Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview:
Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most other industrialized nations we’re talking about well under 10 percent, because there’s so many more supports for housing, healthcare, employment, and so on.
With that very high poverty rate, our average scores on international tests look a little above the average in reading, about at the average in science and somewhat below the average in math, and a lot has been made out of that in the United States. But in fact, students in American schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students live in poverty actually are number one in the world in reading. Students in schools with up to 25 percent of kids living in poverty would rank number three in the world in reading, and even schools with as many as 50 percent of kids in poverty scored well above the averages in the OECD nations – which is mostly the European and some Asian nations. Our teachers are doing something very right in terms of educating kids to high levels in much more challenging circumstances than children face in other countries.
The place where we really see the negative affects are in the growing number of schools with concentrated poverty, where more than 75 percent of children are poor. And there -- the children in those schools score at levels that are near those of developing countries, with all the challenges that they face.
When I was running for school board in 2011, everybody was talking about the "achievement gap" and the pervasive narrative then was to blame teachers and schools for it, to bemoan the cataclysm besetting American public schools and how despite the money we spend our rankings are so low in international testing. And when I pointed out that poverty was to blame and not teachers and schools, I was told my attitude was rooted in "the soft bigotry of low expectations", that the real reason was that teachers looked at poor kids and didn't have the high expectations that they had for more affluent kids, that education was the way out of poverty, and that the solution was to have an excellent teacher in every classroom. A good propagandist knows how to take a partial truth that resonates with uncritically accepted popular assumptions and to make it the whole story.
I guess we've been told for so long now that education is the way out of poverty that a lot of Americans have bought this story as applicable for all children everywhere. I'm not going to deconstruct it here--it's too tedious and obvious. But it became a commonplace, and still is, that the schools are the problem, and newspaper editorialists across the nation for the last decade and more have ardently supported the "reformers"--the Michelle Rhees, Wendy Kopps, Arne Duncans, Joel Kleins, Bill Gateses, Eli Broads, etc. who have been behind this idea of closing failing schools and replacing them with charters, of blaming teachers and insisting on tying their evaluations to student progress, and of promoting high-stakes standardized testing as a way of improving academic standards.
None of these wants to look at the root cause, which is poverty. All of them are promoting ideas that are driving the good teachers out of teaching because they don't understand the intrinsic motivations that drive all good teachers. They don't understand how they are making things worse--or if they do, they don't care because they have other fish to fry.
And so the idea that our schools are failing is a commonplace, especially among the rich liberal democrats who fund the politicians who make education policy --the kind who hang out at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. Some them are naively sincere. Others clearly are opportunists. As David Sirota pointed out the other day:
You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”
The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics.
It's amazing to me how so many people don't want to look at the hard truth that poverty is at the heart of things, that the burden of solving all the problems associated with learning and poverty are too heavy for schools and their teachers to shoulder alone. It's amazing to me that the corporate reformers' technocratic cluelessness, their obsession with quantifying and measuring what cannot be measured is so influential. But it is, because like so much of what influences policy in our country right now, it's about money, who has it and who doesn't.
P.S. Good piece in the New Yorker about the teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School who are boycotting the use of the standardized MAP test. The MAP was also something I ran against back in 2011. Its use both subtantively and symbolically points to everything that is wrong with corporate reform ideas about closing achievement gaps.