Education Rhetoric & Reporting vs. Reality

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Mar 14, 2009 at 20:30


This is a continuation of my education diary from last weekend, "Obama Out Of Touch On Education Concerns", but not the continuation of that diary.  There is more to come on this, but I wanted to get part of it out today, dealing with (1) perceptions, and (2) internal differences vs. international comparisons regarding test scores.  These both go to the power of rhetoric and reporting on education to produce a biased and inaccurate public perception of the nature of the challenges we face. First is a simple series of questions asked in the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll I reported on last week.  It shows that people have a much worse impression of schools nationwide than they do of schools in their own community.  In turn, they have an even better impression of schools their own children go to.  The conclusions is inescapable: the more people have to rely on media reports, the worse they think schools are.  The more they can rely on direct knowledge, the better they think schools are.  Tables on the flip--with more on test score comparions.
Paul Rosenberg :: Education Rhetoric & Reporting vs. Reality
Perception Of Nation's Schools

When asked about the nation's schools, people have a generally dim view of how well they perform, with just under 1/4 giving them an "A" or a "B":

Perception of Local Schools

People have a decidedly better impression of schools in their community, with just under 1/2 giving them an "A" or a "B":

Perception of Children's School

And when it comes to the schools their own children attend, the levels of approval actually seem to reflect a realistic assessment overal--most schools are quite good, but schools serving low-income minority students tend to be underfunded and incapable of dealing with the wide range of social problems that make learning much more difficult for the students they serve.  Just under 3/4 giving them an "A" or a "B":

In short, the number of people giving schools an "A" or a "B" triples if they are asked to grade the school their own children attend, as opposed to the nation's schools as a whole.

To further re-emphaize how demographically limited school failure is, consider these international comparisons.  This is from an online fact-sheet I created in the late 1990s, using data from 1992, but more recent data has shown similar patterns.

In reading, US scores and ranks are among the highest in the world. The scores of our best students--the top 10%, 5% and 1%--are the world's best compared to students from 31 other nations.

For example, in the study,"How In The World Do Students Read?" (1992) US students placed as follows:

    9-year olds: 2nd of 31
    14-year olds: 8th of 31 (statistically, could be anywhere from 2nd to 11th)

In math and science, US scores are near to international averages.  Because many countries are very tightly bunched, this often places the US near the bottom in rank, but virtually indistinguishable from the international average score.  Tiny differences in score translate into large differences in rank, which often mean nothing at all.

For example, in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1996, US students placed as follows:

    8th grad math: 28th of 41 (statistically, could be anywhere from 21st to 34th)
    8th grad science: 17th of 41 (statistically, could be anywhere from 10th to 27th)

The real difference isn't between America and other countries, it's within America, between the advantaged and the deprived.

Well-Supported American students and schools in international comparisons.

Combined IAEP-2 and NAEP Mathematics
Proficiency Scores for
Selected High-Acheiving Student Groups. (11)
Group                                                           Score
 Advantaged urban students, U.S. schools       292
 Asian students, U.S. schools                           287
 Students in Taiwan                                          285
 Students in top third of U.S. schools              284
 Students in Korea                                            283
 Students in Hungary                                        277
 White students, U.S. Schools                          277
Note: "Advantaged urban" is a NAEP category, but it really means advantaged suburban.   (IAEP-2): Second International Assessment of Math and Science

Under-Supported American students and schools in international comparisons.

Combined IAEP-2 and NAEP Mathematics
Proficiency Scores for
Selected Low-Acheiving Student Groups. (12)

Group                                                           Score
 Students in Jordan                                               246
 Students in Mississippi                                       246
 Hispanic students, U.S. schools                          245
 Students in bottom third of U.S. schools            240
 Disadvantaged urban students, U.S. schools       239
 Black students, U.S. Schools                              236

In short, the educational problems we face are the inherited disadvantaged of race and class--precisely what conservative elites do not want us thinking about.  Instead of facing this reality and dealing with it, they have managed to convince us that the problem lies with "public education" in general.  A pretty neat trick if you're Grover Norquist or Karl Rove.

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Education Rhetoric & Reporting vs. Reality | 21 comments
if i remember correctly (4.00 / 3)
One of the key characteristics non-middle-class parents use for evaluating their school is how they (parents) are treated by school personnel.  In any case, the evidence is that parents use criteria for "good" schools that do not have a direct relationship to the actual educational quality of the school.  This is why parents may choose a crappy "choice" school--the staff may treat them better.

