"We're Number Umpteenth!"

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“We’re Number Umpteenth!”: The myth of lagging U.S. schools

By Valerie Strauss, Updated: May 3, 2013

How many times have you heard about how lousy American students perform on international assessments in comparison to their counterparts in other countries? Here to talk about why the comparisons are nonsense is Alfie Kohn, the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, including “The Schools Our Children Deserve,” “The Homework Myth,” and “Feel-Bad Education… And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling.” He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org.
By Alfie Kohn
Beliefs that are debatable or even patently false may be repeated so often that at some point they come to be accepted as fact.  We seem to have crossed that threshold with the claim that U.S. schools are significantly worse than those in most other countries.  Sometimes the person who parrots this line will even insert a number — “We’re only ____th in the world,  you know!” — although, not surprisingly, the number changes with each retelling.
The assertion that our students compare unfavorably to those in other countries has long been heard from politicians and corporate executives whose goal is to justify various “get tough” reforms:  high-stakes testing, a nationalized curriculum (see under: Common Core “State” Standards), more homework, a longer school day or year, and so on.
But by now the premise is so widely accepted that it’s casually repeated by just about everyone — including educators, I’m sorry to say — and in the service of a wide range of prescriptions and agendas, including some that could be classified as progressive.  Recently I’ve seen it used in a documentary arguing for more thoughtful math instruction, a petition to promote teaching the “whole child,” and an article in a popular on-line magazine that calls for the abolition of grades (following a reference to “America’s long steady decline in education”).
Unsurprisingly, this misconception has filtered out to the general public.  According to a brand-new poll, a plurality of Americans — and a majority of college graduates! — believe (incorrectly) that American 15-year-olds are at the bottom when their scores on tests of science knowledge are compared to those of students in other developed countries.[1]
A dedicated group of education experts has been challenging this canard for years, but their writings rarely appear in popular publications, and each of their efforts at debunking typically focuses on just one of the many problems with the claim.  Here, then, is the big picture:  a concise overview of the multiple responses you might offer the next time someone declares that American kids come up short.  (First, though, I’d suggest politely inquiring as to the evidence for his or her statement.  The wholly unsatisfactory reply you’re likely to receive may constitute a rebuttal in its own right.)
1.  Even taking the numbers at face value, the U.S. fares reasonably well.  Results will vary depending on the age of the students being tested, the subject matter, which test is involved, and which round of results is being reported.  It’s possible to cherry-pick scores to make just about any country look especially good or bad.  U.S. performance is more impressive when the focus is on younger students, for example — so, predictably, it’s the high school numbers that are most often cited.  When someone reduces our schools to a single number, you can bet it’s the one that casts them in the worst possible light.
But even with older students, there may be less to the bad news than meets the eye.  As an article in Scientific American noted a few years back, most countries’ science scores were actually pretty similar.[2]  That’s worth keeping in mind whenever a new batch of numbers is released.  If there’s little (or even no) statistically significant difference among, say, the nations placing third through tenth, it would be irresponsible to cite those rankings as if they were meaningful.
Overall, when a pair of researchers carefully reviewed half a dozen different international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, they found that “U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations.”[3]  And that still seems to be the case based on the most recent data, which include math and science scores for grade 4, grade 8, and age 15, as well as reading scores for grade 4 and age 15.  Of those eight results, the U.S. scored above average in five, average in two, and below average in one.[4]  Not exactly the dire picture that’s typically painted.
2.  What do we really learn from standardized tests?  While there are differences in quality between the most commonly used exams (e.g., PISA, TIMSS), the fact is that any one-shot, pencil-and-paper standardized test — particularly one whose questions are multiple-choice — offers a deeply flawed indicator of learning as compared with authentic classroom-based assessments.[5]   The former taps students’ skill at taking standardized tests, which is a skill unto itself; the latter taps what students have learned, what sense they make of it, and what they can do with it.  A standardized test produces a summary statistic labeled “student achievement,” which is very different from a narrative account of students’ achievements.  Anyone who cites the results of a test is obliged to defend the construction of the test itself, to show that the results are not only statistically valid but meaningful.  Needless to say, very few people who say something like “the U.S. is below average in math” have any idea how math proficiency has been measured.
3.  Are we comparing apples to watermelons?  Even if the tests were good measures of important intellectual proficiencies, the students being tested in different countries aren’t always comparable.  As scholars Iris Rotberg and the late Gerald Bracey have pointed out for years, some countries test groups of students who are unrepresentative with respect to age, family income, or number of years spent studying science and math.  The older, richer, and more academically selective a cohort of students in a given country, the better that country is going to look in international comparisons.[6]
4.  Rich American kids do fine; poor American kids don’t.  It’s ridiculous to offer a summary statistic for all children at a given grade level in light of the enormous variation in scores within this country.  To do so is roughly analogous to proposing an average pollution statistic for the United States that tells us the cleanliness of “American air.”  Test scores are largely a function of socioeconomic status.  Our wealthier students perform very well when compared to other countries; our poorer students do not.  And we have a lot more poor children than do other industrialized nations.  One example, supplied by Linda Darling-Hammond:  “In 2009 U.S. schools with fewer than 10 percent of students in poverty ranked first among all nations on PISA tests in reading, while those serving more than 75 percent of students in poverty scored alongside nations like Serbia, ranking about fiftieth.”[7]
