Eduardo Porter recaps the conventional wisdom about American schools, recapitulating in one column all the same tired cliches as Rhee, Gates, Duncan, and our other corporate reform titans.
Our scores on international tests are mediocre. Yes, they have been mediocre since 1964, when the fist such test was given. No, I take that back. We were not mediocre in 1964, we came in last. And in the last fifty years, we surpassed the nations with higher scores.
There is a shameless gap between the test scores of rich and poor, which is true, but that’s because we have such a huge proportion of children who are poor (23%), more than any other advanced nation. Porter talks about various ways too raise the test scores of kids in poverty (the latest unproven fad: blended learning), quoting the salesmen.
Of course, the best way to reduce the gap would be to provide jobs and a decent living wage for the parents of poor children, but that seems to be off-topic. Best to keep up the pusuit of ever higher standards and harder tests, the failed strategy of the past dozen years.
Porter ultimately concludes that our biggest problem is “a dearth of excellent teachers.” How does he know? The OECD told him so.
Maybe he believes this. Maybe he just watched “Waiting for Superman.” I would love to have an hour with him.
The Néw York Times is unusually out of touch when it comes to the issue of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The focus on test scores does not require any thinking. Unfortunatly test scores trump poverty stats in relation to “cognitive demand.” I have concluded that a lot of the columnists at the New York Times (in addition to many other media outlets) work from boilerplate and press releases with lite editing. Some may have phrase makers similar to this one for art criticism, an endeavor that is conspiculously full of pretense.
It is hoot http://www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html
It’s a shame Porter wrote this, as his columns usually show him to be less susceptible to economic orthodoxy… Not this time though.
It just shows how deeply embedded in mainstream discourse these talking points, and how much we have to overcome.
It would be interesting to see how the scores of recent US immigrant groups compare with the scores from the country they immigrated from.
(Even assuming that the tests themselves are “invalid” under Noel Wilson’s analysis.)
“emigrated” from, I guess.
Many of my students came here from countries where not everyone received regular, quality education.
Not sure your proposal would compare would be apples to apples.
It may not. Would be interesting to see, though. Even the example you mention is potentially instructive — it might suggest that one thing American public schools are doing is dramatically increasing access to “quality education” for a substantial number of immigrant students. That’s not a topic I recall seeing in most discussions of international test comparisons.
The problem for me is it’s too easy. It’s the opposite of political courage. The idea that Chris Christie is “speaking truth to power” when he’s yelling at a public school teacher is ridiculous. What he’s doing is “punching down”.
Now that we’ve put income inequality solely on public schools, what do we dump on them next, and how does dumping everything in the world on public schools protect some really powerful actors in our system, including business leaders and politicians?
If I hear one more business leader bemoan the fact that he or she can’t find people trained in the specific skills they need for their particular enterprise I am going to scream. Give me a break. What role does business and industry have in training workers? None? That’s nuts. If you need a welder, you might think about covering the cost of hiring and training an apprentice, and also covering the RISK involved that that employee may not produce a return equal or better than your investment. I don’t when when the EMPLOYER’S role and responsibility in training was “taken off the table” and we shoved the entire burden of paying for training off on the public, but I don’t agree with it and I don’t think it makes any sense.
We haven’t done that in the past. Is this the 21st century skills I’ve been hearing so much about? Because it looks like an old idea to me. It looks like passing financial risk off on the public sector and then taking all the gains that result from that public investment.
“Contrary to the standard argument of many liberals, solving the problem probably doesn’t require a lot of new money. Among advanced nations, only Luxembourg spends more per child than the United States. But in contrast to the views of many conservatives, what it does require is changing the way resources are allocated, focusing more on the students who need help the most.”
This is lazy and facile analysis of public education spending and no one should swallow it whole without a lot more information. “Education spending” is a huge category. It includes all kinds of expenditures that may or may not be included under that category, in Luxembourg or anywhere else.
What I learned from The Smartest Kids in the World is this: parents in one country where students do very well on tests spend a huge amount out of pocket on private tutors. That’s not “less spending”. It’s simply shifting the costs from the state to individuals, and it means middle class parents have LESS to spend on other things. Arne Duncan left that part out when he delivered his lecture on how parents in that country take test prep “more seriously” than we do. They also devote a lot of family income to test prep tutors. If we want to do that, we should say so, because it means parents won’t be spending that money somewhere else.
I wonder: How many adults would care to be judged completely on how well they can “regurgitate” government approved facts onto a paper? How well does that define them? Nuff sed?
Like many columnists who are expected to voice opinions and ideas on a variety of topics where they have limited or no expertise, Mr. Porter’s column exposes his simplicity and naivete.
CCSS allows for comparisons between communities and states but that doesn’t mean that the standards are necessarily good. Under that assumption ANY set of standards is acceptable because they are simply common. Being common is not a guarantee of quality. Commentators conveniently skip this fact and I’ll attribute it to listening to talking points without providing deep thought.
Secondly, he cites ways to avoid “the dearth of excellent teachers.” His suggestion involves having more stringent standards for entry into teaching programs and making the job as financially and socially prestigious as medicine. When saying that throwing more money at schools isn’t the answer, isn’t he now in conflict with his own later idea? The vast majority of school expenses are salary and compensation. Raising teaching wages to attract better candidates (presumably) requires more money. And is he not paying to the charter school model where non-unionized teachers get paid lower wages and administrators attain the financial windfalls?