For non-middle-class parents this makes a lot of sense, since they have likely not had particularly good education themselves, and do not have the background to easily make judgments about good or bad schooling. What other proxy variables do they have to use to make a determination about whether the school is good?  They are dependent (and know they are dependent) upon middle-class teachers to do the class transfer work of education.

Interestingly, there have been more recent efforts to equip parents with school survey tools, so that they can construct their own "report cards" on their schools, giving them more concrete and hopefully more valid ways for making judgments about the educational context there.

I always worry, however, when the "solution" to parent disempowerment is to turn them into researchers--just what those who are constructing the empowerment tools already are.  In other words, if you become more like "us" then you will be better off.  While allows researchers to stay within their relative comfort zone.  Not that I oppose this kind of work, though.  Just something knocking around in my head.

Do you have the numbers on how poor parents view their local schools vs. privileged parents?  Although you would need to know "why" they would make a judgment.  I could imagine privileged parents cutting their school down because it doesn't have enough gifted and talented schools, making their view at the same relative level as poor parents, but for very different sets of reasons.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

Good Points (4.00 / 4)
Unfortunately, I don't have cross-tabs.

What I think the totality of your comment points to is the complexity of even evaluating schools and empowering parents to become truly effective advocates.  This is part of why the right has become so powerful.  Rather than look at each particular facet of society and ask, "What are the issues here? What are the concerns? What are the problems that need to be solved?" as liberals instinctively would, they ask a much simpler quetion, "How can we remake this into a weapon in our war against liberalis,?"

While liberals tend to have their own limiting assumptions, and have problems hearing certain sorts of concerns, they are at least sensitive to the existence of such complexities, even when they don't live up to all that's required in dealing with them.  Conservatives look at liberals concerned with such complexities, and think, "Wow!  Look at them!  They're all distracted thinking about all their pointy-headed ideas!  What a bunch of losers!  Let's just go in and wipe them out!"

Well, IMHO, the reality is that liberals have to get a whole lot better at fighting conservatives in order to defend and preserve the space to get a whole lot better at problem-solving the sorts of issues you raise.  And I'm just afraid that that's 2 or 3 orders of complexity beyond where Obama is operating.  Of course, he may be 3 or 4 orders of complexity beyond George Bush, but that only gets him a little over half way to where he really needs to be t actually solve the problems we face.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Fascinating (4.00 / 6)
What surprises me is how deep into our social fabric the tentacles of right-wing populist demagoguery have managed to extend. The damage is severe, widespread, and in the short term, virtually irreparable.

I've been pondering the wreckage again since this morning, when Paul diaried the Amy Goodman report on the student loan scandal. Charter schools, creationism, white academies in the South -- all of that turns out to be the tip of the iceberg. In educational institutions, as elsewhere in our society, the real destruction has resulted from turning us against ourselves.

I had my arguments with Clark Kerr back in the day, but the University and State University campuses of California, and the City and State University systems of New York were among the true marvels of our age, and are one of the main reasons for the enormous post-war success of the economies of both states. Virtually nothing anywhere else in the world could equal them, and if you add the land-grant colleges to the list, it's not surprising that the United States' system of higher education was widely admired, and attempts were made to emulate it all over the world.

And we've pissed it all away; that's the galling thing. (Well, not all of it, as Paul's statistics show, but this is a sore subject with me, so please forgive a little hyperbole.) If Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, and the ghosts of Howard Jarvis and William F. Buckley were brought before me in chains on Judgment Day, their contempt for free public education is the one crime which might cause me to condemn them to eternal hellfire; the rest of their evils combined would scarcely merit a month in purgatory by comparison.

[ Parent ]
Yes, And To Think, They Had The Gall To Accuse US Of Destroying Western Civilization! (4.00 / 2)
Do they ever get any of their material from anything but pure projection?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
In just two generations, (4.00 / 1)
our public education policy went from the GI Bill to contracts of indentured servitude. We now build prisons instead of schools, do our best to enshrine ignorance in what remains of our curricula, and turn our teachers into pieceworkers. We've become a country which burns its own libraries, and points with pride to the ashes.

God forbid we should get what we deserve.

[ Parent ]
Liberal tautologies and foregone conclusions (0.00 / 0)
The real difference isn't between America and other countries, it's within America, between the advantaged and the deprived.

