Discussion of school test scores gets stuck on agendas
The response to another dismal performance on international math and science tests by U.S. high school students predictably ranges from attempts to explain away the differences to cries of alarm about our schools. Neither approach really answers what Americans should do.
Pyzhou/Wikimedia Commons
The reports and comments on American students’ poor showing on international-comparison tests of math and science have taken on a predictable sameness, become a stylized lament, commenting on the action like a hand-wringing Greek chorus.
Numerous articles have taken up the dirge as the latest round of testing has enthroned the kids of Shanghai as best in the world, one of the latest among them by David Barboza of the New York Times who reported Dec. 30 from the Chinese city.
The test at issue is the latest PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and given every three years to a sample of 15-year-olds in 60 to 65 countries. It tests math, science and reading in each country’s language.
“American students came in between 15th and 31st place in the three categories,” reports Barboza, who quickly softens the blow by writing, “France and Britain also fared poorly.” (Thank heavens!)
Of course, there has to be a reason for this poor showing, so the reporter quickly checks with the experts. And here is the first verse of the chorus: As with other countries in Asia, “Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation,” writes Barboza, summarizing what he hears.
And the Chinese admit this horror. They’re not keeping it a secret. Barboza quotes a Chinese expert: “Very rarely do children in other countries receive academic training as intensive as our children do,” said Sun Baohong, an authority on education at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
But test prep must have a downside and that’s the second verse of the chorus that arises around these stories. Barboza has another Chinese expert supply it. Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School, told the reporter that (in Barboza’s paraphrase) “Chinese schools emphasized testing too much, and produced students who lacked curiosity and the ability to think critically or independently.” The chorus tells us we’re safe because those are American virtues.
The third verse of the chorus is, of course, that statistics can lie. At best perhaps they are snapshots. James Fallows in his blog recently quoted at length from a university professor who covered this point excellently. For example, Shanghai, as Barboza reports, is not representative of China. And in the last “Bracey Report” before his death, renowned education researcher Gerald Bracey, commenting generally on international comparisons, said, in effect, not to worry, America’s best are as good as anybody’s, summarizing it this way: “Well-resourced schools serving wealthy neighborhoods are showing excellent results. Poorly resourced schools serving low-income communities of color do far worse.”
True as that is, I have a hard time accepting it as a good argument.
Nowadays, in counterpoint, another chorus enters stage right, carrying spears. They are the voices of education reform’s presently dominant fad: test-based teacher pay-for-performance. This group includes federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and several huge foundations with enough money to set the agenda: Gates-Buffet, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and a few others. Their role is not to minimize but to sound the alarm, pointing to the crisis as proof the reforms they advocate are essential. It’s time for action. In Barboza’s story, Duncan says the test scores are a “wake up call” for the U.S.
But back to China. Barboza quotes 9th grade teacher Li Zhen asking her 40-student class a question that requires understanding Euclid’s theorem of parallelograms: “Who in this class can tell me how to demonstrate two lines are parallel without using a proportional segment?”
Writes Barboza: “One by one, a series of students in this medium-size (sic) public school raised their hands. When Ms. Li called on them, the each stood politely by their desks and usually answered correctly. They returned to their seats only when she told them to sit down.”
Ask yourself two questions: Wouldn’t you want American kids to know geometry that well? Wouldn’t you want them disciplined and paying attention in class?
What the minimizing chorus does, although not really wrong on its points, is keep us from asking those kinds of questions, while the alarmist chorus tells us they already have the answer.
You probably answered yes to both of those questions and you’re probably uncomfortable with the sounds of the choruses. You don’t really know what to do and you’re not sure they’ve got it right, either. But something or some ways other countries approach education must make a difference. Because there are differences.
Barboza nods toward the alarmists with a few paragraphs about teacher training and pay but there’s not enough information to determine what teacher pay in Shanghai means in terms of lifestyle and social standing compared to the U.S. Does the profession attract the best and the brightest?
So, except for the following paragraph, the article sheds little light on what the international differences might be.
