Let's look inside the international test results.

Over the last 3 blog posts, we've been looking at the performance of American public schools in light of the current "the sky is falling" push to "reform" schools. Along the way, we've learned that HS graduation rates are up, not down. We have also learned that, over time, results as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have been going up, not down and that, in fact, students today know far more than students 25 or 50 years ago.

But then there is the matter of international test scores. The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test, administered every 3 years, measures performance in reading, math, science and problem-solving skills. While the U.S. has maintained its score level over several administrations of the test, other countries score higher. The conclusion the "reformers" reach is that we are not keeping up with our international competition. Our public schools are "failing" and drastic changes are needed.

Sorry, but that's only true if you compare apples to oranges!

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) has done a very nice job of looking inside the numbers for the PISA test. They have a nice analysis, and you might be very surprised at where the USA really stands when apples are compared with apples. Please take a few minutes and click here to read their piece, then come back here when you are done.

Welcome back! Let's review:

• U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are the number one country in the world.

· U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.

· U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.

· U.S. students in schools with greater than 50% poverty are near the bottom.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton: It's the poverty, stupid! Poverty matters because it's more difficult for kids who are homeless or live in a shelter to learn. It's more difficult for kids who are hungry to learn. It's more difficult for kids who are scared about getting to/from school--or just about being in school--to learn.

Poverty is not an excuse, it's a fact of life and the USA has a greater percentage of kids living in poverty than any other country in the world.

To quote the NASSP: "When it comes to student achievement and school improvement, it's poverty not stupid! Researchers report that perhaps the only true linear relationship in the social sciences is the relationship between poverty and student performance. While there is no relationship between poverty and ability, the relationship between poverty and achievement is almost foolproof. To deny that poverty is a factor to be overcome as opposed to an excuse is to deny the reality that all educators, human services workers, law enforcement officers, medical professionals and religious clergy know and have known for years.... regretfully, poverty impacts test scores."

"We count on our leaders to provide focus and direction. Sadly, our education leaders don't trust us enough to tell us the truth. The problem is that we will never solve a problem that our leaders refuse to admit even exists. The comparison of PISA scores by poverty clearly identifies our strengths and challenges as a nation. Our schools with less than 50% poverty are some of the best in the world. Our extremely high-poverty schools, with over 50% poverty, are among the poorest performing internationally."

"Instead of labeling all schools as failing, we must find a way to raise the performance of our students in under-resourced schools. Instead of looking to low-poverty countries like Finland for direction, we should be looking to take what we already know about educating students in high-performing, high-poverty schools like our Breakthrough Schools and scaling up their successes across the nation. We continually look for gold in other countries when, all along, we are sitting on acres of diamonds."

"Superman" and Rhee blew it!

My last two posts (There's only one problem with this narrative and Public schools in Crisis? Check the facts) began looking at education expert Diane Ravitch's new book, Reign of Error. Ravitch maintains that there is no "crisis in American education" and backs up her assertion with hard facts.

One of the claims of the "reformers" is that today's students don't know as much as their counterparts from 25 or 50 years ago. In this post we will examine this claim.

According to Ravitch, the U.S. has only one way to measure student performance over time. It is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is run by an independent, bipartisan board consisting of "teachers, administrators, state legislators, governors, businesspeople and members of the general public." Ravitch was appointed to this board by Pres. Clinton and served on the board for 7 years.

According to Ravitch: "NAEP is central to any discussion of whether American students and the public schools they attend are doing well or badly. It has measured reading and math and other subjects over time. It is administered to sample of students; no one knows who will take it, no one can prepare to take it, no one takes the whole test."

NAEP reports scores in two ways. The first is a "scale" score which is simply a number on a scale with a maximum of 500. This scores reflects "what students know and can do." Its purpose is to establish a trendline over time.

The second is "achievement levels." Ranging from "advanced" on the high end to "proficient," "basic," and "below basic." Misunderstanding of what each of these achievement levels represents can lead, and has lead, to misrepresentation of the state of our public schools.

