<p>I’d love to see substantially increased pay for teachers who volunteer to work in the poorest schools. It’s a different, and harder, job than teaching in a middle-class or magnet school.</p>
<p>I’ll stand my my assertion. I have literally REAMS of data to support it.</p>
<p>This is a tribute to hardworking, unionized, tenured teachers across the country doing the best they can under rather difficult conditions.</p>
<p>The question really to be asked is “who benefits” from perpetuating the lie that U.S. schools (for children not in poverty) are not among the very best in the world? Who benefits when we decide not to focus on poverty, and instead choose to focus on teachers unions?</p>
<p>(And, mind you, I’m not a school supporter - I’m a homeschooler - but the facts don’t lie.)</p>
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<p>Garland, Mini’s assertion was “The U.S. ranks second or third in every international ranking or test, in virtually age group and in virtually every subject.” That statement is false. </p>
<p>For the record, most observers of this type of data are familiar with the source of the “It’s poverty, stupid,” namely Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi from National Association of Secondary School Principals. Since this “study” has circulated widely on the web, we all know that it MUST be true and scientifically defensible!</p>
<p>Indeed, it appears that, according to some, the solution to our woes is to remove the lowest performers. While the statistical hoccus-poccus serves little purpose and does not do amy harm, the same cannot be said about the systemic lack of concern offered to the same low-performing students.</p>
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<p>You do? Well, let’s have it. Your assertion was "“The U.S. ranks second or third in every international ranking or test, in virtually age group and in virtually every subject.” </p>
<p>Do you care to rewrite that statement and introduce your “control” mechanisms? After you do that, please share the reams of data that support your revised assertion. Please note that I am not interested in the voodoo analysis of Gerald N. Tirozzi. </p>
<p>That is fodder for the blogoshere.</p>
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<p>And, fwiw, I do agree that our focus should be on the impact of poverty in education, as well on issues of segregation and economic discrimination. How many of your “satisfied” families have been able to vote with their feet and move to newer suburban districts where the poor and less fortunate are effectively removed from the equation. And, if that does not work well enough, let’s make sure to develop “schools within a school” through crutches such as the AP and IB programs. </p>
<p>Our public system of education is based on the principle of offering an education to EVERYONE. This commitment is given as part of the funding monopoly of the public system. It is also based on the expectation to succeed in educating everyone. When the system fails as many as 30 percent of the students, one has to look at the causes. </p>
<p>You as a homeschooler made a choice, and one facilitated by your academic background and facilities. Not everyone can resort to homeschooling. I also believe that you decided to homeschool your children because you could give them a better education than the public system. Not exactly an endorsement!</p>
<p>No, Xiggi–I think the general agreement of those who bring up the role of poverty is that the solution is to DO something about it, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>As my husband says–try teaching a kid who misses weeks of school at a time because of asthma (much more common in low income urban areas.)</p>
<p>Try teaching a kid who’s suffering from undiagnosed lead poisoning.</p>
<p>Try teaching a kid who’s hungry.</p>
<p>Try teaching a kid whose parent is working two minimum wage jobs and may not be able to oversee homework, or whose parent doesn’t speak English, or doesn’t read her/himself.</p>
<p>Do you really think that the score differentials by poverty level don’t have something to do with the lives of low income kids? LIves that society would rather pretend are just fine, rather than doing something about? This is fair neither to the kids, nor to their parents who are struggling with these circumstances.</p>
<p>Do you think that, bizarrely, all the teachers in low income schools are incompetent, but the teachers in upper middle class schools are all quite competent? I just don’t see how that conclusion makes sense.</p>
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<p>Am I the one who says we should not focus on poverty? Or remove them from the statistics?</p>
<p>For what it is worth, researchers have dissected the PISA numbers to isolate elements well before the US found its perfect excuse. There are countries with very different results depending on the economic variances AND based on a different system or education within te country. In simple terms, there are analyses of the impacts of middle class versus the poor and of privately run system of schools versus government run schools. In this case, you cannot talk about private versus public because ALL education is considered public, even when run by religious orders. The bottom line is that the different results cannot be explained SOLELY by economic differences. It is a chicken and egg story. Did the poor system of education contribute to the deteriorating well-being of the families it serves, or vice versa?</p>