On its face, if I were grading this as an opinion essay with supporting facts, it would receive a nice score for grammar and structure but a low score for cohesion and logic. He contradicts himself.
I wonder why the NY Times would consider his article to be valid, given that the Times put it in the Economic section. He’s a business columnist, not an education writer. As far as I can tell, he has no experience with public school education, much like editorial writer Jo-Ann Armao of the Washington Post who hates public school education. I’ve always wondered why so many economists think they are experts at education.
I don’t even think it’s good economics opinion. The US spends widely varying amounts “per child” depending on the state and district. How is a sum total spent in one country compared to a sum total spent in another country helpful to anyone for anything, especially given the fact that I have no idea what constitutes ‘education spending’ in the other country?
Do they include facility operations cost, transportation, food service, the cost of health insurance for employees, and on and on and on in other countries? I don’t know. Does he? He better if he’s comparing.
Detroit public schools include service on debt in their “per pupil funding” amount. Is that “education spending”?
“I’ve always wondered why so many economists think they are experts at education.”
TE,
Do you have an answer for that one???
What economists are generally good at is trying to tease out causal relationships in a mass of data. The paper on retention by Umut Ozek comes to mind, the more recent paper by Noelle A. Paufler et al, and of course the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff paper all come to mind.
I realize that Porter is mostly writing about achievement gaps, much of which is heavily shaped by poverty and other influences outside of school. However while we as educators should always seek to grow professionally and provide more opportunities for our students, the reality is that the story of American public education is one of steady progress. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back, but overall steady progress. This is especially true in mathematics, regardless of what we hear from the critics of public education.
I recently read an interesting piece by Zalman Usiskin on what changes should be made to the Common Core and he included some interesting data about student achievement in mathematics.
For the full document, please see http://ucsmp.uchicago.edu/resources/conferences/2014-04-10/.
Average 4th grade NAEP math score in 1990: 213. In 2013: 242.
Average 8th grade NAEP math score in 1990: 263. In 2013: 285.
Average ACT math score in 1990: 19.9 In 2013: 20.9
ACT test-takers in 1990: 817,000. In 2013: 1,799,000.
Total students taking AP Calculus AB or BC exams in 1999: 71,678. In 2012: 190,658
AP Calc AB Scores of 5 in 1999: 19,763. In 2012: 67,394
AP Calc BC Scores of 5 in 1999: 11,616. In 2012: 47,553
This is what a rising tide of student learning in mathematics looks like. Here we see both increased achievement and increased participation in advanced courses. We frequently hear about the failings of mathematics education, but the data above clearly shows progress.
Couldn’t care less about student “achievement”, especially when it is is defined in terms of standardized tests.
Edudeformer talking point is what “student achievement” is.
“. . . but the data above clearly shows progress.”
NO! that data shows us absolutely nothing because using INVALID standardized test scores results in conclusions that are INVALID, or as Noel Wilson puts it “VAIN AND ILLUSORY”.
To understand why read his complete destruction of educational standards and standardized testing in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Thanks, Duane. I knew that was probably coming.
I agree that assessments take something that is complex and represent it in a simplified way that cannot fully represent the underlying constructs. This is particularly true with individual students.
However, my belief is that if a group of students have good learning in a subject area, in all of its complexity, then that usually is demonstrated on an assessment however messy and uncertain the assessment process is. I don’t feel the assessment presents the full picture, but part of the picture. I know you disagree with that.
College is not the right choice for every students and calculus is certainly not the right choice for every students, but when I personally feel rising participation in high school calculus while the percentage of students scoring at a high level on the AP exam is a good indicator that more students are learning advanced mathematics (noting that calculus is only part of mathematics).
You show gains in math. That is encouraging. But are the gains proportionate with the huge increase in math instruction time that came in the wake of NCLB (in my school, math time more than doubled)? Do these gains outweigh the reduction in history, science and other learning that has occurred because of the increase in math instructional time?
Ponderosa, I would need to more about the schedule and minutes of instruction in our school before offering an opinion on that.
Generally, though, I feel the gains stem from four influences. First, the increased emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem solving over routine procedures since the major NCTM recommendations in 1989, 2000, and 2006. Second, reassignment of topics across grades to reduce unnecessary duplication and introduce new topics earlier. We used to have grades that typically revisited previously taught content and very little new in the upper elementary and middle grades depending on the district. Third, in many districts more instructional time has been allocated to mathematics. My view is that math needs 45-75 minutes daily. Fourth, increased differentiation not only in supporting struggling students but in providing appropriate challenge for students who have mastered the general targets.
This post is unfair to Porter’s article. True, he mentioned the tests,but he also stressed income inequality, the importance of investing in teachers which the US does not do as a country and the fact that school funding by property taxes disproportionately hurts low income students and helps affluent students.While the article was by no means perfect, it hit on many important issues in public education. Give credit where credit is due.
I don’t think I was unfair to Porter. The most reliable predictor of low scores is poverty. I am all for raising standards for new teachers but that won’t reduce the shocking level of child poverty. And blaming teachers doesn’t get us anywhere other than more punitive policies that drive people out of teaching. During this past dozen years of testing and accountability, I haven’t seen any state come up with anything other than stripping teachers of due process and collective bargaining rights, implementing inaccurate and punitive VAM plans, instituting merit pay, and other versions of carrots and sticks. Maybe it’s time for fresh ideas.