“Public school students in Shanghai often remain at school until 4 p.m., watch very little television and are restricted by Chinese law from working before the age of 16.”
That may be a clue that cultural shifts and not just education “reforms” are what America needs. We may be on the way, though: The football team stays late.
(For more on PISA, including Washington’s relatively good standing relative to other states, see “Your Child Left Behind” in the December Atlantic. There's a very good graphic.)
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 7:26 a.m. Inappropriate
I believe the last paragraph sums our problem up nicely. We do need a cultural shift. We need an emphasis on building a better work ethic for our young people, but this begins at home.
As parents, we are the primary teachers of our children. We teach work ethic, responsibility and the desire to do better. If we do not demand more of our children, they will fail in school. No “feel good” philosophy of child rearing will prepare our children for life. For years, I have espoused the idea that self-esteem is based on achieving something that you did not thing you could achieve. Like getting a “B” on a paper when you thought you would only get a “C”. For the last 40 years, we have been told the way to build self-esteem is to praise our children regardless of whether they succeed or fail. If a person fails, they need to know that they have failed, that it is unacceptable. They need to get up, and go at it again until they do not fail. We keep trying to change the education system; we need to change the parenting system. Parents have abrogated their responsibilities to the schools; they expect the school system to teach their child a work ethic. No, it is the parent’s responsibility. Demand more of your children it is good for them. Do not expect the school system to do what you as a parent have failed to do.
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 8:57 a.m. Inappropriate
It seems like we have two choices:
-- Pray that it won't be too much longer until the Chinese take over and have an opportunity to correct the deficiencies in our school system; or
-- Reconsider whether test-based rote learning is really and truly the essence of the educational enterprise.
Admittedly, it's a tough choice, but here's a hint. If rote learning is education, then Pavlov's dogs were "educated".
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 10:31 a.m. Inappropriate
key is this: "For example, Shanghai, as Barboza reports, is not representative of China"
That's because if your parents move from the countryside to Shanghai, you cannot attend those schools. Your school is back in the sticks where education still sucks. You are considered a rural peasant and as such won't get the chance of a good education.
Of course this article begs the question, what's up with it? Is it an attempt to get WA residents alarmed enough to drop the current set of standards teaching we just got around to approving? Cliff Mass has an excellent article on this whole mess, at least from the math education problem.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2011/01/common-core-math-standards-worse-for.html
And remember, all the math taught in high school today was known just after Calculus was invented, that's about 1780. You'd think that we'd have figured out how to teach it by now, and that text books wouldn't need to be renewed every year or so.
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 10:32 a.m. Inappropriate
Oh yeah, if we taught critical thinking in high school, voters wouldn't be so easily manipulated. Clearly corporate America doesn't want that.
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 11:40 a.m. Inappropriate
Yes I want kids to know geography. No I don't want them trained like good little communist tools. Is Dick Lilly crazy? I would never want my child's learning goal reduced to the "ideal" of command robotic memorization. Crimony, we used to be creative, intellectual, challenging, iconoclastic and independent. Those facets of "us" made us world leaders. What are we trying to achieve here?
Posted Thu, Jan 6, 11:57 p.m. Inappropriate
There is a mix of responsibility: teacher, curriculum, parent, student. So I partly agree with the conclusion that cultural shift is needed, but sometimes it is more than that, and sometimes there are "blocking factors" like bad curriculum that make the whole point moot.
Today I was helping in my second grade daughter's class with a supplemental math program that requires scan cards. There were 26 children. Most of the scanning went just fine, but there were a few children where the following happened:
1. A child could never find her folder with the cards (the teacher had given her several to replace what she kept losing), so she was way behind. Remember, these are second graders, so the parents in theory should be very involved and keeping track of this. But they are not. I don't know the particulars, I could describe some observations but that might not come across the right way. The main thing is: this child has cost the teacher a lot of extra time, with no educational benefit at all.
