I’m sure there was more, but the gist of the current hand-wringing is the news that the nation is no longer the equal opportunity society it once was. The social mobility gap is growing while our faith in boot-strap capitalism, where hard work (i.e., merit) can get you a spot at the table of the elite, is waning. My concern, at least with what I’ve read above, is the failure to include knowledge in the equation…
Unfortunately, most of the attention seems to be focused on the surface problems, where caste and class meet (or don’t meet, which is what everyone is suggesting). As Brooks writes, summarizing new work by Robert Putnam, “the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities.” And, of course, it ends badly for the less affluent. As Charles Murray puts it in Mike’s social mobility post, we have a “New Elite that is ‘a class unto itself,’” where “the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members.” In other words, the poor need not apply. (Murray’s arguments seem to have shaken even Mike’s faith in the capacity of schools to affect mass social mobility.)
Everyone seems to understand the value of a college education. The Pew Report even suggests, on page twenty-five, that 90 percent of poor kids who graduate from college escape poverty as adults, which would seem to be the obvious place to mention the salient fact that our education system is not getting very many poor kids a college education. What our schools do to educate our children should be THE question for those worried about the growing social mobility gap. But it’s not even a tertiary question in most of these essays, which is alarming…
You might call the last fifty years of public education the “When Dewey met Darwin” era. The terrible consequences of family breakdown (predicted by Daniel Moynihan many years ago) are certainly upon us, but if this recent spate of teeth-gnashing over the growing social mobility gap is any indication of where the country is, I’d say the country still doesn’t get it. Knowledge does count. Schools do count.
Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer, taking apart colleague Mike Petrilli, paleo-eugenicist Charles Murray, and David Brooks, and explaining why the failures of American public education are at the heart of growing economic inequality, an aspect covered in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on combating literacy.
So what the law actually requires is that – over a 16 year timespan since 2001 – about 92 percent of students achieve the “proficient” level on their state tests in order for their schools to make what’s called “adequate yearly progress.” And the law’s big policy shift was requiring that same level of performance for minority, poor, and other traditionally under-served student groups so schools couldn’t hide behind averages that masked persistent low-performance for some students. Whether the tests have any consequence for students is a state by state decision, the federal law is silent on that. And the law doesn’t use the term failing. Schools not making progress are deemed ‘needing improvement.’ That little detail makes it all look a little different given that even average or good schools can need improvement on some measures.
More than a decade after the [No Child Left Behind Act;s] passage there are a bunch of things that I think should be changed or refined. When the law was passed states did not have the data systems they do now, for instance. But here’s the more basic question: When have we ever had a widespread increase in accountability in education without it being a three-ring circus, policymakers walking back from the brink, and a general bemoaning of things? And how much of all that owes to specifics of policy and how much to broader capacity problems in the system?…
None of the people cheering or jeering today’s article would put up for a moment with having their own kids in schools that couldn’t generally meet the proficiency bars states have established. That’s something they quietly agree on. This is about other people’s children and what’s good enough for them. And that, rather than any one feature of the policy, is probably the root of the problem.
Andy Rotherham, hitting on the real reason why so many education traditionalists have opposed No Child (which should make them happy with the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit).
Just when you thought we’d reached a consensus on the need to dramatically improve America’s schools, a chorus is emerging to suggest all is well. First, a new book out from Harvard University Press, Is American Science In Decline? notes that “American high school students are … performing better in mathematics and science than in the past,” helping explain why the authors’ answer to the title question is “no.” This comes on the heels of a USA Today op-ed last month urging us to “Quit Fretting: U.S. is Fine in Science Education.” And why can the fretting end? Because, the pundits tell us, last year 65% of students had a “basic” grasp of science on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), up from 63% in 2009. Their conclusion: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
It’s hard to overstate how dangerous such complacency is. Not to mention how ill-informed. Popping the champagne corks over slight upticks in NAEP scores, for example, ignores what every serious educator knows: scores of “basic” on that test evidence only limited familiarity with a subject — as opposed to “proficiency,”…Only the top quarter of America’s K-to-12 students are performing on par with the average students in Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, Taiwan, and South Korea. International comparisons of advanced achievement in math are even more depressing: 16 countries now produce at least twice as many advanced math students per capita as we do, an important predictor of how many engineers and scientists we’ll have in the future driving economic growth…
That’s why Arne Duncan, looking at the latest NAEP results last November, said, “It’s clear that achievement is not accelerating fast enough for our nation’s children to compete in the knowledge economy of the 21st Century.” Condoleezza Rice and I put it even more bluntly in a recent report by a Council on Foreign Relations task force that we co-chaired. “The United States’ failure to educate its students,” we wrote, “leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” This isn’t us being alarmist. When the house is on fire, you can’t sound the alarm enough.
Former New York City chancellor Joel Klein, offering another reminder of how poorly our children are prepared for the knowledge-based global economic future.