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
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Schools indeed are not failing, but it is important to the elites – financial and political – to create a crisis in order to cover up the real scandal – poverty, hunger, homelessness, unprecedented income disparity and destruction of the middle class – also to find an excuse to “reform” the system. Reform is euphemistic to the transfer of public wealth to private unaccountable tyrannies against popular wishes while securing the “educational” industrial complex. The result is the devastation of education, unionized workers, and democracy. Professor Krugman, the Nobel prize economist, while in Britain expressed discontent with the austerity and the use of the ‘shock doctrine’ to profit the corporate elites saying:”So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.”
Indeed, once an atmosphere of fear, emergency and crisis have been created anyone in power would abuse it in order to gain more control, eliminate and oppress populations from expressing grievances and petition the government. Every dictatorship have used the “temporary emergency” to take civil liberties and eliminate social programs – like education – that are vital for democracy. unfortunately at the present time we are the ones to experience it. We have financial emergency – so we bail out banks, emergency in education – therefore we hand it to corrupt corporations, terror emergency – so we will support endless wars, budget emergency – to eliminate elections and cut all social programs that many need to survive. an example was set by our neighbors in Quebec and their brave mass resistance to an “emergency” law that prohibits public gathering in public spaces. Yet another example of the fashionable ‘shock doctrine’ being tested on us.
Diane: Nobody seems to get this point! Here’s one teacher’s attempt, published in a local paper:
About those test scores…
Our fondness for truisms doesn’t seem diminished even when truisms aren’t true. That’s certainly the case with the popular myth that American students’ test scores can’t compare with those of kids in East Asia or Europe.
This truism has inspired billionaires to want to dump their billions into “turning education around.” One example is a program sponsored, with a fervor Elmer Gantry–novelist Sinclair Lewis’s traveling salesman-turned revival-tent preacher–would admire and a budget Gantry would covet, by Lowell Milken,, the unindicted brother of Michael Milken, the “junk bond king” who was the model for Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.
But the largesse of the Milken brothers, or of Bill Gates, is founded on the truism that American kids are stupid, are getting stupider, and their only rivals in stupidocracy are their own teachers.
And the unindicted statistical data would seem to bear that out. The numbers need closer examination.
According to the often-cited Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) tests, while East Asian students lead all nations, American fourth- and eight-graders score better in math and science than students in most European Union nations.
That’s not cause for dancing among the classroom desks. While the international average for fourth-grade math on the last, 2007, TIMSS was 500, American students scored a fairly mediocre 529; students in Japan scored 568.
Here’s where closer examination is relevant. When the scores of American students from districts with a 10% or lower poverty rate are isolated, according to University of San Francisco professor Jim Taylor, Americans score 583.
And that, Taylor argues, needs to be put in a greater statistical context: The childhood poverty rate in the United States is 22.4%; second only to Mexico’s among developed nations. In Finland, the nation whose schools are most often cited for excellence, the poverty rate is 3%.
The same phenomenon emerges when the even-more-cited PISA test is examined. PISA measures the achievement of 15-year-olds: Finnish students averaged 536 on the 2009 test; Americans 500.
But when Virginia high school principal and education writer Mel Riddile used the same standard Taylor did—comparing the scores of districts with poverty rates of 10% or less—the scores flipped: American students, 551, Finnish students, 536.
In his study, Riddile quoted a true truism from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In the case of American students’ test scores, it’s “unexamined statistics” that are the problem, and, as well, the sources for a new cycle—remember Sputnik and, in the 1980s, “A Nation at Risk?”– in the vilification of American education, which currently seems to border on the gleeful.
What we should be celebrating—America leads the world in the percentage of its workforce that is college educated; the high-school dropout rate is 8% today, when it was 27% in 1960, SAT exams (once the province of a kind of WASP country club) are being taken by more and more minority and poor students and their scores are improving—we choose to overlook.
It’s much easier, evidently, to excoriate teachers than it is to summon the courage to look beyond statistics and squarely at the face of a hungry American third-grader.
# # #
Jim Gregory is a history teacher at Arroyo Grande High School.
Jim,
You will enjoy this: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/do-our-public-schools-threaten-national-security/?pagination=false
Diane
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The video by Professor Marder seems to offer a simplistic view of the effect of poverty on test scores, while it looks at the PISA scores for each quintile of poverty in the United States it only looks at the averages for other countries across all students. I imagine that a similar relationship between income and test scores would appear for students in other countries as well. This argument also ignores confounding factors that are tied up in the poverty measurement. Intelligence is likely positively correlated with income and is a genetic trait, so much of the influence of poverty on test scores might actually be a measure of the influence of intelligence on test scores.
One comment: you say that Professor Marder has demonstrated that “academic performance is a function of poverty”. Well, if by ‘a function of’ you (or he) mean ‘correlated with’ than it means very little, since poverty itself can be correlated with many different factors (like IQ, family structure, and so on). On the other hand, if by ‘a function of’ you mean, ‘is caused by’, then certainly professor Marder has NOT demonstrated THAT. In short, the claim that if we just help poor people climb up the social ladder, we would solve our educational problems, is simplistic and was never proven in countries with mixed populations. In fact, there is enough evidence that the contrary is true: people often use their acquired socioeconomic status to consume more pop culture whereas poor people from specific minority groups with strong communal bonds (Jews, orientals) always do quite well.