2. One card had lines connecting the dots on the cards. This was creative and individualistic, but it meant the cards could not be scanned. Who's responsible here? I assume the child drew the lines, but did the parents look over the homework at all? The bubbles were not filled in a way that would make them easy to scan anyways. I assume the parents let the child do the bubbles. So this one also cost the teacher an extra 10 mins.
Some parents "know" what they should do and don't do it. Others are, for whatever reason, incapable, ineffective or otherwise not adding any value whatsoever to their child's education. They may not expect much and so figure "what's the point."
The challenge is how to change that culture at home without coming across as ... politically incorrect .... .
Then there's curriculum. There are a lot of them out there. Some are absolute wastes of time. Some are ok. The big problem is if you think your curriculum is bad, any workarounds are going to take an incredible amount of time and be very challenging to fit in if your family is doing other things like music, sports, arts etc outside of the classroom. It is simply very hard to get a second grader or fourth grader to sit down for 30 mins of extra math when they have already had "math" in their school day, or what is described to them as math but what in reality may have very little computation in it.
Again we ask a lot of teachers if we expect them to create their own supplemental materials to compensate for bad curriculum, yet that's often what they do if they care and have a sense the curriculum is not going to include the amount of practice they think the children need.
Posted Fri, Jan 7, 5:52 p.m. Inappropriate
There are a number of issues jumbled up together here and none of them are answered by the extreme proposals from either of the polarized camps of thought on any of them.
Yes, we want our children to master computational skills and the standard mathematical algorithms. And yes we want them to be able to understand the underlying concepts so they can think critically and creatively when presented with problems. These are not mutually exclusive.
Yes, we want to give every child the support they need to reach grade level standards - and we believe that (except for a few) they are all capable of reaching those Standards. And yes, we also want to support the advanced work of the students who are working beyond Standards. These are not mutually exclusive.
The main challenge is clear and well-known: the widespread underperformance of students from low-income homes.
The proposed solutions from the two far ends of the spectrum are both completely insane. Ed reformers seem to think that the whole problem is that the teachers stink - or, more precisely, the teacher contracts stink. None of their solutions make any sense. It's not as if there is an army of better teachers who would take the job and be successful with the same students if they were eligible for 5% incentive pay. Does anyone really think that the difference in peformance between students at Aki Kurose and students at Eckstein is attributable to the teachers at those schools? Does anyone really believe that if the schools swapped teaching staffs that the student test scores would be swapped as well? The teachers cannot be held responsible for the student outcomes because they can't much impact them.
There are folks on the other side of the spectrum who think that the whole problem is that the students' families stink, but they don't offer any solutions either.
The District is taking a completely bizarre approach. When students underperform they send out coaches for the teachers. Wrong! It's not the teachers who need help; it's the students.
No one wants to talk about the real solution: the reliable delivery of early and effective interventions for students working below grade level. People don't want to talk about it because it's expensive.
The "Run It Like A Business" idiots don't seem to understand that the primary motivating factor that makes businesses work, profit, isn't there to support the businessworld solutions imported to the classroom.
They have this misplaced belief that the kinds of productivity gains that have been realized in other industries can be realized in teaching as well. They can't. Teaching and learning continue to be human endeavors that require the personal attention of a professional.
There are now a number of efforts underway to de-professionalize teaching. They include scripted lessons, even scripted responses and reactions to predictable student responses and reactions to the scripted lessons. Teach for America another effort to de-professionalize teaching.
There are now a number of efforts underway to use technology to leverage teachers. Online education self-directed by the student with a teacher available for support and teacher monitoring.
These methods may work for some students, but, by and large, teaching will always require the physical presence of a professional teacher who has the training, experience, creativity, and license to improvise solutions for individual students in real time. That is exactly what is expensive in the New Economy. Post-modern productivity tools just cannot be applied here.
I wish they could. If someone could find a way to do it I hope they will step forward. There's billions to be made by whoever figures this out.
In the current economic and political context which follows thrity years of tax revolts, there just isn't any money to do education right and there isn't any reason to believe that the dysfunctional fortress education bureaucracy culture would do it right if they had the money.
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