The Brookings Institution was once known as a reliable source of thoughtful, informed analysis of important policy issues. In the past decade, it has turned its education commentary over to rightwing ideologues, who are driven by ideology and indifferent to facts that they ought to know.
On behalf of Brookings, Jonathan Rothwell, economist for Gallup, complains that the U.S. spends more on education, has seen no improvement in decades, and is seeing no gains in productivity. He ends by saying that low-income families can’t afford private tutors or home schooling, as though these were viable ways to improve education for the poorest children .
I can’t unpack all this in a short space, but I would like to show you in a few paragraphs why this is an uninformed article. To begin with, Rothwell cherrypicks the data on test scores. This makes his analysis misleading and wrong. Test scores are the highest they have ever been on the only longitudinal measure we have: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). He selectively quotes one version of the NAEP, while ignoring the other.
There are actually two versions of NAEP. One is called the “Long Term Trend” (LTT) data, the other is main NAEP. The LTT is offered every four years to samples of students at age 9, 13, and 17. Main NAEP is given every other year to students in grades 4 and 8.
LTT contains questions that are unchanged since the early 1970s and have no relation to what students are taught today. Occasionally, questions are deleted because their content is obsolete (e.g., a question that refers to S&H Green Stamps). The data for 17-year-olds is especially dubious because this group has no incentive to take the NAEP tests seriously.
The National Assessment Governing Board is aware of the problem of low motivation among 17-year-olds. When I served on the board, from 1994-2001, we devoted a large part of one of our quarterly meetings to this problem. There was talk of incentives, pizza parties, cash, but it was not resolved. The bottom line, however, is that any data about the test scores of 17-year-olds must acknowledge that this group doesn’t care about the test because they know it doesn’t matter. What the board learned when we discussed it is that some 17-year-olds doodle on the answer sheet or answer every question by checking the same letter. They don’t care.
I recommend that Rothwell read Chapter 5 of my book Reign of Error. He would learn there that the scores on the main NAEP reached their highest point ever in 2013 (they were flat for the first time in many years in 2015). This was true for every group of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. He would also learn that the graduation rate was the highest ever for these groups, and the dropout rate was the lowest ever. He would see a different reading of the LTT data, showing a dramatic rise in test scores in math for black students and Hispanic students in all three age groups, and for white students at ages 9 and 13, from 1973 to 2008. Even white 17-year-olds saw a gain, but it was small.
If I may quote my analysis, based on a review of both versions of NAEP, “NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades: slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics.”
I would also urge Rothwell to read chapter 7, which reviews the international test scores. It shows that we were never #1 in test scores on international tests. In fact, when the first international tests were given in 1964, we were last among 12 nations. Yet over the half century that followed, we outpaced all the other 11 nations by every measure.
I know that Brookings uses Google or some other search engine to find anything that quotes its articles and research. I hope that they find this article and bring it to the attention of Jonathan Rothwell.
More important, I can only hope and wish that Brookings would make the effort to employ genuine education researchers to write and declaim about this important subject. Over the past decade, its education spokesman was Grover Whitehurst, George W. Bush’s former research director, who turned Brookings into a cheerleading think tank for school choice. This is unworthy of a once-great and once-trusted institution.
“Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.
Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.”
Here’s a crazy idea.
Maybe people don’t have faith in elite institutions anymore because elite institutions are no longer reliably independent and trustworthy.
Instead of looking to the middle and lower classes to see why the US standard of living is declining, maybe Brookings could look into why our “elites” all seem to be captured or corrupt. I have a feeling the problem begins at the top. Maybe we have low quality elites.
EXCELLENT summary: “Maybe people don’t have faith in elite institutions anymore because elite institutions are no longer reliable.” Having to sit with no voice and listen, yesterday, to what the PBS Newshour promoted (through interviewing a couple of “experts”) about how we should remember President Obama’s educational legacy — so much negative information simply ignored, not addressed, skimmed over, intentionally left out — gives me little faith in turning on PBS and hearing any real news about anything.