This is a conclusion that will probably shock at least 2% of the demographic that reads OpenLeft, and the other 98% will be delighted to have their prior opinions confirmed, yet again, on the basis of...

What?

Combined IAEP-2 and NAEP test scores.

And what, exactly, does the International Assessment of Educational Progress actually measure?

It measures choosing the "right" response among four or five ready-made responses about snippets of prose or tiny puzzles.

But isn't that an awkward way to describe it? "It measures choosing." Don't you mean it measures the ability to choose, and by extension, reading ability and math ability?

No.

Pseudo-scientific industries like "educational testing" impress the rubes by aping the methodology of the physical sciences, and pretending to measure something, with a bogus accuracy supposedly guaranteed by infinite repetition, but it makes about as much sense to say the IAEP measures "reading ability" as saying that Galileo's famous experiments on the leaning tower of Pisa measured "the ability to fall."

Like most other readers of OpenLeft, I also subscribe to the liberal tautology that disadvantaged children suffer educational disadvantages, but I don't need a bogus methodology to "prove" it.

Instead of confirming tautologies and foregone conclusions with pseudo-scientific mimicry of the physical sciences, it would be infinitely better to abolish the current torture-regime of infinite testing, and treat our children more like human beings than tools for confirming one political ideology or another.

Once Again Your Dogmatic Superiority Renders You Counterproductive (4.00 / 1)
It must be quite comforting to imagine that you're the only one who reads open left who doesn't see anything wrong with standardized tests.  Quite comforting, and utterly delusional.

The whole point here is to take the sorts of arguments and evidence that are being used to justify destroying public education, and turn them back on themselves.  Accepting an argument for the sake of refuting it is not the same as accepting the argument.  But this is something that forever escapes your grasp, because the real point of all your comments is to prove your own moral superiority.

It's extremely tiresome.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Remedial reading (0.00 / 0)
It must be quite comforting to imagine that you're the only one who reads open left who doesn't see anything wrong with standardized tests.  

This implies that I don't see anything wrong with standardized tests, and imagine that everyone else does.

You probably meant to say...

It must be quite comforting to imagine that you're the only one who reads open left who sees anything wrong with standardized tests.

This is inaccurate, but at least it makes sense, in the context.

So tell your mommy to sign you up for remedial reading next summer, because your unfortunate tendency to demonize anyone who doesn't agree with you has reduced your reading ability to the level of a second-grader, and you're old enough to know better.

     

[ Parent ]
And now it's time for another email to MSNBC... (0.00 / 0)
...urging them to hire David Sirota for a full-time gig, and signed by "Andrew Laurens," an upper-middle-class suburbanite who plans to buy a car, a 50-inch flat-screen TV, and everything else they advertise on MSNBC, within the next year.
[ Parent ]
If disadvantaged children have a harder time (4.00 / 1)
prospering in their schools, why aren't people talking about that instead of "schools"?  Could it be because it will be construed as racist? Everytime somebody tries to fix something in Detroit, some people (like Monica Conyers) stand up and start screaming racism and take the whole damn thing off track.  Removing Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (the crook, dallier, and perjurer) from office while he was being tried for perjury even devoled into charges of "racism".  

Back on topic, what is the fix for schools with high numbers of poor academically performing and disadvantage children?   One could be to change the "work first" focus of the TANF legisltion to focus on parenting skills while providing more support systems for their children such as Even/Head Start.  Another could be more academic programs for kids in summer and before and after school.

Why isn't Obama talking about more money for these kinds of schools and programs as opposed to charter schools and merit pay?  A different bureacracy is not going to be a miracle cure or drive out the ineptness and cronyism that keeps bad teachers from getting fired in the first place.  They will simply give all of the merit pay increases to their pals.  "I like you, here's a raise.  You, on the other hand, have been a pain in my ass with your relentless advocacy for you students.  You aren't a "team player", and you don't deserve any merit pay."

We had a story break some time ago about technology and the Detroit Public Schools.   The staff of one elementary school freaking stole all of the technology that was suppose to be put into the school. I'm talking about the principal, janitors, teachers, lap tops, work stations, cameras - it was disgusting.    I don't recall hearing what ever happened to them.   Probably nothing given the state of Detroit Public Schools.   As an advantaged surbanite, I miss my city; and I am willing to help pay to bring it back.   Until they fix the Detroit Public Schools, Detroit will never recover.