The following definitions are all direct quotes from Ravitch: "Advanced" represents a superior level of academic performance. In most subjects and grades, only 3-8 percent of students reach that level. I think of it as A+. Very few students in any grade or subject score "advanced."

"Proficient" represents solid achievement. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) defines it as "solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter." From what I observed as a member of the NAGB who reviewed questions and results over a seven-year period, a student who is "proficient" earns a solid A and not less than a strong B+.

"Basic," as defined by the NAGB, is "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade." In my view, the student who scores "basic" is probably a B or C student.

"Below basic" connotes students who have a weak grasp of the knowledge or skills that are being assessed. This student, in my understanding, would be a D or below.

With this background, you will be able to see how "reformers" fudge the numbers to create a "crisis." Again, I quote Ravitch directly.

"The film Waiting for Superman misinterpreted the NAEP achievement levels. Davis Guggenheim, the film's director and narrator, used the NAEP achievement levels to argue that American students are woefully undereducated. The film claimed that 70 percent of eighth-grade students could not read at grade level. That would be dreadful if it were true, but it is not. NAEP does not report grade levels (grade level describes a midpoint on a grading scale where half are above and half are below). Guggenheim assumed that students who were not "proficient" on the NAEP were "below grade level." That is wrong. Actually 76 percent on NAEP are basic or above, and 24 percent are below basic. It would be good to reduce the proportion who are "below basic," but it is 24 percent, not the 70 percent Guggenheim claimed."

Ravitch points out that "reformer" Michelle Rhee, makes the same mistake--equating NAEP "proficiency" with "at grade level"--in her writings.

The full details can be found in chapter 5 of Ravitch's book, but here is the simple truth. "NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the last two decades: slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago."

"Why the difference between the two subjects? Reading is influenced to a larger extent by differences in home conditions than mathematics. Put another way, students learn language and vocabulary at home and in school; they learn mathematics in school....their starting point in reading is influenced more by home and family than in mathematics."

"So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. Test scores are rising."

Well, that may be so, some will say, but the real problem is that our students stink when compared with those in other countries. We'll deal with that in the next post.

Public schools in crisis? Check the facts.

In our last post --There's only one problem with this narrative.--we began to look at Reign of Error, a new book from education scholar/historian and former Asst. Sec. of Education Diane Ravitch.

Dr. Ravitch maintains that the current "sky is falling" narrative claiming a "crisis" in our public schools is simply not true. All one needs to do, according to Ravitch, is look at the facts. Ravitch handles this in a straightforward manner by devoting a chapter to each of the claims of crisis made by "reformers."

Chapter 8, for example, examines the claim that "the nation has a dropout crisis and high school graduation rates are falling." Ravitch counters with the "reality" that "High school dropouts are at an all-time low, and high school graduation rates are at an all-time high."

According to Ravitch: "Not until 1940 did the high school graduation rate reach 50 percent. The graduation rate dropped during World War II, as young men went into the armed forces, but rose to 70 percent by 1970. By 1990, the four-year graduation rate reached 74 percent and remained virtually flat until 2010. In 2012, the Department of Education announced that the four-year graduation rate had reached to 78.2 percent in 2010, the first significant increase in three decades."

Ravitch continues: "The U.S. Department of education uses the four-year completion rate as the gold standard; this method produces the lowest possible graduation rate. It does not account for students who take more time to graduate or who earn a GED....When their numbers are added to the four-year graduates, the high school graduation rate is 90 percent."

What about the dropout rate? "The dropout rate is trending downward....The dropout rate has actually been cut by 40 percent overall between 1972 and 2009 and reduced even more for blacks and Hispanics, the groups that are most at risk for dropping out."

"Well, so what," I heard someone mutter in the back of the room. Everybody knows that kids today don't learn as much as kids did 50 years ago. We may be graduating a higher percentage but they aren't as well prepared as graduates when we went to school. Ravitch devotes chapter 5 to this subject.

According to Ravitch: "Critics have complained for many years that American students are not learning as much as they used to or that academic performance is flat. But neither of these complaints is accurate."

According to Ravitch: "We have only one authoritative measure of academic performance over time and that it the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAPE (pronounced "nape")."

"Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now. If they are still in doubt, I invite them to go to the NAEP website and review the questions in math and science for eighth-grade students."

We will talk a little more about NAPE in the next post, and we will address the question of how American students rank with respect to other nations.

There's only one problem with this narrative.

"In the early years of the twenty-first century, a bipartisan consensus arose about educational policy in the United States. Right and left, Democrats and Republicans, the leading members of our political class and our media elite seemed to agree: Public education is broken. Our students are not learning enough. Public schools are bad and getting worse. We are being beaten by other nations with higher test scores. Our abysmal public schools threaten not only the performance of our economy but our national security, our very survival as a nation. This crisis is so profound that half measures and tweaks will not suffice. Schools must be closed and large numbers of teachers fired. Anyone who doubts this is unaware of the dimensions of the crisis or has a vested interest in defending the status quo."

"Furthermore, according to this logic, now widely shared among policy makers and opinion shapers, blame must fall on the shoulders of teachers and principals. When test scores are low, it is their fault. They should be held accountable for this educational catastrophe. They are responsible because they have become comfortable with the status quo of low expectations and low achievement, more interested in their pensions than in the children they teach."

"In response to this crisis, the reformers have a ready path for solving it. Since teachers are the problem, their job protections must be eliminated and teachers must be fired. Teachers' unions must be opposed at every turn. The "hoops and hurdles" that limit entry into teaching must be eliminated. Teachers must be evaluated on the basis of their students' test scores. Public schools must be evaluated on an "objective" basis, and when they are failing, they must be closed. Students must be given choices other than traditional public schools, such as charter schools, vouchers and online schools."

"In Hollywood films and television documentaries, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Traditional public schools are bad; their supporters are apologists for the unions. Those who advocate for charter schools, virtual schooling and "school choice" are reformers; their supporters insist they are championing the rights of minorities. They say they are leaders of the civil rights movement of our day."

"It is a compelling narrative, one that gives us easy villains and ready-made solutions. It appeals to values Americans have traditionally cherished--choice, freedom, optimism, and a latent distrust of government."

These are the first 5 paragraphs from a new book, Reign of Error, by education scholar/historian and former Asst. Sec. of Education Diane Ravitch.

Pick your source: NBC's "Education Nation", local or national newspapers, local or national TV/radio, they're all saying essentially the same things found in those 5 paragraphs. How often to do you recall pundits on Fox News and MSNBC agreeing on anything? Those who have spent their careers in public education are--to say the least--dispirited.

But let's continue just a bit farther, to paragraphs 6 and 7.

"There is only one problem with this narrative."

"It is wrong."

"Well, Dr. Ravitch, that's your opinion," one might say. But then Ravitch does the most frustrating thing: She looks at the "everybody knows" claims made by "reformers" and shows that they simply are not true. How does she do this? With FACTS.

Now we will examine some of these claim-crushing facts in the next post or two, but don't wait for me. If you're tired of being told that public education is ruining the country and that retired teachers should be ashamed of taking their pensions, buy the book right now. Click on the link above, it will take you to Amazon where you can be reading the book in less than a minute if you have a Kindle. If you don't, they will be happy to send a real book to your home.

Read the book and be ready to jam some facts down the throat of the next irritating bozo who tries to pull one of those "everybody knows" arguments out of his clown car full of claims.

Have Medicare? Don't worry about Obamacare.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the retiree community regarding what Medicare participants need to do when the Obamacare "exchanges" start doing business on October 1.

The answer is simple: If you currently are participating in Medicare, you do not need to do anything! Medicare will continue uninterrupted for you. Enrollment in health insurance in those "exchanges" you'll be hearing about on TV is for those under 65 who are not covered by Medicare.

There is something happening in October, however, that Medicare participants need to think about: The annual "open enrollment period." Between October 15 and December 15 you can change your Medicare coverages for "medigap" policies and part D drug coverages. You can also switch from traditional Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan (or vice versa). All of this can be accomplished at medicare.gov. See "I saved $700 in 45 minutes last Sunday."

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal titled Seniors: Obamacare marketplaces don't change Medicare.

