New international test results showed American students trail much of the industrialized world, and are losing ground in math.
The United States had not raised its average scores, but on measures of equity, it had improved. One in every three disadvantaged American teenagers beat the odds in science, achieving results in the top quarter of students from similar backgrounds worldwide.
This is a major accomplishment, despite America’s lackluster performance over all. In 2006, socioeconomic status had explained 17 percent of the variance in Americans’ science scores; in 2015, it explained only 11 percent, which is slightly better than average for the developed world. No other country showed as much progress on this metric. (By contrast, socioeconomic background explained 20 percent of score differences in France — and only 8 percent in Estonia.)
Between 2006 and 2015, the percentage of so-called resilient students in the U.S. – teens from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder who manage to outperform their peers and rank among the top quarter of students internationally – grew by 12.3 points, the largest margin of the 72 countries and economies surveyed.
Of course family wealth and background still influence academic achievement. Disadvantaged students in the U.S. were 2.5 times more likely to be low performers than advantaged students last year, according to the OECD report released Tuesday. But the correlation is decreasing. In 2015, 11 percent of the variation in American students’ test scores could be explained by their socio-economic status. That's down from 17 percent a decade ago, suggesting that education outcomes are increasingly the result of students’ abilities and effort rather than their personal circumstances and family background.
Perhaps the most important takeaway:
[O]ther countries have shown that it is possible to improve. While changing achievement might be difficult, there is ample evidence that it is critical to the U.S. future.
Meanwhile...
Mythmaking: A meme spreads that supporters of private school choice (like President-elect Donald Trump's pick for education secretary) are somehow hostile to public education.
For the incoming secretary, opinion and commentary have mostly taken place in a reality that is, as Einstein once said, “merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Education is purportedly an issue where Trump and the public differ. The New York Times relies on PDK/Gallup numbers that are more unfavorable to private school vouchers than most other surveys that ask this question.
Why legal efforts to establish a constitutional right to literacy, and a right to educational options, may be misguided.
Why school reformers should care about a police officer's mistrial in the killing of Walter Scott:
What does the Slager mistrial have to do with school reformers? Plenty. As I wrote two years ago, you can’t proclaim to be a champion for all children if you are not championing them at all times. After all, you can only reach people when your care and consideration for the matters of their greatest concern. Just as importantly, the school reform movement cannot sustain its efforts without support from communities who are also dealing with the other issues that result from (and contribute to) low-quality education.
Does Ireland illustrate why no country should offer public support to children who attend religious schools? Or is overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland a rare case, and is America more like the pluralistic Netherlands?
The internecine debate over school choice evidence is not as evidence-based as participants sometimes claim.
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers releases state policy rankings that could help chart a course to better oversight in Florida. The Center for Education Reform skewers the rankings.
Looking ahead: Could Kentucky get charter schools? Which states might go big with education savings accounts?
Choice or regulation: Where do your policy preferences lie? Have you tried squaring that list of hypothetical voucher regulations with the ones that actually exist?
What if some districts returned some of their education spending directly to parents? (What if they did so in the form of an ESA?)
Islamophobia in Mother Jones?.
MTI stands for Madrasa Tul-Ilm. It's an Islamic school, where 90 percent of its 225 students receive state voucher funding for their tuition, according to the school, to the tune of more than $1 million a year, making it one of the largest recipients of state voucher money. Thanks to the vouchers, the number of students attending MTI is now triple what it was in 2011.
In 2013, a young Muslim man named Akram I. Musleh attended the school for about eight weeks, as he bounced around several schools on his way to becoming radicalized. In September, he was indicted for providing material support to terrorists after allegedly trying to join ISIS. The school wouldn't confirm whether Musleh himself was the beneficiary of a state-funded tuition voucher.
All Islamic schools are "madrassas." It's the Arabic word for school. The idea that an Islamic school was responsible for radicalizing a student who attended for less than two months is the kind of guilt-by-association Mother Jones would normally stand against.
The end of 2016 can't come soon enough.
Tweet of the Week
https://twitter.com/libbyanelson/status/806872646579265536
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