<p>There are NO simple conclusions. However, one solution would be to focus on what has worked well in other countries, and perhaps stop pretending that the United States is on a total different playing level because it has become a poor nation!</p>
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<p>I do not think that, and do not believe I ever made that point.</p>
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<p>Well, our level of poverty is what it is. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>But, to the first point, I’d love to model more of what we do here on Finland’s very successful system. Teachers are respected, paid well, and given great autonomy. Kids don’t start formal schooling until they are seven. There’s very little standardized testing. There is no “college or bust” attitude. Administrators come from the ranks of actual teachers. Schools are community based and include meals, medical services, etc. Teachers and students have flexibility about what is taught and learned, and how. Principals teach.</p>
<p>I could go on and on. Sounds all great to me.</p>
<p>I dont think there is any other developed country that has the % of immigration that we do. OK, expecting flames.</p>
<p>No flames. That’s absolutely a factor. We have a far more heterogenous population, with different expectations, languages, educational backgrounds, etc than many other countries. No doubt that is a factor which adds to the complexity of schooling in the US (in good ways, too–I love my highly diverse college classes–the students bring all kinds of perspective to the mix, but it does complicate the program.)</p>
<p>The other thing that is ignored in the statistics is that in the US, we don’t track kids out to “trade” schools in early adolescence the way most other countries do. Perhaps the reason that our scores start to drop in middle school is that those countries have already started pulling their lower performing kids out of the academic tracks. This continues on into high school. Our tests nationally test ALL kids, regardless of disability or English language proficiency. And we test them all the way through age 18. They don’t do that in other countries.</p>
<p>Some years ago a woman from India who was blasting the US public school situation was telling me how wonderful the system is in India. I thought she was nuts. "If one removes the poverty factor, of course, " she told me in her sing song voice. I thought she was nuttier. </p>
<p>I have not looked at any of these stats, and can just say that our public schools, all considered good ones have not served my kids well at all. I support the public school system with some of the highest taxes in the country–our area’s, but none of my kids go to the public schools until college. I would have loved to have saved the hundreds of thousands of dollars I paid in private school costs, but each time we looked at the situation, the best choice for each of our kids was a private school.</p>
<p>You’re not the only one:</p>
<p><a href=“Many Pushing to Change Public Schools Attended Private Ones - The New York Times”>Many Pushing to Change Public Schools Attended Private Ones - The New York Times;
<p>By the end of the year, according to our Czar, 82% of our schools will be considered “failing”. (But almost 80% of parents like them!) What’s wrong with this picture? Who benefits? Who loses?</p>
<p>There are successful approaches to improving performance of individual students by addressing poverty (instead of schools). But there’s no money in it.</p>
<p>There is a truism that says social systems are perfectly designed to get the results they do. That being the case, looking at something like:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu[/url]”>http://www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu</a></p>
<p>How would your thinking change if you considered low-income schools part (and deliberately part) of the prison industry? What if the real shortage in the country was for low-income workers who wouldn’t expect much in wages and benefits, and you needed to design an education system to address that need? How would you go about maximizing profit from a public school system on a systemic basis?</p>
<p>We moved to the area we lived for a long time because of the school system. It’s a well-known school system.</p>
<p>But, it’s a system.</p>
<p>The public schoosla are in a bind. They have to find the way to educate the most number of people on a conveyor belt type system, which artificially measures and moves kids along. This is the case in the wealthy schools.</p>
<p>What I understand works best in impoverished situations is year long schooling, and longer days, less homework (because nobody to help or supervise to get it done), and most of the work happening on the the campus. This is expensive and labor intensive and effective. If we ever decide we would like to truly educate our poor and not drop bombs on the impoverished in other countries, perhaps we will have enough money to do some of these things. </p>
<p>Instead of the classic guns v. butter argument, we ought to create an education v guns argument. </p>
<p>All that said, we still sent our kids to private schools. And completey different private schools because, as individuals, they needed entirely different things, even from each other. Systems are systems. By nature, in the effort to fit “everyone,” they end up fitting no one. </p>
