NAEP VERSUS NEWT: Us against the world!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2011

EPILOGUE—ARE THEY SMARTER THAN OUR (RICHEST) THIRD GRADERS: Do American students stink to high heaven? How about their lazy, incompetent teachers?

The claim that American teachers stink has become Standard Plutocrat Dogma. The plutocrats and their scripted tribunes love to recite this familiar tale. As this script has taken hold, the liberal and progressive worlds have been too dumb and too uncaring to put up much of a fight.

When NAEP scores show our low-income kids improving, we liberals yawn and go back to sleep. Ditto with any attempt to explore plutocrat claims about the way our crummy students stink on international tests.

That said, how do American kids perform on such tests if you adjust for poverty factors? How do our schools compare with glorious Finland when such adjustments are made? Last week, we cited a claim by David Sirota at Salon. Let's review what he said:

SIROTA (12/9/11): As 2011 draws to a close, we can confidently declare that one of the biggest debates over education is—mercifully—resolved. We may not have addressed all the huge challenges facing our schools, but we finally have empirical data ruling out apocryphal theories and exposing the fundamental problems.

We’ve learned, for instance, that our entire education system is not “in crisis,” as so many executives in the for-profit education industry insist when pushing to privatize public schools. On the contrary, results from Program for International Student Assessment exams show that American students in low-poverty schools are among the highest achieving students in the world.

As we noted, Sirota set a low bar with his assertion that “our entire education system is not in crisis.” But how about his broader claim—the claim that American students “in low-poverty schools” are among the highest achieving in the world on the Program for International Student Assessment?

The PISA is the international test on which Finland made its bones. Let’s look at the basic data which lie behind Sirota’s claim.

(All the data which follow come from the report on the 2009 PISA by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. Just click here.)

The PISA tests 15-year-old students in various countries and sub-units. The most recent PISA, in 2009, emphasized reading literacy. These are the scores of the nine top-scoring countries and sub-units, along with the OECD average and the score of the United States:

PISA, Reading Literacy, 2009
Shanghai/China 556
Korea 539
Finland 536
Hong Kong/China 533
Singapore 526
Canada 524
New Zealand 521
Japan 520
Australia 515
United States 500
OECD average 493

American students scored well below those of the highest-scoring countries and sub-units, including wondrous Finland. Such PISA scores have produced a million plane rides to Finland, followed by inane attempts to explain how the Finns do so well.

Looking at those overall scores, American students don’t measure up to the students in Finland. But Sirota said that American kids “in low-poverty schools” are among the highest achieving students in the world on the PISA. He refers to the kinds of data summarized on page 15 of that NCES report. This is how those test scores look if you separate out American kids who attend a certain type of school:

PISA, Reading Literacy, 2009
Shanghai/China 556
U.S. students in schools with less than ten percent free or reduced-price lunch 551
Korea 539
Finland 536
Hong Kong/China 533
Singapore 526
Canada 524
New Zealand 521
Japan 520
Australia 515
OECD average 493

In this country, socioeconomic status of students is typically measured in terms of eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch. On that chart, we have included the average score of students who attend schools where fewer than ten percent of the students qualify for such subsidies. Rather plainly, American teachers, with their infernal unions, haven’t managed to ruin those kids. Students in Finland don’t score as high as this sub-set of American kids.

Similar data obtain on the TIMSS, another major international test. For results from the 2007 testing in fourth- and eighth-grade math, just click here.

What sorts of conclusions should we draw from these data, which are rarely discussed? That depends. Let’s note a few major points:

First, a small percentage of American children attend schools of this type. It’s important to understand a key fact: Reduced-price lunch is not a measure of “poverty;” neither is free lunch. According to the USDA, children are eligible for free lunch if they come from families with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty level. The cut-off for reduced-price lunch extends up to 185 percent of poverty.

Across the country, roughly 45 percent of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. A very small percentage of students attend schools where less than ten percent quality for these subsidies; generally, these are schools in our most advantaged neighborhoods. (Example: In many Maryland counties, no children attend such schools. No such schools exist in these counties.) These would be very low-poverty schools. In many of these schools, none of the students would come from families with incomes below the poverty level. (Good!)

For that reason, people should be careful when citing data like these. We should be clear—for the most part, we’re talking about groups of kids in our most selective neighborhoods. On the other hand, American students still do rather well at the next level of social advantage. Here’s how those PISA reading scores look at the next level down:

PISA, Reading Literacy, 2009
Shanghai/China 556
U.S. students in schools with less than ten percent free or reduced-price lunch 551
Korea 539
Finland 536
Hong Kong/China 533
U.S. students in schools with 10-25 percent free or reduced-price lunch 527
Singapore 526
Canada 524
New Zealand 521
Japan 520
Australia 515
OECD average 493

As noted, schools with this level of free or reduced price lunch are still serving student populations which are substantially more advantaged than the American average. But those foreign test scores start seeming less magical when we factor income in.

This brings us back to those foolish articles which are constantly written about the magic of Finland.

Remember: In the American context, free or reduced-price lunch is not a measure of poverty. Many of the American schools singled out in the data above have no poverty at all. (Good!) But there seems to be almost no student poverty in Finland whatsoever. (Good!) According to this report by UNICEF, these were the child poverty figures for two well-known developed nations in 2005:

Child poverty/UNICEF 2005
United States: 21.9 percent
Finland: 2.8 percent

And yet, people keep flying off to Finland, wondering how they do it! The reason for this behavior is clear. Whatever we think of American students, American “journalists” plainly can’t read, write, reason or work with data. American journalists are plainly among the dumbest folk in the world. (They’re also among the most scripted, generally with plutocrat scripts.)

We’ve never cited those PISA or TIMSS data because they’re hard to interpret and may tend to be misleading. On the other hand, those data help us see how foolish it is when our journalists, in thrall to plutocrat scripts, keep writing those foolish reports about miraculous Finland. In the international context, “poverty” can be hard to measure. But if UNICEF knows what it’s talking about, Finland has very little student poverty. It isn’t clear that Finland does better with non-poverty students than we do in this country, although it may be that they do.

Finland has very few immigrant kids—and Finland has very little child poverty. Beyond that, Finland didn’t spend three or four centuries working to eliminate literacy among one major part of its population. Despite these blindingly obvious cultural differences, American journalists keep flying to Finland and puzzling about the way the Finns do it. Let’s say it one last time:

These silly reports say little about American students or teachers. They mainly suggest that American “journalists” ought to go take a good long rest. This includes liberals and progressives who pimp the Finland bandwagon, cherry-picking the fact that Finland pays high salaries to its teachers and the fact that its teachers are unionized. Right from the jump, the comparison between the U.S. and Finland doesn’t make a lot of sense. Liberals should simply say so—and we ought to know how to explain why.

Is that claim by Sirota correct? Are American students in low-poverty schools among the highest achieving students in the world? Those NCES data may tend to be misleading. But we’d love to see that claim fleshed out—examined, sifted, poked and prodded. This raises a rather obvious question:

In a world where plutocrat scripts are ruling the discourse, why haven’t liberals and progressives already done so? For example, why haven’t Rachel and Lawrence been on the case?

Answer: Rachel and Lawrence don’t seem to care about low-income kids or about their ratty prole teachers. Rachel and Lawrence and other progressives just flat-out don’t seem to care.

We liberals don’t seem to care about kids of this type. What fact could be more clear?

Tomorrow: What Winerip said