International comparisons on costs of schooling are also highly problematic — especially since teacher health care costs mixed in here but not abroad; see this from Bruce Baker:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/school-finance-reality
International comparisons of school spending and outcomes are fraught with imprecision, where elementary and secondary education expenses across nations include vastly different services and related expenditures: differences in whether or not employee pension and healthcare costs are included, differences in provision of special education services (through health versus education sectors) and differences in responsibility for extracurricular offerings or transportation expenses. Existing data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on national education expenditures make no effort to achieve comparability and thus, cross national comparisons of rate of return on the education dollar suspect. Claims that U.S. education spending has climbed dramatically while outcomes have remained flat fail to address correctly the changes in competitive wages over time, changes in the needs of student populations, and ignore that in fact, outcomes have improved substantively. Finally, declarations that U.S. states have done their part to allocate additional funding to high poverty districts, by way of reference to national average spending figures, fail to acknowledge that in many U.S. States, school district state and local revenues per pupil remain inversely related to district poverty – with districts serving higher poverty student populations having systematically less revenue per pupil than districts serving lower poverty populations (Baker, Sciarra, Farrie, 2014). Further, many districts around the nation have twice (or greater) the poverty rate of surrounding districts, while having less than 90% of the state and local revenue per pupil (Baker, 2014).
leonie haimson: the “thought leaders” of rheephorm’s 3DMsters* can’t do even the most elementary data analysis…
You put me in mind of #4 of the late Gerald Bracey’s “Principles of Data Interpretation” (READING EDUCATION RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED, 2006):
“When comparing groups, make sure the groups are comparable.”
Thank you for your cogent remarks.
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P.S. 3DM = Data-DrivenDecisionMaking.
P.P.S. I could have resisted but won’t—two other “Principles of Data Interpretation”:
“6. Beware of convenient claims that, whatever the calamity, public schools are to blame.”
“7. Beware of simple explanations for complex phenomena.” [On p. 29 he adds this quote from H. L. Mencken: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”]
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With our once great universities turned from institutions of research to sold out branches of corporate product development, our highest level intellectuals turned to shills and think tanks turned to marketing departments, how is the heart of democracy and education, thinking, to survive?
Cherry picking data like cherry picking students is all part of the “reform” agenda. It is sad that Brookings has sold out like so many think tanks. While they lament the inefficiency of education, they fail to state that “reform” is one the main contributors to this inefficiency. Setting up parallel schools, particularly when there is little oversight, is costly and inefficient. Brookings also fails to mention all the waste and fraud inherent in privatization. What is efficient are common schools for the common good with authentic teachers and administrators.
As far as their oblique reference to “reform” providing equity, they are dead wrong. “Reform” has resulted in hyper-segregation with few benefits. Well funded public schools can do a better, more equitable job. Poor parents cannot afford tutors, and we all know this. I worked in a diverse well funded public school system. Using local funds and grants, we were able to provide homework centers for ELLs, summer school for ELLs and poor students, a guidance department, parent liaisons, and summer workshops for minority students in the high school to support students taking Regents and AP classes. All classes were taught by authentic teachers, and it helped to prepare our poor students for demanding academic classes. It was highly successful. Impoverished public schools whose funds have been drained to pay for charters cannot support students to the same degree. The “reform” assault has undermined what is in the best interest of our young people, authentic, well funded, democratic public schools.
The truth is all these things ed reformers want schools to do cost money. If schools are supposed to replace the entire social safety net that other countries’ provide their citizens, schools will cost more.
Every new demand the country makes on public schools increases costs. These things ed reformers want aren’t free. The whole laundry list of programs and policies each faction of ed reform insists upon are stacked one on top of the other and they ALL cost money.
12,000 a year really isn’t a huge investment to create and sustain a whole safety net plus education for poor children.