Schools in MI are not funded by property taxes. The state funds schools from state revenues and not very well.  But then, Michigan is in partisan gridlock, broke, and not funding much of anything.  Our current unemployment rate is 11.6%.

BLS
42 OHIO 8.8
43 INDIANA 9.2
44 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 9.3
45 NEVADA 9.4
46 NORTH CAROLINA 9.7
47 OREGON 9.9
48 CALIFORNIA 10.1
49 RHODE ISLAND 10.3
50 SOUTH CAROLINA 10.4
51 MICHIGAN 11.6  

This Is The Problem In A Nutshell (4.00 / 1)
Expecting schools to fix all the ills of society is a recipe for continued failure.  You can't have successful schools in a failing society. They have to be part of a larger turnaround program.

The failure to grasp this fundamental fact represents an astonishing blind spot on Obama's part.

Surely he realized this once upon a time when he used to be a community organizer.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Teachers (4.00 / 4)
Obama should not continue to frame education as something that is broken and in desperate need of reform. This is especially important with regard to using language that paints as a large part of the problem those doing the teaching. This type of rhetoric will support a continued erosion of the profession in the pubic eye, as well as have a chilling effect within our schools.

Saying that we've let "our teacher quality fall short" and tying teacher pay to student achievement is demoralizing to those of us in the classroom working 60+ hours a week with outdated equipment, crumbling schools, and parents who abdicate their parental responsibility - factors those in the classroom have NO control over.

Painting with such a broad brush as Obama's statement this week did feeds stereotypes developed over a long period of time by the right. Obama's statements should be more clear, more positive, and seek to build on the successes of our education system, not play to the lesser angles of mass politics.

If teaching is so easy, then by all means get your degree, pass your certification test(s), get your license, and see if you can last longer than the five years in the classroom 50% of those who enter the profession never make it to.

[ Parent ]
He said what he meant. (0.00 / 0)
Obama is a huge disappointment to me.  He is just another insider with a different group of special interests.    
[ Parent ]
You should read this. (0.00 / 0)
Schools - are we headed for national tests and standards?

OMG, Obama might as well put implants in our arms.  

[ Parent ]
that sounds pretty fatalist (0.00 / 0)
If we have to fix society in order to fix our public schools, then we might as well give up and switch to a voucher system.

The truth about Saxby Chambliss
[ Parent ]
That's Not Even Close To What I Said Or Meant (0.00 / 0)
Especially since most of our public schools are already so good that Money magazine advised its readers not to waste their cold hard cash on private schools.

But the schools that are under-performing are primarily inner-city schools in communities with a wide range of social ills.  Not least of which is 30+ years of flat wages, and increased environmental degradation.  Give us an economy where everyone shares the prosperity, where those on the bottom have hope again, where there are visible signs that children are cared for and cherished by their society, and things can be changed dramatically.

Now, of course, there's a whole lot more than that which we could also wish for.  But that's not what all this test score scare nonsense is all about.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I know that's not what you meant... (0.00 / 0)
but it's a logical response to what you said. If you tie education to relatively intractable problems then many people will just throw their arms up in despair.  

The truth about Saxby Chambliss
[ Parent ]
There's Nothing Intractable (0.00 / 0)
We just need to stop the conservatives from creating the problems in the first place.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
strategic question (0.00 / 0)
Paul, this is a legitimate question - not an attack - but is it strategically smart to emphasize that academic success is largely a product of external factors such as race and class rather than the quality of our public schools? Wouldn't the obvious moderate response to this post be that we don't need any educational reform, that we shouldn't increase funding for our schools? I'm sure you don't mean that our schools are good enough so they don't need more money. But your analysis is easily twisted around.

I hope no one here is so focused on the merit pay debate that they don't care about school funding. I could be wrong, but I thought funding was the big cahuna, and the merit pay issue was just a bone thrown to the Republicans.

The truth about Saxby Chambliss

I'm Not Sure There IS A Big Cahuna (0.00 / 0)
Or even a little one, for that matter.

"No cajones, no cahunas," that's what I thought the slogan was.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
clarification (0.00 / 0)
Are you saying that merit pay might be too bitter a pill for you to swallow in exchange for a big increase in funding, say, to reduce class sizes or increase teacher salaries or whatever?

The truth about Saxby Chambliss
[ Parent ]
Education Rhetoric & Reporting vs. Reality | 21 comments
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