Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

This is the story of how wishes come true in the strange, upside-down world of education.

Edu-pundits like Diane Ravitch like to say that America’s education problems have everything to do with poverty. This is actually a debate that goes back centuries in American schools. It takes different forms at different times, but it almost always follows the same equation: poverty (or race) is a problem so intractable that schools cannot be expected to overcome it. (Fun fact: the same debate was used to defend low-performing, segregated public schools in New York City in the 1960s. Check out this New York Times story from 1963.)

Interestingly, this is not the kind of talk you hear in places with higher-performing education systems. In those countries, the very same countries that Ravitch says should be models for US schools, educators also think poverty is a big problem. But they think it is their problem. They think it is a problem so intractable that our schools must be outstanding in order to help overcome it. See the difference?

Of course, if we think about it calmly for more than 5 minutes, we can probably agree that poverty interacts with schools, like a chemistry experiment. Bad schools make poverty worse, and great schools make it possible to overcome poverty. In fact, great schools are among the most effective anti-poverty measures known to humanity. Neither schools nor poverty work in isolation.

And yet this debate rages on, with a stunning lack of sophistication. To show you what I mean, let’s consider the latest talking point.

Ravitch and others have been saying over and over again that America’s low-poverty (i.e. affluent) schools do even better than Finland. “Low poverty schools, low poverty districts in the US perform just as well in the US as schools with similar demographics in the top nations in the world. They’re number 1. In fact, our children are number 1 in the low poverty districts.”

So if we took away our pesky poverty problem, we’d rank at the top of the world! This point is meant to defend all schools, but mostly it makes upper-income parents feel better about their own kids’ schools.

Too bad it’s not true.

The most respected international tests of teenagers around the world (PISA) has consistently shown that our most-affluent kids do not perform as well as the most-affluent kids in the highest-performing countries around the world (even though our rich kids are richer than their rich kids). PISA measures students’ economic, social and cultural status to get a sense of their socio-economic background. In reading, American kids’ best subject, our most affluent students still rank behind the most affluent kids in six other countries. (Even though we spend far more money per student than all of those countries.)

Rich Kids Ranking (PISA Reading 2009)

1. New Zealand

2. Korea

3. Belgium

4. Finland

5. Canada

6.  Australia

So where is Ravitch coming from? She is, after all, a professor at New York University. Surely she can’t just make these things up, right?

Here’s what’s happening. Bear with me, because it is revealing.

Ravitch’s claim can be traced back to a small table on page 15 of a government report that broke down the PISA results based on the percentage of kids who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When you do that, you see that kids at U.S. schools where less than 10% of the students qualify for free/reduced-price lunch score on average very high—indeed higher than the average for, say, Finland.

But then she makes the magical leap. She says that since Finland has less than 10% poverty, and those schools do, too, then…ta da! Our low-poverty schools are best in the world—when you compare rich kids to rich kids.

Here’s the problem: she is using 2 different definitions of “poverty.”

The free/reduced-price lunch figure measures the number of kids from families making 185% of federal poverty line, right? So that means a family of 4 needs to make less than about $40,000 to qualify. Under this measure, roughly 40% of American kids qualify as “poor.”

OK. Then the other measure is the measure usually used in international comparisons of poverty. That is the percentage of kids from families earning less than 50% of the median income in that country. (In the US, this comes out to about 22%. NOT 40%.)

In other words, Ravitch is comparing the test scores of kids from families that earn more than $40,000 in the U.S. to the scores of all kids in Finland (where the median household income is about $40,000).

I don’t have tenure, but even I know you can’t mix and match data like this. Unless you are really, really desperate to find a certain answer, that is. [Edit: After this post went up, an alert reader informed me that Ravitch does not have tenure either; NYU confirms that she is a nontenured “research scientist.”]

Conversely, PISA’s own measure of socio-economic background, the one you can find detailed in Table II.3.1 in PISA Volume II, offers a more valid comparison. And yet Ravitch does not cite it—because it does not show what she wants it to show.

I have been to Finland, Korea and Poland working on this book, and I have the luxury of spending hours reading PISA results. Most writers do not. They just repeat what Ravitch and others say. And so the magical thinking continues.

On Friday, David Sirota repeated this myth in Salon. And it ran again yesterday in the Oregonian.

As 2011 draws to a close, we can confidently declare that one of the biggest debates over education is — mercifully — resolved. We may not have addressed all the huge challenges facing our schools, but we finally have empirical data ruling out apocryphal theories and exposing the fundamental problems.

We’ve learned, for instance, that our entire education system is not “in crisis,” as so many executives in the for-profit education industry insist when pushing to privatize public schools. On the contrary, results from Program for International Student Assessment exams show that American students in low-poverty schools are among the highest achieving students in the world.

What interests me is not so much that fiction gets reported as fact. That is an old story. What interests me is why so many people—particularly liberals—seem to want to believe that poverty is even more intractable than it is…  Why would this be?

I’ll be in Vegas this week giving a talk to the International Association of Emergency Managers. Incredibly, I’ve never been to Vegas before. I know, I know. I’m an embarrassment to my country. So it’s time, and I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and sources. Plus, what better place to talk about risk, denial and panic?

Here’s a little screed I wrote about testing in Finland and other countries for NBC’s Education Nation blog, the Learning Curve. As Congress debates a rework of No Child Left Behind and our own culture of testing, it’s worth considering what really matters.

Before Jesus Christ was born, human beings were taking tests. Civil service exams date back to China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD.) Hiring test-prep tutors - and cheating - go back about as far, by the way.

U.S. students now take more standardized tests than ever. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, our kids get tested in grades three through eight, and at least once between tenth and twelfth grade.