5.  Why treat learning as if it were a competitive sport?  All of these results emphasize rankings more than ratings, which means the question of educational success has been framed in terms of who’s beating whom.  This is troubling for several reasons.
a)  Education ≠ economy.  If our reason for emphasizing students’ relative standing (rather than their absolute achievement) has to do with “competitiveness in the 21st-century global economy” — a phrase that issues from politicians, businesspeople, and journalists with all the thoughtfulness of a sneeze, then we would do well to ask two questions.  The first, based on values, is whether we regard educating children as something that’s primarily justified in terms of corporate profits.
The second question, based on facts, is whether the state of a nation’s economy is meaningfully affected by the test scores of students in that nation.  Various strands of evidence have converged to suggest that the answer is no.  For individual students, school achievement is only weakly related to subsequent workplace performance.  And for nations, there’s little correlation between average test scores and economic vigor, even if you try to connect scores during one period with the economy some years later (when that cohort of students has grown up).[8]  Moreover, Yong Zhao has shown that “PISA scores in reading, math, and sciences are negatively correlated with entrepreneurship indicators in almost every category at statistically significant levels.”[9]
b)  Why is the relative relevant?  Once we’ve refuted the myth that test scores drive economic success, what reason would we have to fret about our country’s standing as measured by those scores?  What sense does it make to focus on relative performance?  After all, to say that our students are first or tenth on a list doesn’t tell us whether they’re doing well or poorly; it gives us no useful information about how much they know or how good our schools are.  If all the countries did reasonably well in absolute terms, there would be no shame in being at the bottom.  (Nor would “average” be synonymous with “mediocre.”)  If all the countries did poorly, there would be no glory in being at the top.  Exclamatory headlines about how “our” schools are doing compared to “theirs” suggest that we’re less concerned with the quality of education than with whether we can chant, “We’re Number One!”
c) Hoping foreign kids won’t learn?  To focus on rankings is not only irrational but morally offensive.  If our goal is for American kids to triumph over those who live elsewhere, then the implication is that we want children who live in other countries to fail, at least in relative terms.  We want them not to learn successfully just because they’re not Americans.  That’s built into the notion of “competitiveness” (as opposed to excellence or success), which by definition means that one individual or group can succeed only if others don’t.  This is a troubling way to look at any endeavor, but where children are concerned, it’s indefensible.  And it’s worth pointing out these implications to anyone who cites the results of an international ranking.
Moreover, rather than defending policies designed to help our graduates “compete,” I’d argue that we should make decisions on the basis of what will help them learn to collaborate effectively.  Educators, too, ought to think in terms of working with – and learning from – their counterparts in other countries so that children everywhere will become more proficient and enthusiastic learners.  But every time we rank “our” kids against “theirs,” that outcome becomes a little less likely.
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NOTES
1.  Pew Research Center for People and the Press, “Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology,” April 22, 2013.  Available at: www.people-press.org/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/.
2.  W. Wayt Gibbs and Douglas Fox, “The False Crisis in Science Education,”  Scientific American, October 1999:  87-92.
3.  Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin, “Is the United States Really Losing the International Horse Race in Academic Achievement?” Phi Delta Kappan, May 2005: 688-695.
4.  National Center for Economic Statistics, Average Performance of U.S. Students Relative to International Peers on the Most Recent International Assessments in Reading, Mathematics, and Science: Results from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009, 2011.  Available at:  http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2011-mrs.asp
5.  See, for example, Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing (Heinemann, 2000); or Phillip Harris et al., The Myths of Standardized Tests (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
6.  For example, see Iris C. Rotberg, “Interpretation of International Test Score Comparisons,” Science, May 15, 1998: 1030-31.
7.  Linda Darling-Hammond, “Redlining Our Schools,” The Nation, January 30, 2012: 12.  Also see Mel Riddile, “PISA: It’s Poverty Not Stupid,” The Principal Difference [NASSP blog], December 15, 2010 (http://bit.ly/hiobMC); and Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, “What Do International Tests Really Show About  U.S. Student Performance?”, Economic Policy Institute report, January 28, 2013 (http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/).
8. Keith Baker, “High Test Scores: The Wrong Road to National Economic Success,” Kappa Delta Pi Record, Spring 2011: 116-20; Zalman Usiskin, “Do We Need National Standards with Teeth?” Educational Leadership, November 2007: 40; and Gerald W. Bracey, “Test Scores and Economic Growth,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 2007: 554-56.  “The reason is clear,” says Iris Rotberg.  “Other variables, such as outsourcing to gain access to lower-wage employees, the climate and incentives for innovation, tax rates, health-care and retirement costs, the extent of government subsidies or partnerships, protectionism, intellectual-property enforcement, natural resources, and exchange rates overwhelm mathematics and science scores in predicting economic competitiveness” (“International Test Scores, Irrelevant Policies,” Education Week, September 14, 2001: 32).
9.  Yong Zhao, “Flunking Innovation and Creativity,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 2012: 58.  Emphasis added.

