Lies and Damned Lies: U.S. Test Scores Actually Near the Top

For years, free market education reformers have claimed that the U.S. public education system is broken—some have even called it a threat to our national security (Reagan’s Nation at Risk report, 1983). They have used this “crisis” to justify everything from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to attacks on teachers’ seniority, tenure and due process rights. It has led to a decade of accountability and testing mania that has eaten up instructional time and replaced activities that foster creativity and critical thinking with rote memorization. It has taken away billions of dollars that could have been used for teacher training, recruitment and remuneration, and transferred it into the pockets of test and textbook publishers, private charter school operators, and online curriculum producers.

The claims that America’s schools are failing are grossly exaggerated, if not utterly false. For example, the number of students attempting and passing SAT and AP exams has been growing every year and in every ethnic and social group (see here and here). Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in history, more than 30% of Americans aged 25 or older—56 million people—have bachelor's degrees, while only 5% did 70 years ago—something that would be impossible if K-12 education was not successfully preparing its graduates for college. According to Good Education, more than one-third of these degrees are now in STEM fields. The data also indicates that gender and ethnic disparities are closing, with 30% of women now holding degrees (compared to 31% of men), while the percentage of Hispanic degree holders increased 80% over the past decade, with over 14% now holding degrees.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Free market reformers love testing because it seems objective and scientific (plus they can massage the statistics to suit their needs). Most people lack the time and expertise to disaggregate the numbers, examine the methodology, and identify biases and experimental errors that can skew the data and influence the validity of their conclusions. Consequently, the media typically report test results without such analyses, proliferating misconceptions and inaccuracies like the notion that U.S. students’ test scores are substantially lower than those in other wealthy nations (as measured by the PISA test).

However, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) correctly points out in a new report (that you can read here), lower income students in every country perform more poorly on the tests than affluent students. However, because economic inequality is greater in the U.S. than in virtually every other country with which we are compared, our national average appears comparatively low. To make matters worse, there was a sampling error in the most recent PISA test, resulting in an over-representation of students from the most disadvantaged U.S. schools, thus further depressing the average U.S. scores.

When EPI re-estimated PISA scores, adjusting for the disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students in the U.S., it found that average U.S. scores in reading and math were substantially higher than the official numbers. Using EPI’s corrected numbers, the U.S. moves to sixth in reading (up from the officially reported 14^th) and 13^th in math (up from the officially reported 25^th) compared with other OECD countries.

Although U.S. students still performed worse than those in the top three countries (Canada, Finland and Korea), the difference was markedly narrowed when adjusted for socioeconomic differences. Perhaps more significantly, economically disadvantaged students in the U.S. performed better than their social class peers in most other countries, including in these three top scoring countries.

Thus, while U.S. educational outcomes appear worse than those of its trading partners (due mostly to its greater levels of social inequity), it is actually doing a better job than its trading partners at boosting the test scores of its poorest students. Furthermore, the performance of the poorest U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance of poor students in other similar countries has been on the decline, suggesting that U.S. schools are doing a better job addressing the needs of their economically disadvantaged students.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

Brookings Study Indicates Public Education Not So Bad After All

We're #11 Mofo! And Proud of It!

The 10^th Brown Center Report (Brookings Institution), which analyzed PISA and other common standardized test scores, debunked two common myths: that the U.S. once led the world in math and science education scores and that it has been declining ever since. In reality, the U.S. has never led the world on international achievement tests, according to the report. The report also found that some of the states that won federal Race to the Top (RttT) grants actually underperformed states that did not receive the grants on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), thus suggesting that the “reforms” mandated by the Obama Administration are not improving educational outcomes.

According to Brookings scholar Tom Loveless, U.S. science and math scores have been mediocre compared to other wealthy nations since at least 1964 and, contrary to the claims of Ed Deformers and accountability maniacs, they have not been getting any worse. America’s schools are NOT in a state of crisis or deterioration. Indeed, evidence suggests that they have been improving (see Jay Mathews’s Class Struggle). In 1964, we scored near the very bottom, compared with 2010, when we scored near the middle in science and literacy.

Despite the fact that we’ve never been number one (or even close to it) in K-12 math and science scores, the U.S. has continued to dominate the world economically over the past 50 years, suggesting that pundits and critics have been completely wrong about the importance of this metric to our international competitiveness. Furthermore, despite our relatively weak K-12 math and science scores, we continue to pump out some of the most effective scientists and mathematicians in the world, including more Nobel laureates than any other country.

