Achievement gaps begin long before children start kindergarten. On the first day of school, some children have had better medical care than others; are better nourished than others; are likelier to have a larger vocabulary because of having a parent who is college educated; are likelier to have books and computers in the home; and are likelier to live in sound housing in a safe neighborhood. The children at the wrong end of the gap are likelier to attend schools in overcrowded classrooms with inadequate resources and inexperienced teachers, as compared with the children at the advantaged end of the gap, whose schools are likelier to have small classes, experienced teachers, a full curriculum, laptops, libraries, playing fields, and a full staff. Schools that have large numbers of inexperienced teachers and inadequate resources are ill-prepared to reduce the achievement gap. If we were serious about narrowing the gap, the schools attended by African American and Hispanic children would have a stable, experienced staff, a rich curriculum, social services, after-school programs, and abundant resources to meet the needs of their students.
The black-white achievement gap is now smaller than the achievement gap between the poorest and the most affluent students, according to the sociologist Sean Reardon of Stanford University.
Strikingly, he found that “the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years, though the data are less certain for cohorts of children born before 1970.” In contrast to the racial achievement gap, which has narrowed, the income achievement gap is growing. In fact, he found that the income achievement gap was nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap; the reverse was true fifty years earlier. The income achievement gap is already large when children start school, and according to the work of other researchers it “does not appear to grow (or narrow) appreciably as children progress through school.” Reardon suggests that the income-based gap is growing in part because affluent families invest in their children’s cognitive development, with tutoring, summer camp, computers, and other enriching experiences. He concludes that “family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.”5
Thomas B. Timar of the University of California reviewed the efforts to close the black-white achievement gap and the Hispanic-white achievement gap and concluded that while there had been progress, the overall situation was discouraging. Why was there so little progress? He wrote: “One reason is that although schools can be held accountable for some of the disadvantage these students experience, they have been given the entire responsibility for closing the achievement gap [emphasis mine]. Yet the gap is the symptom of larger social, economic and political problems that go far beyond the reach of the school … While schools are part of the solution, they alone cannot solve the problem of educational disparities.”6
Another reason for the persistence of the gaps, Timar writes, is that policy makers have invested in strategies for thirty years that are “misdirected and ineffectual,” managing to keep urban schools in a state of “policy spin,” bouncing from one idea to another but never attaining the learning conditions or social capital that might make a difference.
Schools can’t solve the problem alone, Timar acknowledges, as long as society ignores the high levels of poverty and racial isolation in which many of these youngsters live. He writes of children growing up in neighborhoods that experience high rates of crime and incarceration, violence, and stress-related disorders. In the current version of reform, fixing schools means more legislation, more mandates, and more regulations. What is missing from reform, he says, is an appreciation for the value of local and regional efforts, the small-scale programs that rely on local initiative for implementation. Without local initiative, reforms cannot succeed.
Of great importance in creating lasting change is social capital, Timar notes. This is the capital that grows because of relationships within the school and between the school and the community. Social capital is a necessary ingredient of reform, and it is built on a sense of community, organizational stability, and trust. Successful schools in distressed communities have stable leadership and a shared vision for change. They have “a sense of purpose, a coherent plan, and individuals with responsibility to coordinate and implement the plan. Teachers worked collaboratively to improve teaching and learning across the entire school curriculum … School improvement wasn’t something done to them (like some sort of medical procedure), but a collaborative undertaking. Students also realized that the school’s engagement in school improvement activities was meant for them, for their benefit.”7
If we are serious about significantly narrowing the achievement gaps between black and white students, Hispanic and white students, and poor and affluent students, then we need to think in terms of long-term, comprehensive strategies. Those strategies must address the problems of poverty, unemployment, racial isolation, and mass incarceration. Income inequality in the United States, he points out, cannot be ignored, since it is greater now than at any time since the 1920s and more extreme than in any other advanced nation. But American politics has grown so politically conservative and unwilling to address structural issues that the chances of this happening are slim.
So we are left with the short-term strategies. Timar says that the strategies of “bureaucratizing the process of school improvement and turning it into a chase for higher test scores” have not worked. They have not made schools more stable, more coherent, and more professional. NCLB plus the Obama administration’s Race to the Top have made schools less stable, encouraged staff turnover, promoted policy churn, and undermined professionalism.
