It has recently become a humdrum narrative: Our schools are failing, we must reinvent the schools, we must fire the principals and the teachers and start over, we must race to the top, we must have vouchers and charters, we must turn public education over to the business people who tanked the economy in 2008, we must….do something, anything.

Fortunately there are sane people in the world, even in the United States. One of them is University of Texas physicist Michael Marder. Professor Marder has produced on his own a series of studies of U.S. performance and demonstrated that academic performance is a function of poverty. Here is his latest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSf63qdI4xg&feature=youtu.be

Professor Marder is not one of those notorious education professors who allegedly make excuses for poor performance. He is a scientist at the top of his game.

This is his bio:

Michael Marder is a member of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, internationally known for its experiments on chaos and pattern formation, and for the last four years ranked #1 in the nation by US News and World Report. He is involved in a wide variety of theoretical, numerical, and experimental investigations, ranging from studies of plasticity and phase transformations to experiments on sand ripples at the sea bottom. He specializes in the mechanics of solids, particularly the fracture of brittle materials. He has recently developed numerical methods allowing fracture computations on the atomic scale to be compared directly with laboratory experiments on a macroscopic scale. He has been checking these methods through experiments and computations on single crystal silicon, and is preparing for low-temperature experiments.

As Professor Marder has shown time and again, American students who do not live in poverty do very well indeed. In fact, they are at the top of the world.

Diane

A new report by UNICEF finds that the United States ranks second among the nation’s advanced nations in child poverty, with 23.1% of our children living in poverty. We are second to Romania, where the rate is 25.5%. Read the summary here.

Forgive me, but I think we are really number one. Romania is a very poor country that was subject to decades of misrule by Communist dictators. I visited Romania in 1990, soon after the execution of the dictator Ceauşescu and his wife. I saw desperate poverty and a collapsed economy that was not that of a developed nation. It was what we then called Third World. The nation has great potential, but it is certainly not in the same economic category as the highly developed United States, other than on a measure of child poverty.

So forget Romania. We lead the world’s advanced nations in Europe and Asia. We are number one in child poverty.

Since child poverty is the single most reliable indicator of low academic achievement, it stands to reason that anything our government and our nation can do to reduce child poverty will improve academic performance. Children are more likely to learn if they are healthy, well-nourished, and able to focus on their learning. Children who have a toothache or can’t see or hear well can’t focus. Children who are hungry can’t focus. Children who are not sure where they will sleep tonight can’t focus. Children who are worried whether their mother or father is safe can’t focus.

Why is it so hard to get the attention of our leaders tuned to what matters most? Why the pretense of a program like Race to the Top that the best way to meet the needs of poor children is to fire their teachers?

Diane

I read an article last fall that compared our current education reform movement with Stalinist education policy. (A reader told me that the link didn’t work.  Another reader sent me a different link. Thanks to all! The article is “Stalinizing American Education” by Lawrence Baines, Teachers College Record, September 16, 2011).

There is a part of me that is reluctant to go along with any sort of alarmism, not the alarmism of today’s Henny-Pennies (“the sky is falling, we are failing, failing, failing”), nor the Henny-Pennies of other eras. Unless one is presented with real catastrophe, the best course of action is usually incrementalist and muddling through. Act in haste, repent at leisure. Fix what’s broke, don’t mess with success. That sort of thing.

But the article begins with three statements and asks you to guess which one was made today and which were made by Soviet leaders in the 1930s. And frankly, the reader can’t tell. They all sound exactly the same. They all blame bad teachers for poor pupil performance. They all demand 100% success so all children can learn.

And the author goes further to make additional comparisons between then and now, such as a national curriculum, standardization, frequent standardized testing, emphasis on STEM subjects, and a regime of compliance. The compliance regime banishes the localism that produces innovation and progress.

Does this article make sense? Is it cause for concern? Should we think twice about the road on which we are racing to the top?

Diane