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.”
The debate swirling around president-elect Donald Trump's potential education agenda highlights a potential rift between charter school backers skeptical of vouchers and the rest of the school choice movement.
Last week, at the annual conference of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Harvard University Prof. Martin West noted a real concern: Politics is inherently tribal. People might decide to oppose something based on the people they see lining up in favor. A tribal backlash seems to be among the main fears of school choice advocates. One way to reduce that risk? Limit the federal government's role in dictating choice-friendly policies to states.
Jeb Bush described a plan that might bridge this divide, giving states more flexibility to promote school choice as they see fit — whether by steering more money to charter schools that serve low-income students or allowing them to put extra money into "lifelong education savings accounts," as he proposed on the campaign trail.
Meanwhile...
This quote, dug up by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, suggests Trump's likely Education Secretary pick believes in an ecumenical, all-of-the-above approach to educational options:
We think of the educational choice movement as involving many parts: vouchers and tax credits, certainly, but also virtual schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, and charter schools.
