Yesterday I cited the statistic that 67 percent of Americans believe that the American education system is in crisis. Some of you questioned that notion. After all, for many of you, your schools are perfectly adequate. Your kids are learning their math facts. Your teachers are polished and smart. You meet regularly with the teachers to discuss your kids' progress.
It's worth noting that some of you have these schools which range from adequate to excellent, because you can afford to live in the right neighborhood or pay to send your kids to private schools, you are educated and informed, and your kids are well fed, smart, and motivated. (We bloggers and blog readers are an exceptional bunch.) Not everybody is so lucky.
But let's go back to the basic question. Are our schools really in crisis? In an excellent book, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
Tyack and Cuban are correct that most schools are performing just as they have for a hundred years. However, urban schools have been consistently bad. As I said yesterday, 1/3 of kids don't graduate from high school. That's an average. If you just look at urban schools, that percentage is much higher. I talked to activists in Philadelphia who told me about schools in their neighborhood where only 1 in 10 kids graduated.
In this economy, we need every kid graduating from high school. The type of jobs that used to provide decent wages for poorly educated individuals don't exist any more. The steel mills have closed. The factories have moved to China. If you lack a high school education, you are more likely to be unemployed and to make less money than those who graduate from high school.
Then there's the troubling correlation between educational achievement and income. The number one variable that explains education achievement isn't curriculum styles or computers in the classroom. It's income. Sure you have your kids that manage to beat the odds. My parents did. But they are outliers.
For the most part, the wealth of your community will determine how much your kid learns. This applies not only to broad diferences between the rich and the poor, but even among the fine gradations of income within the middle class. Last summer, the New York Times ran a graph that demonstrations that the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score. Last spring, I fooled around with the numbers and found that even within my very middle class corner of New Jersey, those findings held.
That extreme correlation between income and achievement disturbs me. Our schools should be a place that levels economic stratification. The great promise of our country has always been not pure equality, but an equality of opportunity. Let the smartest, hard working kids have an equal shot at achievement. Sadly, that's not the case. The rich replicate the rich.
So, I do think that there is an educational crisis in this country. The harder question is why we are at this point and what changes can occur. I'm going to slowly build my case throughout the week.
Apt. 11d 
so (your para 7) is it wealth of the community or of the parents that matters? Option 2 means that my kids, as professors’ kids, will do fine wherever — I can send them to public school, their performance will be the same, and maybe incidentally raise the level of the whole school as well. Option 1 suggests that that’s not good enough (wrt my own kids’ performance) and I should still be angling for a fancy neighborhood. I’d sure prefer the non-fancy public school option on both financial and social-good grounds.
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re: what about kids from high SES families that attend schools with a lower SES average?
I don’t know, but this is a big, big concern for our family as well. Some literature says that the peer group matters more than the family income. But I’m not sure.
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I’m going to make a pitch for Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, both by Judith Rich Harris. She came absolutely out of left field for me, broadly claiming that parents have little influence on their kids besides genetics and that our kids very much mold themselves on the views and attitudes of their peers.
If you buy this, yes, the schools are hugely important in our kids’ outcomes – not importantly because of teacher quality, but because the kids are aping their classmates. I see this in my kids, they are very much forming their aspirations by those of the kids around them. If their classmates want to be rocket scientists (yay!) they will want to be rocket scientists. If their classmates want to be drug dealers (boo!) they will want to be drug dealers.
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Are you sure about the data?
I know in Canada they count it slightly differently – rather than looking at straight graduation rates, they look at how many 20-24 year olds have a high school diploma (this is the measure the OECD uses I think). In Canada they’ve said that we’re in the middle of the pack with about a 10% rate and the US has 12. Here are two links:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-004-x/2005004/8984-eng.htm#a
http://www.oecd.org/document/52/0,3343,en_2649_39263238_45897844_1_1_1_1,00.html
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“…they look at how many 20-24 year olds have a high school diploma…”
Canada also has a lot of immigrants, so how does that work when computing high school graduation?
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Not sure Amy. If anything I’d guess that immigrant studens may take the extra year or two to graduate that counting in the 20s allows for.
I’m mostly curious as to why the internal US numbers are so different than the ones we use to compare Canada to the US. (As collected by the OECD).
But on the OECD spreadsheet I believe they also do track actual graduations and the US scores higher. (78% in 2007 for the US vs 76% in 2007 for Canada; OECD average is 82% in that year.)
I do know that we invest quite a bit in our local board with programmes designed to help people with alternatives means of getting a diploma.
