Are Public Education Chicken Littles Wrong?

Dr. Jim Taylor

We have been hearing a constant drumbeat from politicians, policy wonks, and pundits that America's public education system is losing the educational "arms race" against other countries around the world. These advocates for reform use the widely reported results of testing of students from dozens of countries showing that U.S. students have gone from world leaders to middle-of-the-packers in a generation. As Thomas Friedman noted in a recent New York Times essay, "…the latest international education test results show our peers out-educating us, which means they will eventually out-compete us." The ramifications of this dramatic decline in academic achievement are, according to these voices of impending educational Armageddon, nothing less than the loss of our intellectual, technological, and economic supremacy on the world stage for future generations.

But a recent email exchange with Dr. David Berliner, a leading education researcher from Arizona State University, has led me to conclude that these doomsayers may actually be more Chicken Little than Paul Revere. The comparisons of American students to an international cohort may not be valid because the differences that exist between the U.S. and other countries make direct comparison of achievement test results more like apples to oranges. Let's look at why.

The U.S. has one of the highest poverty rates among developed countries, about 22% of our population live in poverty compared with, say, Finland and Denmark whose poverty rates are under 3%. Further, about half of the 40 million students in public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. qualify for free or reduced lunches. America has, by far, the greatest income inequity among developed countries as well. It also has the greatest demographic diversity, with more than 25% of public school students who speak English as a second language. Plus, we have among the highest rates of low-birth weight and among the worst health care among developed countries. All of these societal and economic factors have an immense impact on the over-all quality of our public education system and the test results that are used in international comparisons.

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But when the U.S. scores are broken down by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunches, a widely accepted measure of poverty, the results change dramatically. In schools with less than 10 percent of students relying on the subsidized lunch programs (i.e., schools in affluent communities), U.S. fourth graders had a math score of 583, placing them third internationally. In schools with under 25 percent of students on these lunch programs (i.e., schools in middle-income communities), American students scored a 553, putting them in fifth place in the international rankings. This block of students who attended middle-class and affluent schools comprise about 40 percent of all U.S. public school students. Comparable results emerged for eighth graders, the TIMSS science test, and among white and Asian-American students.

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http://blog.seattlepi.com/jimtaylor/archives/232198.asp

What a right-wing argument. Schools are okay in affluent communities, so piffle on the problem for everybody else. Good lord.

The right is using these "reports" to attack public education, not just those in poor areas. They lie and continue to lie. Public education is doing fine. Solutions need to be found for the poor areas, not the reform (AKA destruction) of public eduction. To me, it sounds like you are pushing the rightwing lies.

If we want to help these children do better in schools, the best thing we can do is to help their familes get and stay out of poverty.

you should remember that one of the terrible public schools that a child needed to escape from to enroll in a charter was in an affluent area and is ranked consistently as one of the best high schools in the country. The message from the filmmaker was that even our kids in the good schools are being deprived of a good education.

This analysis, however, isn't intended to diminish the injustice and tragedy of the 60 percent of our public school population who, for a variety of reasons, are not gaining the full benefits of a quality public school education. For this group of predominantly African-American and Hispanic-American children, we should be doing our best Chicken Little impressions. Those large chunks of the sky that are raining down on them include poor education, limited opportunity, and a vicious cycle of poverty. If this pattern continues, we will be doing a great disservice to a population that has already gotten the short end of the educational and economic sticks for generations. And, importantly, we will be losing out on much needed human capital that may be the only way to maintain our international preeminence in the generations to come.



I have worked in urban, post-industrial, and suburban districts and this article is exactly accurate. We don't need to fix our "broken" schools, but we do need to renew our drive against poverty and increase learning opportunities for disadvantaged kids of all stripes. We also need to work on getting parents to become more accountable and involved in their children's lives, at a much earlier age.

don't expect the media to present the facts, either.