<p>I do not know how to fix what is broken except year long school and longer days which allow the kids to finish all their work on the premises.</p>
<p>Stephen Krashen knows how to fix it:</p>
<p>[Stephen</a> Krashen: Children need food, health care, and books. Not new standards and tests. - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher](<a href=“http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/05/stephen_krashen_fix_poverty_an.html]Stephen”>Stephen Krashen: Children need food, health care, and books. Not new standards and tests. (Opinion))</p>
<p>(He has a long body of work over the past 20 years, and is well worth looking up, even if you disagree with him.)</p>
<p>Mini–yes! They don’t need to be warehoused for longer days. They don’t need to recite in sing-song voices and march in step–stuff we’d never allow for our own kids. They don’t need endless testing.</p>
<p>they need security and health care and food and books.</p>
<p>And they certainly don’t need anyone telling them in advance that their schools are “failing”, and their hardworking, tenured, and unionized teachers are to blame.</p>
<p>(I think Obama should be ashamed of himself. As the “education President”, now he’s cutting Pell Grants for those who actually succeed. Oh, wait, they can’t succeed, because they are in failing schools…)</p>
<p>“our public schools, all considered good ones have not served my kids well at all…the best choice for each of our kids was a private school.”</p>
<p>Is that really a condemnation of the public system, though? I don’t know of any public school system with the stated aim of offering the ultimate, ideal education to every child. Excellence, yes, the best at any price, no. The fact that a parent is able to find an even better option does not suggest to me that there’s necessarily something wrong with the public schools.</p>
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<p>Garland, as someone who has studied the Finnish model for more than 5 years, I’d like to add something about the teaching profession in Finland. They are indeed respected like doctors and other professionals because the level of preparation is quite comparable. Just as in countries such as Korea, the access to the profession is highly competitive and … selective. To make it simple, only the brightest and most qualified are capable of entering the colleges that will prepare the feature teachers. In addition, this is only the first “cut” as teachers who will work past the basc kindergarten and elemetary system are expected to be specialist, with degrees corresponding to the material taught. The Finnish system is not based on combinations of experts in pedagogy and “generalists.” </p>
<p>Their system could not be more different from ours in terms of primary selection and education of future teachers. </p>
<p>PS On the other hand, aren’t some saying that the Finnish model only works because everyone is rich and is a native Fin?</p>
<p>No, Hanna, not a condemnation of the system. Just a danged shame for us. And for a system that could not “sell” to us as we were not hard cases in any of our kids. I wanted the public schools for our kids, but they just weren’t good enough. The private choices were just that much better, so we paid. We did things backwards, in that one of mine went to very expensive private schools, and then went off to the public system for college. Got our money’s worth that way, I guess. But it was not a decision made lightly as it really hit us in the bank account and daily living very hard.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the Finnish model would work much better for our country with it’s very diverse population. </p>
<p>I will say that the rigorous private prep school model worked very well for our kids who would not have done anywhere nearly as well in excellent (like top in the US) public school models. Yes, we tried. Our kids ended up bottom feeders in this wonderful schools. Had to pull them out, homeschool to erase the abysmal record and then put them in top independent schools where the still didn’t do as well as they could grade wise, but, oh, the education they got, absolutely top drawer. Worth every penny for that. I could not have homeschooled them to that level. I had no trouble exceeding public school standards. One year of homeschooling and my kids who were in the bottom 25% of their class were up in the top 1-7%.</p>
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<p>Are you suggesting that a comparative test such as PISA does allow other countries to remove “trade schools” from the sample but forces the United States to include them? Or are you suggesting that the United States test “everyone” but that other countries do not include technical, arts and vocational education?</p>
<p>While I cannot profess to know how each PISA country satisfies the methodology and integrity of the samples, I can assure you that the reports I have read do include technical, arts and vocational education. </p>
<p>But do not take my word for it. If you have data that shows that a country removed the technical, arts and vocational education., please do not hesitate to post them. I will be happy to post the specific data for say, Belgium. For the record, in the 2006 Pisa Belgium report, technical-arts education represents 30 percent and vocational education represents about 20 percent of the sample.</p>
<p>Again, the incorrect information circulates rapidly in the blogosphere.</p>