Timar believes that the best hope for a school-based strategy for reducing the gaps lies in a grassroots model of change. He points to approaches like the Comer Process, developed by Dr. James Comer of Yale University, which engages the school community in meeting the emotional, psychological, social, and academic needs of students. What works best is not regulation and mandates but professional collaboration, community building, and cooperation. Such a scenario can happen only when those in the school have the authority to design their own improvement plans and act without waiting for instructions or permission from Washington or the state capital.
What we know from these scholars makes sense. The achievement gaps are rooted in social, political, and economic structures. If we are unwilling to change the root causes, we are unlikely ever to close the gaps. What we call achievement gaps are in fact opportunity gaps.
Our corporate reformers insist that we must “fix” schools first, not poverty. But the weight of evidence is against them. No serious social scientist believes that rearranging the organization or control or curriculum of schools will suffice to create income equality or to end poverty. The schools did not cause the achievement gaps, and the schools alone are not powerful enough to close them. So long as our society is indifferent to poverty, so long as we are willing to look the other way rather than act vigorously to improve the conditions of families and communities, there will always be achievement gaps.
CHAPTER 7
The Facts About the International Test Scores
CLAIM We are falling behind other nations, putting our economy and our national security at risk.
REALITY An old lament, not true then, not true now.
Critics say that the nation is more at risk than ever because American students are getting mediocre scores on international tests and falling behind other nations. If we don’t have top scores soon, our nation will suffer grievously, our national security will falter, our economy will founder, and our future will be in jeopardy.
By now, this is a timeworn bugbear, but it still works, so the critics continue to employ it to alarm the public. In 1957, critics blamed the public schools when the Soviets were first to launch a space satellite, even though this feat was the work
of a tiny scientific and technological elite. In 1983, critics blamed the public schools for the success of the Japanese automobile industry (overlooking the lack of foresight by leaders of the American automobile industry) and said the nation was “at risk.” In 2012, critics asserted that the nation’s public schools are “a very grave national security crisis,” even though the nation has no significant international enemies.1
Today, critics use data from international assessments to generate a crisis mentality, not to improve public schools but to undermine public confidence in them. To the extent that they accomplish this, the public will be more tolerant of efforts to dismantle public education and divert public funding to privately managed schools and for-profit vendors of instruction.
In 2010, the release of the international assessments called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) provided a new occasion for lamenting the mediocre performance of American students. Sixty countries, including thirty-four members of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), participated in the international assessment of fifteen-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. Students in Shanghai ranked first in all three subjects (Shanghai is not representative of China, which did not participate in the assessments). Of the OECD nations, the United States ranked fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science, and twenty-fifth in mathematics (these rankings are overstated because the United States was in a statistical tie with several other nations on each test).
The media, elected officials, and think tank pundits reacted with shock and alarm. President Obama said it was “our generation’s Sputnik moment” and warned that we were losing ground to economic competitors in India and China (neither of which participated in the international tests). Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the results were “a wake-up call” to the nation.2 Editorialists were alarmed that Shanghai had scored at the top, which seemed to symbolize a new era of Chinese supremacy. The front-page story in The New York Times carried the headline “Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators.” The Chinese-born educator Yong Zhao, now a professor at the University of Oregon, cautioned Americans that China had long ago perfected the art of test taking, and Chinese parents were not happy with this practice, but his voice did not reach as many people as did the major media.3
Examined closely, the scores reveal two salient points.
First, the scores of American fifteen-year-olds had not declined. In reading and mathematics, the U.S. scores were not measurably different from earlier PISA assessments in 2000, 2003, and 2006. In science, U.S. students improved their scores over an earlier assessment in 2006.4
Second, American students in schools with low poverty—the schools where less than 10 percent of the students were poor—had scores that were equal to those of Shanghai and significantly better than those of high-scoring Finland, the Republic of Korea, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. In U.S. schools where less than a quarter of the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (the federal definition of poverty), the reading scores were similar to those of students in high-performing nations. Technically, the comparison is not valid, because it involves comparing students in low-poverty schools in the United States with the average score for entire nations. But it is important to recognize that the scores of students in low-poverty schools in the United States are far higher than the international average, higher even than the average for top-performing nations, and the scores decline as poverty levels increase, as they do in all nations. Two scholars, Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, asserted that the international testing agency had made a sampling error, assuming far higher levels of poverty in American schools than was the case; when the scores were readjusted appropriately, they argued, the United States was actually fourth in the world in reading and tenth in the world in mathematics.5
But what do these international scores really mean? Do they predict the economic future? Do average scores mean that our nation is trapped in a cycle of decline? Will top-scoring nations rule the world in twenty years?