One might conclude from this that our K-12 science and math education has been sufficient for preparing students for the rigors of university level science and math. This would probably be an incorrect assumption. What is probably happening is that some U.S. students are excelling at science and math (primarily the same middle class and affluent students who tend to excel at school, in general) and these students are also succeeding in college, while large numbers of lower income students are struggling across the board, including in math and science.

The improvements in PISA scores, as well as the increasing numbers of lower income and minority students who are taking and passing SAT and AP exams, probably do reflect improvements in teaching, as well as changing attitudes and policies about promoting college and higher level course work to low income and minority students. Yet our inability to score at the top of international tests is not due to the quality of the schools and teachers, which have been improving, but to socioeconomic conditions, which have actually been declining for large numbers of Americans. When disaggregated by class, our middle class students do as well as those from almost any other country. At the same time, the countries with the highest PISA scores tend to have far less childhood poverty and income gaps than we do.

Thus, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, if we really want to see PISA scores go up, along with graduation rates, science literacy, and any other academic indicator, we need to close the wealth gap, end poverty and start investing in education a level comparable to Finland.

Evaluation Deal is Major Defeat for NY Teachers—Harbinger for Others?

A statewide deal was announced last week setting the stage for performance-based evaluations for New York teachers, with state officials finally settling a lawsuit brought by the state teachers union. 700 local districts throughout the state will still have to negotiate the fine points with local unions.

The new framework bases 40% of a teacher’s evaluation on student performance, with 20% being based on student progress on high stakes standardized exams.  The other 20% would also consider test scores, but would be measured using a union-supported method. The plan also makes it easier to fire teachers after two years of “ineffective” ratings.

According to the Wall Street Journal, all sides considered the deal a victory, with UFT President Michael Mulgrew saying that the new appeals process provides a "much greater degree of fairness."

VAM Evaluations Are Bad For Students as Well as Teachers

Regardless of the merits of the new appeals process, any use of student test data to evaluate teachers should be considered a defeat for teachers, as well as students and their schools.

First of all, the test scores and students’ progress on them are most strongly correlated with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, not teacher quality. Consequently, teachers who have more affluent students will tend to get better evaluations, increasing the diaspora of quality veteran teachers from challenging, low income schools, where they are most needed, but least likely to get good evaluations and keep their jobs.

Secondly, there is no accurate, consistent or commonly accepted method for using student test scores to measure teacher quality. Various accounting methods tend to cause wildly fluctuating Value Added Measures (VAM) from year to year. Thus, an excellent teacher could easily get a “false negative” and get fired as a result, which would also be unfair to students, as well as the unjustly fired teacher.

Thirdly, the tests themselves are terrible waste of time and resources, sapping states and districts of much needed revenue for instruction and teacher retention. They do little or nothing toward improving the quality of schools or students’ educational outcomes. They take away class time from authentic learning, critical thinking and problem solving. They encourage teaching to the test and discourage creativity and curiosity.

In order to boost test scores, many districts have abandoned or reduced arts, music, athletics and even science to make room for increased test preparation and remediation. Many schools have even implemented test preparation and homework for kindergartners to prepare them for a lifetime of testing and drudgery.

Basing teachers’ evaluations (and thus their livelihoods) on these same tests will only encourage more teaching to the test and discourage creative, student-centered teaching, thus decreasing the quality of teaching overall. It also legitimizes the tests and their publishers, strengthening their grip on this deplorable and brazen taxpayer giveaway.

Why the Sellout?

The deal had been in the works for two years. However, the stakes grew when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned the state last month that it was in danger of losing nearly $1 billion in federal Race to the Top money if it failed to overhaul of teacher evaluations.

In hard economic times, $1 billion is nothing to sneeze at. But it should not be forgotten that states and the feds have been consistently squeezing education of funding by slashing taxes on the wealthy and their corporations. The money to sufficiently fund public education could be provided, despite the recession, if there were increases in the marginal tax rate for the wealthy, combined with increases in the corporate, capital gains and inheritance taxes. Furthermore, if NY and other states simply refused to participate in NCLB testing, Common Core Standards, and other expensive “reforms,” they would save billions of dollars in expenditures on test printing, scoring and evaluating, new textbooks, making the Race to the Top (RttT) extortion racket  irrelevant.