© The Washington Post Company

Parent Involvement

Thanks to Suzi Ramos for sharing this great article.  The contents of the article reinforce Glassers' Quality School Theory which is one of Esperanza's four pillars. 

 

Is parent involvement in school really useful?

By Valerie Strauss , Updated: February 6, 2013

(by Lisa Bolton/The Washington Post)

It’s one of those things in education that everybody takes for granted: parent involvement is good and necessary. But is it, and if so, what kind? Here is an analysis from Alfie Kohn, the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, including “The Schools Our Children Deserve,” “The Homework Myth,” and “Feel-Bad Education… And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling.” He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org.
By Alfie Kohn
When people who write about agriculture or dentistry tackle the important issues in their respective fields, do they try to shake things up? Are they feisty and willing to peer beneath the surface of whatever topic they’re exploring? I have no idea. But I do know that those qualities are awfully hard to find in what’s written about education.
Consider the question of parent involvement in schooling. Almost everything published on this subject leaves the ideological foundations of the discussion unexamined. Either we’re treated to a predictable announcement that Involvement Is Good (“Parents should do more!”) or else we’re warned that some folks have a tendency to get, well, you know, a little too involved. (“Jeremy, I’m wondering whether you might have had some help with your science fair project? I ask only because it’s unusual for a sixth grader to build a working nuclear reactor”). Put these two themes together and the message seems to be that the interest parents take in their children’s education is either inadequate or excessive.
Does that mean there’s a sweet spot in the middle that consists of just enough involvement? Or are we looking at an example of what a statistician might call a bimodal distribution when involvement is plotted against socioeconomic status: Poor parents don’t do enough; affluent parents do too much?
Let’s begin by noticing that the whole question is framed by the extent to which educators think parents ought to be involved. The parent’s point of view is typically absent from such discussions. And, of course, no thought is given to the student’s perspective — what role kids might want their parents to play (or to avoid playing). But then that’s true of so many conversations about education that we scarcely notice its absence.
There’s something both short-sighted and arrogant about exhorting low-income parents to show up at school events or make sure the homework gets done. The presumption seems to be that these parents lack interest or commitment — as opposed to spare time, institutional savvy, comfort level, or fluency in English. Annette Lareau and other sociologists have described how class differences play out in terms of parental advocacy — including why poorer and less-educated parents may be less effective when they do become involved.[1]
But even observers who are sensitive to issues of class don’t always take a step back to ask what kind of involvement we’re talking about, and to what ends. As is so often the case, our questions tend to be more quantitative than qualitative, with the result that we focus only on how much parents are involved.
Imagine someone who monitors his or her child’s schooling very closely, for example, and doesn’t hesitate to advocate for — or against — certain policy changes and resource allocation decisions. Is that a good thing? Rather than just asking whether the level or style of advocacy is effective, we’d also want to know whether this parent is asking for changes that will benefit all children or mostly just his or her own child (possibly at the expense of others). Our intensely individualistic, free-market-oriented culture — witness the growing push for charter schools, vouchers, and privatization — encourages us to see education not as a public good but as just another commodity one shops for, and to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of how much my kid gets out of it. Thus, those of us who value the cause of equity have reason to be disturbed by many sorts of parent involvement — not just because some are more involved, or better at being involved, than others but because of what that involvement is intended to achieve and for whom.[2]
Proponents of progressive education, too, have reason to be disturbed by the focus of much involvement, even in individual classrooms. What are the pushiest parents pushing for? If they’re judging schools by test scores and children by grades, if they’re demanding more traditional forms of math and reading instruction, tighter regulation of students, and more homework, then the content of their agenda will strike us as more relevant than the degree of their involvement. Some of us may be inclined to ask, “How can we invite these parents to reconsider whether their preferences are really consistent with their long-term objectives for their children?” And: “What would it take to create a powerful parent constituency pushing in the other direction?”