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Graduation rates can be computed in any number of ways. I think one method commonly used in the US is the Cumulative Promotion Index, which measures “on time” graduation. Of course, this would produce different results than other methods, such as one that also counts 20-somethings who possess GEDs as graduates.
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dave s. – you are scaring the crap out of me
we are also very, very concerned about the question ‘what about kids from high SES families that attend schools with a lower SES average?’
laura – would love it if you’d summarize and/or comment on the data in an upcoming post.
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I totally agree with you. Education is not a crisis for me because of where I live and my income level. In the city, education is definitely a crisis, even for middle class kids and their parents, where they may or may not make it into a charter school and they can’t afford private school tuition. I feel slightly guilty every day, but I do the best I can to advocate for better schools. I lobby to increase taxes for better schools, and I remain as active as I can in my public school system even though I teach in a private school. Heck, if the public school system had a more reasonable certification process, I might be in a public school–and that is a problem, I think.
My son, who’s in a public school, is definitely influenced by his peers, and I’m not always happy with what his peers value. So far, it’s minor, like video games vs. reading, but there are also the differing goals like going or not going to college. So far, my son feels that his goals do not align with his peers and that’s okay. But it’s definitely more of a challenge to navigate those differences.
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We live in a wealthy school district in Georgia, so education is not a crisis for us. In fact, it’s quite excellent. However, our county had massive budget cuts. I can only imagine how these cuts have affected the poorer schools. Cutting out a paraprofessional at a rich public school isn’t a big deal. Cutting out a paraprofessional at a poor school, where parents work multiple jobs with no vacation/sick days, and therefore can’t pick up the slack when there are staff cuts, is brutal.
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Classical High School in the middle of Providence has 58% of students who receive free or reduced lunch. Yet its graduation rate is 93%. Why?
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” I see this in my kids, they are very much forming their aspirations by those of the kids around them. If their classmates want to be rocket scientists (yay!) they will want to be rocket scientists. If their classmates want to be drug dealers (boo!) they will want to be drug dealers.”
Really? I mean, have you done the experiment, of surrounding them with classmates who want to be rocket scientists or drug dealers?
I found the Nurture Assumption to be a collection of anecdotes put together to support a preconceived hypothesis (the hypothesis might not be wrong, but the data used to support it weren’t very good). And, I do admit to a certain amount of self-delusion about my children. But, I do not believe my kids are so influenced by their peers that they would shift from rocket-science aspirations to drug-dealing ones. As evidence, I can offer the fact that my fourth-grader was completely impervious to the silly bandz craze.
Fourth grade is when people say children start becoming more outward focused, rather than family-focused, and I do not believe my child is particularly unusual — she has joined the Lady Gaga mania (but, I think it’s because she actually likes the music, even though I had to tell her that she had to turn it off on the house speakers because otherwise I would die).
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Probably for the same reason as charter schools work. Self-selecting a motived group matters. (Also, 58% on cheap lunch isn’t that high. For Pittsburgh’s fanciest public school, it is 35%.)
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Oops. I was addressing Wendy’s question.
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What do folks think about the recent report that union-oriented teachers seem to have solved many of the problems at Brockton High, which serves 4000+ students from poor minority communities? It doesn’t seem like it was just an accident or a fluke.
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Just throwing this link up here for later reading for myself.
I’m pretty sure that starting every day with a huge panic attack over how much I have to do is not good for my health. And trust me, my husband is helping (he comes home at 3 on Wednesdays this term).
Actually, you know what’s causing me huge amounts of anxiety? The university is freaking over paper use, so they are monitoring the small-use copy machine, and our usual resource person for large numbers of copies now says it takes 3 days to get anything copied. You have no idea how that can fuck up a person’s course planning to the point of near hysteria.
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Regarding Brockton High, it took a lot of hard work and the teachers are heavily monitored. Check out this link (under video presentations):
http://www.agi.harvard.edu/projects/Instruction.php
The principal discusses how they made such impressive improvements (begins 18 minutes into the video). Discussion on how they got the teachers on board begins about 54 minutes in.
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Well, this probably was a factor:
The committee’s first big step was to go back to basics, and deem that reading, writing, speaking and reasoning were the most important skills to teach.
However, the article goes on to say that their “writing across the curriculum” was not so good for math achievement. That’s not a surprise to those of us who believe that math classes should be about learning math.
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Hey, guys. I made a Brockton post, so we can talk about it.
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