One other little incentive for the union to sell out was Gov. Cuomo’s threat of a state-mandated settlement, including the threat of cutting state aid to districts. However, it shouldn’t matter which boss is screwing workers, the response should be the same. If VAM and test-based evaluations are bad for students and unfair to teachers, they should be opposed vigorously, regardless of who makes the demand.

Teacher Evaluation Crisis or Red Herring?

Ever since the Nation at Risk report, pundits, politicians and Ed Deformers have been decrying the crisis in public education and looking for causes and culprits under every bed. The problem is that public education is better than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

While it is not without its problems, the single biggest problem is the socioeconomic disparity between students, not teacher quality. Nevertheless, the teacher evaluation system is far from perfect. But the biggest problem is not that too many “bad” teachers are slipping through the cracks. Rather, the biggest problem is that there are too few evaluators with too little training and too much bias to do the job well. In most districts, administrators are responsible for observing teachers and rarely do they have the time and training to do it comprehensively. In 15 years of teaching, I have never been observed more than 3-4 times per year (sometimes never), nor do I know any teachers who have been observed any more than this.

Yet even, if site administrators had sufficient time to observe everyone on a weekly basis, they would still have an inherent bias that potentially undermines the validity of their observations. An independent and creative teacher might deliberately choose his or her own original lessons over an administrator’s recommended ones, or publicly question or critique an administrator’s reforms, leading to biased negative evaluations. Indeed, union organizers, outspoken critics and advocates, and original thinkers are often singled out by bosses and treated unfairly as a result.

The New York City agreement allows the union to send up to 13% of cases to a three-person panel to protect against harassment by principals, according to the New York Times. While Mulgrew has spun this as a victory for UFT, it means that 87% of “at-risk” teachers will simply be tossed aside, without due process or a grievance procedure. Considering how much poverty exists in New York City schools and the heavy emphasis on student test scores, there will likely be a substantial number of good teachers who will fall into this unprotected 87%, abandoned by their own union and without the legal support they paid for with their dues.

There is one theoretically positive outcome from the settlement: the evaluation system will bring independent observers into the classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers, the New York Times reported. I say “theoretical” because, though it is preferable to use unbiased outside observers, these observers will have caseloads of 50-80 teachers, which is far too large to do the job well. Indeed, they are only required to do three observations per year. Furthermore, the “outside” observers will be provided by a private company which stands to profit off the system, creating a new bias.

The Beatings for Preschoolers Will Continue Until Test Scores Improve

(Thanks to Schools Matter blog for first covering this news from Ed Week)

Not only has NCLB not gone away or been “reformed,” it has given birth to a demon spawn named Race to the Top (RTTT), with Obama and Arne Duncan as co-fathers. The basic idea is to dangle a few million bucks in front of states desperate for cash to bail out their sinking education systems and get them to beat themselves up to win the money. The states that go the farthest in opening up their public education systems to private profit, weakening teachers unions and stifling students’ curiosity and creativity through excessive testing and test preparation, win the limited funds.

Now RTTT is offering grants to early childhood education programs and preschools. Since the achievement gap starts well before kids start school (see here, here and here), it makes sense to improve learning at the pre-K level, and these programs are in desperate need of money. However, as Education Week reports, in order to win a grant, states will have to develop assessment systems for their programs and develop appropriate standards and tests for young children.

That’s right, states will start mandating testing and test preparation at the pre-school level, as if it wasn’t already terrible enough to do this to k-3^rd graders, let alone any child. But it is even worse when one considers how little states will gain for selling out toddlers to the test publishers and corporate education raiders. Arne Duncan only is offering $500 million, which is chump change when divvied up among five or more states. (Actual state grants will range from $50-100 million). The money might barely cover the tests the little tykes will be forced to endure. After paying for consultants, assessors, new curricula and training, pre-K schools certainly won’t have anything extra left to hire more staff, offer good wages, expand enrollment, or invest in manipulatives, picture books and learning games. In the end, very young kids will learn very early to hate school. Their schools will gain nothing but a lot more bureaucracy and headaches. Only the test and curriculum publishers really stand to gain directly.