Likewise, while everyone wants parents to be engaged with what their children are doing in school, what matters more is the nature of that engagement. There’s a big difference between a parent who’s focused on what the child is doing — that is, on the learning itself — and a parent who’s focused on how well the child is doing. To ask “So, honey, what’s your theory about why the Civil War started?” or “If you had written that story, would you have left the character wondering what happened, the way the author did?” represents a kind of engagement that promotes critical thinking and enthusiasm about learning. To ask “Why only a B+ [or a 3 on the rubric]?” is a kind of engagement that undermines both of these things.[3]
Of course, parents wouldn’t be asking the latter questions if the school weren’t reducing students to letters and numbers in the first place; they’re taking their cue from educators who blur the differences between a focus on learning and a focus on performance, or between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Nevertheless, this issue seems to have escaped the notice of just about everyone who writes on the topic of parent involvement.
Finally, there’s the matter of whether established educational practices are, on the one hand, accepted uncritically, so that the only question is whether kids are compliant and successful by established criteria, or whether, on the other hand, those practices are examined to see if they make sense. Not surprisingly, it’s the rare educator who encourages the latter. The result is that parents are urged to become more involved (ma non troppo!) in a way that may be more about perpetuating the status quo than about doing what’s in children’s best interest.
A “partnership” between school and family sounds lovely unless that partnership is perceived by the child as an alliance against him. If the purpose is to coerce him into obeying rules that may not be reasonable, or to “live up to his potential” by working harder at assignments of dubious value, then we’d want parents to ask penetrating questions about the school’s practices. Parents should aim higher than helping teachers to make children toe the line.
Homework offers a vivid example. Even on its own terms, parental involvement may not be beneficial. A recent study of middle schoolers found that “the more teachers intended to establish a close link with parents and to involve them in the homework process, the less positive the student outcomes were.”[4] And a review of fifty studies found that, while parental involvement in general was “associated with achievement,” the one striking exception was parental help with homework, where there was no positive effect.[5]
But the predominant outcome measures in such studies are test scores, which means that even if “positive effects” did turn up, they wouldn’t impress those of us who doubt the validity and value of standardized test results. Nor would they tell us about the possible negative effects that certain kinds of involvement might have on students’ creativity, psychological health, excitement about learning, their relationship with their parents, and so on.
The practice of forcing children to begin working what amounts to a second shift after they get home from a full day of school has absolutely no proven benefits before high school, and there are increasing reasons to doubt its value even in high school.[6] What kids need, therefore, are parents willing to question the conventional wisdom and to organize others to challenge school practices when that seems necessary. What kids don’t need is the kind of parental involvement that consists of pestering them to make sure they do their homework – whether or not it’s worth doing.
Exhortations for more “parental involvement” remind me of calls to be “a good citizen”: In the abstract, everyone is for it. But inspected closely, what’s most often meant by the term turns out to be considerably more complicated and even worthy of skepticism.
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Notes:
1. For example, see Lareau’s book Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1989).
2. Alfie Kohn, “Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 1998. Available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ofmk.htm.
3. I review research relevant to this distinction in my book The Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), chapter 2. Also see this 20-minute video presentation: http://cfee.me/PSPvidAK.
4. Ulrich Trautwein et al., “Between-Teacher Differences in Homework Assignments and the Development of Students’ Homework Effort, Homework Emotions, and Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology 101 (2009), p. 185.
5. Nancy E. Hill and Diana F. Tyson, “Parental Involvement in Middle School: A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Strategies That Promote Achievement,” Developmental Psychology 45 (2009): 740-63.
6. Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006); and, for a look at a new high school study, http://ow.ly/fzwxn.

© The Washington Post Company

Uniformity Is Not Excellence

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity.
Alfie Kohn; "Debunking the Case for National Standards," January 14, 2010, Education Week