Have we lost our minds? Many teachers and critics of school reform insist that we have, citing other, higher-performing nations as evidence of our relative insanity…

First of all, let’s be clear: Finland does have standardized testing. They have had it for at least 159 years. They have less of it, for sure. (Which is not to suggest that they have less testing overall, but more on that later.) In fact, in every high-performing nation, tests are embedded in the wiring of schools - particularly in high schools. In the developed world, 76 percent of students attend high schools that use standardized tests, according to the OECD.

Read more here.

The following is a dispatch written by guest blogger Marie Lawrence, a researcher at the New America Foundation. As a recent college graduate watching the Wall Street protests, she saw a connection that I had not considered. Here is her take:

A few days before my 6th-grade graduation in Richardson, Texas, my teacher asked us to write poems about the jobs we hoped to have in 10 years. In clumsy rhyme and loopy cursive, we proclaimed our intentions to become singers, pilots, doctors, race car drivers and pastry chefs. With the audacity of youth, I predicted my own success as an author, lawyer or architect. (I was keeping my options open.)

Mrs. Babb affixed a gold star to each page and lovingly pinned them to the bulletin board, silently affirming that yes, these jobs are waiting for you if you work hard. Not a single child prophesied his future as a barista, a telemarketer or a perpetual job-seeker.
Since then, I have graduated from college and been fortunate to find a job that allows me to use my brain and pay the bills. But some of my highest-achieving friends are still grasping for the very bottom rung of the career ladder.

We know that the Occupy Wall Street protest is partly a response to corporate greed, but I suspect it also reflects the disconnect between our aspirations and our reality. It feels like the engines of social mobility (namely education) are failing us. After talking with the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri described the sentiment this way:

“Growing up, we were told: You are special. You are brilliant. Go to school, get a degree, pursue what you love. Four years later, we are mired in debt. Jobless, with no prospects. This is not what it said on the motivational poster.”

It’s as if we are catching up to the data, which has for years shown a mismatch between our academic performance and our occupational aspirations. In its 2007 report Child Poverty in Perspective, UNICEF evaluated countries’ performance along 40 indicators of child well-being, six of which measured educational well-being. Among 25 “economically advanced” nations, the U.S. ranked 21st in educational achievement of 15 year-olds in reading, math and science. The U.S. also had higher drop-out rates than similarly prosperous countries. Of the 23 countries ranked, the United States ranked 21st in “percentage of 15-19 year-olds in full-time or part-time education.” In fact, the United States ranked second-to-last (20th of 21 countries) in child well-being overall.

But at the same time, U.S. kids trounced all others when it came to optimism about their careers. Just 14% of 15 year-olds surveyed said they expected to go into low-skilled occupations—the lowest rate in the world. Although many could not compete with average students elsewhere in core academic subjects, very few believed they would pay a price for this mediocrity. (By contrast, over half of Japanese 15-year-olds expected to be doing low-skilled work—while the country ranks fourth in overall academic achievement and has a lower unemployment rate than we do.)
Can we continue to peddle the American Dream in classrooms that don’t prepare students to compete in a globalized labor force? One anonymous blogger wrote on the “We Arethe99 Percent” tumblr page:

“I have a bachelor’s degree from a top-ranked liberal arts college and a master’s from an Ivy League university. After graduation, all I could find was a year-long internship that only pays about 1/4 of my living expenses. The fellowship ends in under three months, and I still don’t know if they plan to hire me on permanently.”

Occupy Wall Street is not just about deadlock, dysfunction and disenfranchisement. It is about our nation’s willingness to over-promise and under-educate. It is about the urgent need to finally get serious about making our education system worthy of our ambition.

 

I got the chance to spend an evening interviewing two American entrepreneurs in Times Square recently. One was Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, and the other was Zoe Damacela, a 19-year-old who runs her own clothing company. We were the halftime show during the national business competition held by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship—an organization that goes into low-income high schools to help kids learn to start their own businesses. We watched four kids pitch their business ideas to a panel of accomplished entrepreneurs, and then, while the judges deliberated, we realized a few things:

* Entrepreneurs come out of the closet early. Both Steve and Zoe started businesses before they could be legally hired as employees. Zoe sold greeting cards as a little girl, and Steve did, too. But both had trouble getting taken seriously. We say we love innovation in this country, but we don’t always celebrate the just-this-side-of-crazy risk-taking and hard work it takes to start a business.

* Steve Jobs could have ended up in a jumpsuit instead of a black turtleneck. We talked a bit about Jobs, since he had just passed away. He knew the value of a great education—and how it can make or break a child. Here is what Jobs said in 1995:

“I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail. I’m 100% sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail. I could see those tendencies in myself to have a certain energy to do something. It could have been directed at doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that maybe other people didn’t like so much.”

* The recovery of the U.S. economy and U.S. jobs will be led by entrepreneurs. We can choose to help them—by changing immigration laws to help attract and retain talented entrepreneurs from around the world, by making it easier for people to start businesses without worrying about losing their health insurance, and by helping successful companies grow more quickly. Or not.

Case and others recently met with President Obama to push him to pursue a 16-point plan for energizing entrepreneurship in America. I don’t know if this strategy is the right one—or if it has any chance of succeeding, given what has happened with Obama’s jobs bill.

But I agreed with Case when he says this:  “If we’re worried about the economy, and everybody should be, if you’re worried about employment, and everybody should be, the answer is really doubling down on entrepreneurship as a core American value….We have to. Because there really isn’t a Plan B.”

After that, the judges announced their winner: Congratulations to Hayley Hoverter, CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE from Los Angeles, CA, the 16-year-old winner of the NFTE 2011 Challenge. Hayley won $10,000 in venture money to grow her business selling dissolvable sugar packets (no paper, no nonsense) to high-end coffee shops. Watching Hayley pitch her business plan, which was meticulous and smart, I started to think there may be hope for America after all…