GF Brandenburg, retired math teacher, analyzed the latest international reading test, and it is chock full of good news.
Good news that it is for American children, parents, teachers, principals, administrators and school board members.
Not so good news for all the prophets of gloom and doom who have been prophesying the imminent collapse of the American economic and national security, while offering to sell snake oil to make it all better.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think it is great news, but realities and achievements have not been enough to deter the privateers and profiteers from their mission. They will simply turn to another path of criticism and crisis. While I truly believe in TEACHER DRIVEN and guided reforms, which would be more responsive to the needs of local communities/schools/classrooms, this logical and effective collaborative style is likely to be sacrificed to a financially effective business approach. This is where the test-them-into-the-ground approach originates from. This “data-driven” approach is a benefit to publishing and testing companies that are imposing their values (more closely tied to an accounting goal that an educational one) on our public school students, and money is speech is policy these days. Please spread the word, get some signatures on this petition
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-harmful-public-education-policies-relying-standardized-testing/w8ZrZwVT?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl
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I am very uncomfortable with this. The decline and desperate need for reform of the American education system is argued by reference to PISA. The successes of the system are argued by reference to PIRLS. The over use of tests, be they local or international, are condemned as the causes of curriculum narrowing, teacher disempowerment and teaching to the test, until, that is, we see we are doing well in one of them. The very fact that these two tests are so at odds for the US should be cause for deeper thought. Either we need to discount them as unreliable and neither beat ourselves over the head nor pat ourselves on the back, or we need to look very closely at why it is we do so badly in a test that requires our students to think creatively and apply what they learn yet do so well in one that assesses the ability to recall and reproduce the taught curriculum.
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“…we need to look very closely at why it is we do so badly in a test that requires our students to think creatively and apply what they learn yet do so well in one that assesses the ability to recall and reproduce the taught curriculum.” It has bothered me too. We can’t discount the tests when we don’t like them and then crow when we do. We need to look at trends over time and see what they might tell us depending on the type of test. Perhaps we have had too many years of reform/recall and reproduce.
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Pat & “2old”: I’m confused by your comments. The tests that U.S. students do best on are the international (PISA-?) and the NAEP. The tests they DON’T do well on are the ones that “assess the ability to recall and reproduce the taught curriculum,” and those are the faulty, Pineapple question, neither valid or reliable “standardized” state tests, mostly brought to us by Pearson as well as the soon-to-be-used Common Core Standards Tests, which will garner even WORSE scores (see Diane’s earlier post on this), giving reformers more “evidence” that even more public schools should be closed. THESE tests are the tests that are being counted on VAMs, being used to fire our teachers and being used to close our public schools, and THESE invalid, poorly scored and juked tests have NO place in American education: they are, in fact, a barrier to education. Parents, Opt Out!
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“Perhaps we have had too many years of reform/recall and reproduce.”
That’s why I included this line. My post tried to cram too much into a small space. I am a(n unemployed) special education teacher. As such, I am not fond of tests used for anything but diagnostic purposes. My students seldom performed well on high stakes tests, and the information they provided was of little use to me. We had so much territory to cover that continually reminding the kids of how poorly they performed in relation to everyone else served no useful purpose.
Frankly, I don’t care whether we are tops on any test. We are an incredibly diverse society that provides a top notch education to some children and fails others miserably by our own standards. We don’t need high stakes test to know that. We don’t need to try to compare our educational system disparate societies to know that.
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We don’t need to try to compare our educational system to disparate societies to know that.
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