Back to School, and to Widening Inequality

 Robert Reich

 American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children. Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points. The gap in the mathematical abilities of American kids, by income, is one of widest among the 65 countries participating in the Program for International Student Achievement.

On their reading skills, children from high-income families score 110 points higher, on average, than those from poor families. This is about the same disparity that exists between average test scores in the United States as a whole and Tunisia.

The achievement gap between poor kids and wealthy kids isn’t mainly about race. In fact, the racial achievement gap has been narrowing.

It’s a reflection of the nation’s widening gulf between poor and wealthy families. And also about how schools in poor and rich communities are financed, and the nation’s increasing residential segregation by income.

Why Education Reform Fails

Jack Rothman.

Co-authored by Amy Rothman, psychotherapist and mediator in Los Angeles

 American education just received another beating. This one came in a December report from the Program for international Student Assessment (PISA). While the United States is the top economic and military power globally, once again our 15-year-olds scored below average in math and only middling in science and reading. American students did not make it into the top 20 on any of these tests across the 65 participating nations.

American education has been under constant criticism since the middle of the last century. A galaxy of reforms has been mounted to address the issues, but these have not produced noticeable results. We live in a permanent environment of educational reform and educational failure. The reforms focus on fixing things within the schoolhouse, but the fundamental problem that needs fixing lies outside in the broader society. 

 Diane Ravitch's recent book, Reign of Error, gives a thorough and well-researched review of our educational plight and can serve as a field manual on reform issues. In the book she excoriates the privatization movement she once championed, decrying charter schools, vouchers, "Race to the Top" testing, numeric accountability, and the rest. She believes privatization, under the guise of choice, seeks to neuter teachers' unions, use test scores to fire teachers, and shut down overwhelmed public schools. To Ravitch, this reform isn't aimed as much at improving public schools as it is at replacing and Walmartizing them. It is a type of reform that hedge fund investors drool over because it provides an unending pool of potential customers to fill the pockets of corporate executives.

Education Reform - Now What ?

Jeff Bryant

All the reviews of last year’s top education news stories are out and the consensus view is 2013 was a “pivotal year” for the nation’s education policy, to quote Texas superintendent John Kuhn.

The pivot from what to what has various interpretations, but 2013 was a year when “an education uprising” made many left-leaning people’s lists of positive developments.

Just like what’s happening in the economic arena, where a populist rage against inequality and systemic unfairness is causing even President Obama to take notice, anger over inequity and unfairness of policies labeled as education “reform” has stirred the masses into action and sent a clear warning sign to policy leaders in 2014, an election year.

Dysfunction Junction

Media Failure to accurately examine U.S. education

Fareed Zakari on CNN presents the neoliberal view of schools and the PISA results with Joe Klein, Wendy Kopp of Teach for America , Sal Kahn  and Thomas Friedman. http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/12/14/exp-gps-1215-pisa-education-p1.cnn.html

See other posts for what the PISA scores actually mean, 
http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2013/12/what-does-pisa-report-tell-us-about-us.html  .
The Zakari presentation continues the promotion  of the neoliberal/corporate views of school reform.  The program would have benefitted from having some teachers who actually work in schools  on the program.

What Does the PISA Report Tell Us About U.S. Education?

How to fix education and schools

How to "fix things fast" in education: Support libraries and librarians
Sent to TIME Magazine, Dec 14, 2010

TIME's report that the US "lags behind" countries like Finland and South Korea" 
on the PISA reading test ("In school, China on the rise," Dec 20), and TIME's 
positive evaluation of the film Waiting for Superman (The Best Movies of 2010, 
Dec. 20), leads to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with 
American education and that "we have to fix things fast." A closer look at the 
data shows that what is wrong is our unacceptably high rate of child poverty.

Poverty had a huge impact on American PISA reading test scores. American 
students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch 
averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any of the 34 member countries 
of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).  Those in 
schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch 
averaged 527. Among the OECD countries, only Korea and Finland did better.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in 
poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries. 

Our overall scores are less impressive because we have one of the highest rates 
of child poverty among all the countries tested. According to a 2005 UNICEF 
report, the US has a child poverty rate of over 21.9%; in contrast, the rate in 
high-scoring Finland is only 2.8%.