that really affect students’ readiness for school? They would quickly realize that issues like early access to quality health care would make a difference. There is also mounds of evidence that families in poverty provide very few early learning activities for children in the home. Language deficits exist and are measurable very early in children’s lives and these obstacles are not easily overcome. What do we do to improve these factors? After all, schools do not get the children until they are five years old. By that time they are so far behind they will never catch up.
An American Patriot
November 23rd, 2010
11:08 am
Folks, none of this new crap (that’s exactly what it is) is working and all your psychology into why it’s not working is all buffalo chips, too. Go back to teaching the ABC’s, the old 2+2=4, 2 x X = 10 (I don’t know how I knew the answer…..I never took higher mathematics
Let’s go back to where we were when students learned, back to neighborhood schools where we knew one another, stop all this political correctness crap. I know, you’re gonna butcher me, but I’m right and you’re wrong and you know it…..you just don’t want to admit it.
TopPublicSchool
November 23rd, 2010
2:42 pm
Yes, and the retaliation for trying to expose what is wrong within the Atlanta Public School system is to be involuntarily transferred midyear…to the Southside of Atlanta…to the poverty and disgrace of Bankhead Highway…where a public school should not even exist…next to Atlanta’s City Dump…shamefully escorted out of the elite Northside school by 3 Atlanta Police officers…13 years of service to a system that unloads your personal classroom on the sidewalk in the housing projects of Bowen Homes…AD Williams Elementary…for filing an APS grievance…to question how a Northside Atlanta school Principal spends the funds from her “created” school accounts…and the signature of Beverly Hall rests on every document.
The history of Jackson Elementary is a disgrace for all of the honorable parents on the Northside of Atlanta. It is with sadness that the truth finally comes to pass…
We must be sure this corrupt leadership is not allowed to lead in Atlanta Public Schools again.
Visit http://www.TopPublicSchoolCorruptionAtlanta.com
SET
November 23rd, 2010
3:54 pm
David Sims is right about the race thing. People can cry all they want about the Emperor having nice clothes. The numbers and the experiences all around us of even the last 100 years just tell the tale. It is what it is.
My gripe is that we are not even trying to identify all the high scoring members of the low scoring races and work with them – we condemn them to be kept with the the others in the dumbed down schools. Good public schools would have a system of expelling or transferring poor students to the lesser schools and promoting or transferring the best students to the better schools regardless of the zip code the students come from. And understand – the better schools would be primarily white and asian. Too bad, so sad.
As long as everybody has an opportunity to perform and get placed and transferred according to performance, that’s the way you were born. Education DOES NOT add intelligence to what was not there in the first place. And can be decent roles for everyone smart or dull as long as we don’t drown the dulls away with excessive importation of competition.
And people are born different. Deal with it.
So exactly why are we throwing open our borders to import new minorities to compete with US Blacks??
YeahRight
November 25th, 2010
12:20 am
Hey cool, I totally didn’t get my fill of anonymous racism from YouTube comments! It’s refreshing to have yet another website that disproves the notion that we’re a “post-racial” society. Thanks to comments from the likes of David Sims and SET, I’ll have a job teaching about the prevalence of racist hegemony in U.S. society for a while to come. Thanks guys!
The Best Sites For Getting Some Perspective On International Test Comparison Demagoguery | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
July 15th, 2012
11:35 am
[...] Economic and social failures blamed on schools by Walt Gardner in The Atlanta Journal Constitution. [...]