The private school that Michelle Rhee attended in Toledo costs about 17,000 a year and those kids are coming (primarily) from very wealthy homes. Private schools in more expensive areas of the country cost a lot more than that.
file:///home/chronos/u-6fb9984d795a052c4ee841d75d042b20f0984121/Downloads/2016_17_MVCDS_Tuition.pdf
From The Onion; pay careful attention to the last sentence:
Study Finds High School Students Retain Only One-Third Of Obsolete Curriculum Over Summer
NEWS IN BRIEF
July 21, 2014
VOL 50 ISSUE 29
News · Education · High School
WASHINGTON—A study released Monday by the Department of Education found that the majority of U.S. high school students struggle to retain obsolete course material over summer break, with students remembering as little as 30 percent of their out-of-date curricula by the time classes resume in the fall. “Despite thorough reinforcement with old-fashioned rote memorization techniques, we found that few students are able to recall more than a third of the irrelevant syllabi their teachers attempted to drill into them during the previous academic year,” said one of the study’s authors, Lydia Prestwich, who noted that barely one in four high school freshmen could identify all nine planets or name the capital of Zaire. “According to our survey, two-thirds of students could not state which country Hugo Chavez leads, while more than 70 percent were unable to give the name of even a single shuttle that NASA uses in its space program, despite learning this material as recently as this past spring.” To ameliorate the alarming statistics, researchers stressed that school administrators nationwide must ensure that every one of their pupils has access to outdated classroom resources and receives instruction from an unqualified, out-of-touch teacher.
Excellent commentary, Diane. Thank you. It is unfortunate that Brookings has gone down this road.
The “we spend more than anyone less for poorer results” argument is also specious. We’d really need a forensic examination of finances to get a better fix on this, but American schools carry in their budgets hugely expensive line items for benefits and health insurance, transportation, and athletics that other nations pay for in municipal budgets or through community groups (in the case of athletics). An apples to apples comparison would either eliminate those costs from American school budgets (to get a better fix on true educational expenditures) or calculate, for schools elsewhere, equivalent contributions from outside the school system.
Lots of Chinese families seem to be sending their children to our “failing” public schools earlier and earlier.
Thank you, Harlan
Insightful and meaningful comment.
Good catch.
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We should be skeptical of any comparison between U.S. per-pupil spending and the rest of the world. The number given for the U.S. is often artificially high. The reason: our schools have expenses which are accounted for very differently in other countries.
In the U.S., school budgets include all of the following, which, elsewhere, are part of the social safety net or considered to be general public expenses:
teacher and administrator pensions
employee benefits (e.g., health insurance)
student health and nutrition (e.g., free and subsidized lunch)
student transportation
In addition, many federal programs, such as for migrant families and students with disabilities, are administered through state and local education agencies in the U.S. In other countries, similar programs may be administered by social welfare departments and not treated as educational expenses.
If all education and social spending were categorized the same, it would possibly show the U.S. spends less per-pupil than any other industrialized country—perhaps a shameful amount less.
Postscript: the exorbitant amount we spend on testing, which diverts money from actual instruction, may make country-by-country comparisons even more misleading.
I’d love to see a map of our “failing schools”.
Would it look any different than our “food insecurity” map*?
Our unemployment map?
Our single mother household map?
Our books in the home map?
*In 2015: 42.2 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 29.1 million adults and 13.1 million children. 13 percent of households (15.8 million households) were food insecure. 5 percent of households (6.3 million households) experienced very low food security.
The “failing schools” rhetoric and “achievement gap” wringing of hands come from people who don’t give a damn about kids who are poor or their families. They use this rhetoric to take over their schools, turn them into profit centers, and destroy their communities.
I read this after reading your post on “The Tip of the Iceberg”… and here’s what is particularly dismaying: BOTH political parties are using “the schools are failing” argument as the basis for supporting privatization and NEITHER political party is tackling the “bottom of the iceberg” issues that drive down our test scores and widen the economic divide…. and there is no hope that either party will be willing to tackle the policy recommendations in the report. https://waynegersen.com/2017/01/05/international-test-scores-are-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-and-what-lies-beneath-requires-immediate-attention/
Wayne, agreed.
Schools are being scapegoated for societal failures