Hell froze over and I missed it?

It's been one month since my last blog post. During that time we finalized the sale of our Fredonia home of 40 years and have taken up full time residence in central Florida. For those of you interested in watching snow squalls only in HDTV, I may do a blog post or two in the future about "lessons learned" during our 16 month adventure.

For now, however, I need to share a jaw-dropping article from a recent edition of the NY Times. The article was titled "At charter schools, short careers by choice." The thesis, to paraphrase a famous movie line: Experience? Teachers don't need no stinkin' experience!

"As tens of millions of pupils across the country begin their school year, charter networks are developing what amounts to a youth cult in which teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable. Teachers in the nation’s traditional public schools have an average of close to 14 years of experience, and public school leaders and policy makers have long made it a priority to reduce teacher turnover."

The article notes that Teach for America introduced the idea of a short stay in a teaching job for high-achieving college graduates before moving on to their "real" careers and the rest of their lives. TFA provides its teachers with a few weeks of training during the summer and then they agree to teach for 2 years in low-income schools. 

"'To become a master plumber you have to work for five years,” said Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a nonprofit group that certifies accomplished teachers. “Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?' "

Critics argue that charter schools are taking advantage of the enthusiasm of young teachers to work them long hours for low pay and burning them out quickly in the process. The article points to YES Prep charters as an example. This group of 13 schools provides new teachers with 2 and one-half weeks of training in the summer before they begin work. The average experience level of YES teachers is 2.5 years. "At YES Prep... all teachers are assigned a cellphone to answer any student call for homework assistance until 9 p.m."

Just when did experience become a bad thing? How would you feel if you learned that your heart surgeon was "enthusiastic" about your case because yours would be their first solo surgery? Would you be interested in going to court having a lawyer handling their first case? Didn't think so. Do you remember how long it was into your teaching career before you felt you weren't groping for solutions in the darkness?

This particular article generated 715 online comments. As usual, I found many of these comments made excellent points. Here are just a few:

1) "Encouraging high rates of turnover in the teaching profession seems to me to be a very clever way to ensure that no one looks upon teaching as a lifetime career commitment anymore, thus divesting schools of ever having to worry about the costs of paying for teachers' health care and retirement. When you put 'em through boot camp, employ 'em for a few years, burn 'em out and send them packing for a new career, you need not be concerned that they're going to expect something like paid hospitalization, or a pension."

2) "As someone who once taught in an inner city for a short stint, and had an alternative career in software design, I can tell you one of the driving forces toward short careers is money. I took a 50% pay cut to be a teacher, and when I gave it up, went right back to where I was.

How many people out there would make such a huge financial sacrifice or have the means to do so. There's a reason why the folks in these careers are right out of college, single and mobile. And the reason they don't stay is money.

One of my fellow teachers once told me that all of the reforms in the world of education were simply ways of looking like they (politicians and bureaucrats) were doing something without spending any money."

3) "Why do I have this sick feeling in my stomach it's the education of minority and low income kids that's been shafted, that middle and upper-middle class parents won't send their children to these factories?

This is reprehensible. It's a vicious circle. Kids who are already disadvantaged because their parents don't have resources to support their education, are now being sent to be educated by people with very little professional and life experience, who want to move on to "something bigger and better". This is so immoral and unfair."

4) "From everything I read in the [article], this is simply corporate rubbish. The reality is that these "eager young" teachers are grossly overworked and underpaid. And that's just fine with the corporate elite that is behind the charter school movement. It is impossible to be a "great" teacher - for most people - including myself - without experience. This is nothing more than the "Walmartization" of teaching, including the lavish campaign contributions from the "charter school community."

The interest in this topic was so intense that the NYT put together a "Room for Debate" piece a few days later offering a variety of opinions from those qualified to comment on the subject. We'll get to their opinions in the next blog post.

Putting myths to rest one more time.

The people who don't like public employees and/or their unions are having a field day. Detroit's bankruptcy filing has given them the opportunity to dust off the tired old "everybody knows" myths about public employees and their unions.