Fact: American students have never scored especially well on international assessments.
The first such assessment, called the First International Mathematics Study, was offered in the mid-1960s. It tested thirteen-year-olds and seniors in twelve countries. American thirteen-year-olds scored significantly lower than students in nine other educational systems and ahead of only one. On the test given only to seniors enrolled in a mathematics course, U.S. students scored last. On the test given to seniors not enrolled in a mathematics course, U.S. students also scored last. In brief, our scores were dreadful.6
The First International Science Study was administered in the late 1960s and early 1970s to ten-year-olds from sixteen educational systems, to fourteen-year-olds, and to students in the last year of secondary school from eighteen educational systems. Among the youngest group, only Japanese students scored higher than those in the United States. Among fourteen-year-olds, five systems scored higher than the United States, and three were lower. Among students in their last year of high school, Americans scored last.7
When mathematics was tested again in the early 1980s, American thirteen-year-olds tested at or near the median. American seniors placed at or near the bottom on most subjects, and the scores of our top students in algebra (the top 1 percent) were lower than those of the same group in every other country. Science was tested again in the mid-1980s, and U.S. students did not excel: ten-year-olds scored at the median, fourteen-year-olds were in the bottom quarter, and seniors scored at or near the bottom in biology, chemistry, and physics.8
Why have American students scored poorly over the years on international tests? No one can say for certain, but I recall that when I worked in the U.S. Department of Education in the early 1990s, we were briefed on the latest dismal results. The representative from the testing agency described how Korean students in eighth grade were excited about doing well on the test, on behalf of their nation, while American students didn’t seem to care about the tests because they knew their scores didn’t “count,” didn’t matter, wouldn’t affect their grades or their chances of getting into college. Later, when I was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, we held discussions about the problem of motivating high school seniors; they didn’t take the NAEP seriously, because they knew it had no stakes for them. Some doodled on the exam; some made patterns on their answer sheet.
Given the current emphasis on testing and the ongoing pressure to raise scores, students have learned to pay more attention to tests, even when they don’t count toward grades or graduation.
In 2012, the results of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), the major international assessments of mathematics and science, were released. American students have participated in TIMSS since 1995. The major American media presented the 2012 results in a negative light, reflecting the reformers’ gloomy narrative. The headline in The New York Times read, “U.S. Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests Show.” The Washington Post ran the headline “U.S. Students Continue to Trail Asian Students in Math, Reading, Science.”9
But the media were wrong. American students performed surprisingly well in mathematics and science, well above the international average in both subjects in grades 4 and 8. Two American states (Florida and North Carolina) volunteered to take the TIMSS tests in fourth grade, and another seven states took the tests in eighth grade, to gauge how they were doing by international standards.10
In fourth-grade mathematics, U.S. students outperformed most of the fifty-seven educational systems that participated. American students were tied with their peers in Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, and Russia. South Korea, Singapore, and Japan were the only nations that outperformed fourth-grade students in the United States (as did certain regions, like Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei). American students outperformed their peers in such nations as Germany, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand. North Carolina ra
nked as one of the top-performing entities in the world.
In eighth-grade mathematics, U.S. students also did very well. They were tied with their peers in Israel, Finland, Australia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, and England. The only nations that outperformed the United States were Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Russia (along with the two Chinese regions noted above). Students in four American states that offered to take the tests ranked among the world’s highest-performing entities: Massachusetts, Minnesota, Indiana, and North Carolina. Black students in Massachusetts received the same scores as students in Israel and Finland. Imagine that! It should have been a front-page story across the nation, but it was not.
In fourth-grade science, American students ranked in the top ten systems of the fifty-seven that took the test. Only South Korea, Japan, Finland, Russia, and Singapore ranked higher (along with Chinese Taipei).
In eighth-grade science, American students were outperformed by only six nations (Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Finland, and Slovenia, along with Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei) and tied with those in England, Hungary, Israel, and Australia. The states of Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado, which volunteered to participate in TIMSS, ranked among the top-performing nations in the world. Massachusetts, had it been an independent nation, would have been ranked second in the world, behind Singapore.
Four dozen nations participated in the latest international reading assessment called PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). Fourth-grade students in the United States were among the top performers in the world, ranked behind only Hong Kong, Russia, Finland, and Singapore. The only U.S. state to participate, Florida, scored behind Hong Kong; if it were a nation, Florida would have been tied for second in the world with Russia, Finland, and Singapore.11
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Page 8