American students are struggling in the rankings of an
international test released Tuesday, and the battle is on over how to interpret that:
While U.S. teenagers were average in reading and science, their scores were below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. That pattern has not changed much since the PISA test was first given in 2000.
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, it's a "brutal truth" that "must serve as a wake-up call." But again, a wake-up call to what? Knowing that American students aren't doing as well as we want doesn't actually provide an answer for fixing the schools, and as the video above points out, Duncan's education policy answers don't bear much resemblance to what several of the top countries on PISA are already doing.
But how we should understand these scores is also a lot more complicated than screaming "crisis." As Diane Ravitch has pointed out again and again, the United States has been doing poorly on international tests for decades, but as people call it a crisis every time this pattern plays out:
Never do they explain how it was possible for the U.S. to score so poorly on international tests again and again over the past half century and yet still emerge as the world’s leading economy, with the world’s most vibrant culture, and a highly productive workforce.
Another complication of reading the PISA scores is that it's not like all American students were at the same level. Three states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida—were broken out as if they were separate countries. And what do you know? Florida was below the average scores for the United States and the average of other OECD nations in math and science, and at the average for reading. By contrast, Massachusetts was above average in all three subjects, while Connecticut beat both the U.S. and OECD averages in math and reading and was above the U.S. average but below the OECD average in science. As Ravitch notes, these results:
[...] burst the bubble of the alleged “Florida miracle” touted by Jeb Bush. [...] It turns out that the highly touted ”Florida model” of testing, accountability, and choice was not competitive, if you are inclined to take the scores seriously
So if, after a decade of corporate education "reforms" making inroads into American education, international test score results haven't shifted, and the state where corporate policies have the strongest hold performs the worst ... is PISA really a wake-up call for the policies Arne Duncan is going to say it is? Maybe not. Dana Goldstein
explains that "PISA is quite different from the mostly multiple-choice, fact-driven state exams American kids take annually," as we'll discuss below the fold.
The idea of PISA is to test students’ ability to handle words and numbers in real-world situations. One math activity asked students to compare the value of four cars, using a chart showing the mileage, engine capacity, and price of each one. American kids were especially bad at problems like this, in which they were not provided with a formula, but had to figure out how to manipulate the numbers on their own.
Ouch. That's a good question, and not the kind of thing we see much of on American standardized tests. That's not the only way the corporate policy Duncan will use PISA to push differs from what the test's results actually suggest works:
The OECD found that school systems with greater teacher leadership opportunities, like Canada’s, outperform those like ours, in which administrators and policymakers exert more top-down control over the classroom, through scripted lessons or teacher evaluation systems that heavily weigh student test scores. Yet you won’t hear about that much on PISA Day, because those have both become popular interventions during the Obama era of education reform.
Duncan and his allies are using PISA to whip up concern about American education being inadequate, but they're counting on you not to know the details of the scores or of what policies are working elsewhere. That's true when it comes to countries that rely less on top-down control and standardized tests that prioritize memorization, and it's true—in a very different way—of another of the top scoring
countries locations.
While Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida were broken out but scores for the U.S. as a whole were also published, the same is not true of every country. If you read an article simply summarizing the international scores, you might have heard about how well Shanghai did; perhaps you even wondered "since when is Shanghai a country?" It's not a country, and its results should be heavily discounted. The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless explains that, while Chinese students in a dozen provinces take PISA, China only allows Shanghai's results to be released. Shanghai's not representative, though:
About 84 percent of Shanghai high school graduates go to college, compared to 24 percent nationally. Shanghai’s per capita GDP is more than twice that of China as a whole. And Shanghai’s parents invest heavily in their children’s education outside of school. [...]
... at the high school level, the total expenses for tutoring and weekend activities in Shanghai exceed what the average Chinese worker makes in a year (about 42,000 yuan or $6,861).
China also forces children from migrant families to go back to their parents' often-rural hometowns for high school, pushing many lower-income students out of the Shanghai schools and thereby out of the Shanghai PISA results.
If the United States insisted that only Massachusetts' PISA scores could count, and then excluded a large category of kids likely to perform badly on tests, our results would look pretty good. But again, you're not going to hear much about this from Arne Duncan. Because the point of his PISA crusade isn't for Americans to understand what's on this test, what policies improve scores on this test, or whether this test measures what we want our kids to be learning. The point is to make us afraid that the U.S. is failing, so that we'll accept the policy prescriptions that the Obama administration, Michelle Rhee, and a host of billionaires who think they know everything are already pushing. The policies that they've been pushing for a decade of stagnation on this exact test. The policies that are substantially in place in Florida.