We addressed these myths in early 2012 with a six-part series called "Let's lay this myths to rest once and for all." If you're unfortunate to have a family member or friend who still believes these myths, here's a quick refresher course:

MYTH: Public employees are paid more than employees in the private sector.

TRUTH: The average public employee IS paid more than the average private-sector employee. This ignores, however, the fact that this involves an "apples to oranges" comparison. The "basket" of public employees contains many more employees with college educations, including many with graduate degrees. In fact, the average public employee is more than twice as likely to have a college or advanced degree. If you believe that more education should lead to better pay, you should have no problem with better-educated employees being paid more. The research-based conclusion is that "Wages and salaries of state and local employees are lower than those of private sector workers with comparable earnings determinants (e.g., education). State employees typically earn 11% less; local workers earn 12% less." For details see:

1) Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all.
2) Part 2: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all.

MYTH: Pubic sector benefits are excessive compared with those in the private sector.

TRUTH: Pundits have told us time and again that excessive pension benefits have brought Detroit to its knees. The average police/firefighter pension is $36,000 for Detroit retirees. The average for other city employees is $19,000. These hardly seem excessive! Taking the country as a whole, we find that " benefits as a share of total compensation across the entire private sector amounted to 29.15%. In large private firms (100+ employees), benefits were 31.42% of total compensation. The figure for local and state governments is 32.65%, hardly a dramatic difference!"

The research-based conclusion is that " When comparing total compensation [wages plus benefits] state workers are behind their private sector counterparts by 6.8%, while local government workers trail by 7.4%. If you compare them with just the large firms in the private sector sample, state workers trail their private counterparts by 10.4% with local workers trailing by 9.8%." For more details see "Part 4: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all."

MYTH: Public sector unions, through their political influence, are exacerbating state and local financial problems.

TRUTH: Let us read from "Part 5: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all."

"The large state deficits have frequently been blamed on a growing public sector. For example, Governor Scott Walker warned that Wisconsin 'cannot grow if our people are weighed down paying for a larger and larger government.' However, the size of the public sector has not grown in recent years, neither in terms of public sector employment levels nor public sector compensation."

"Let's look at the numbers. "State and local government workers as a share of the workforce has been relatively steady since 1979....Overall, the share of workers in state and local employment averaged 14.2 percent over the thirty year period and ranged from a low of 13.6 percent at the height of the boom in 1999 to a high of 15.2 percent in the great recession in 2009 reflecting the greater loss in private sector employment—over 5 million private sector jobs were lost that year.  By midway through 2011, the share of workers employed by state and local governments had fallen back to 14.6 percent."

"Not only has the share of state and local government jobs remained relatively steady as a percentage of all jobs, but state and local government employment per thousand residents has also remained steady....In 1990, the United States as a whole had an average of 17.2 state workers per thousand residents. In 2009, there were 16.8."

"Might union states be different? New York Times columnist David Brooks argued, “public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product.” If he is correct, we should expect states with high public sector union density—the share of public sector workers in a union—to have more public sector workers per thousand residents, than states with lower public sector union density. In order to test this hypothesis, we examine the ten states with the highest share of public employees in unions and the ten states with the lowest share of public employees in unions. .. the lowest union density states averaged 69.1 state and local employees per thousand residents in 1990 and 74.6 in 2009. The highest union density states averaged 65.1 state and local employees per thousand residents in 1990 and 68.3 in 2009. The number of state and local employees per thousand actually fell in the high union density states between 2001 and 2009....No correlation was found between public sector union density and the level of public sector employment in a state. Contrary to Brooks' assertion, there is no evidence that public sector unionization has resulted in a growth of the public sector workforce." 

"Not only has the number of public sector workers per thousand residents remained steady, but public sector compensation as a share of state budget has actually declined....The share of state spending that went towards compensation fell steadily between 1992 and 2002 and remained stable from 2002 to 2009."

"The average share of the budget spent on compensation over the time period for the ten most highly unionized states was 19.6%, compared to 18.7% for the ten least unionized states. By 2009, that gap between the two groups had narrowed to 0.5% (19.8 vs 19.3 percent)...Budget deficits were not caused by an increase in funding going to compensation for public sector workers."