Legistlature looking for help

From the blog, Florida Common Ground

Governor Rick Scott has put a renewed emphasis on education. He’s working to keep the best teachers and expand school choice through charter schools and virtual education. He is committed to ensuring that Florida has an education system to produce a workforce that is prepared to compete in the new, global economy.

The Florida Senate is also working to ensure education reform is a conversation – amongst all Floridians. Today, the Senate Pre-K-12 Committee is holding a hearing to gather comments on “teacher quality and student success.” However, being a Friday, most Floridians are working and are unable to attend such a meeting. To ensure feedback is given on this important issue, the Senate has developed an e-mail account, educationinput@flsenate.gov, for all Floridians to send in their views.

I applaud this initiative and hope all parents, educators, citizens and students let their voice be heard.

http://educationfl.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/florida-senate-looking-for-feedback-on-education-reform/

Want to be taken seriously as a reformer? Don't be an educator

From The Answer Sheet

By Gregory Michie, author and professor

In the current upside-down world of education policy, there's one foolproof strategy for being taken seriously as a reformer: Make sure you're not an educator.

Urban districts nationwide, with Chicago leading the way, have hired those with business or legal backgrounds to head their school systems. Major voices in the reform conversation such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and philanthropist Eli Broad have never been teachers. And when Oprah wants to talk about schools, she invites Bill Gates or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- all the while reminding her audience how much she loves teachers.

So it probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise that "Performance Counts," a proposal that zoomed to the top of the legislative agenda in Illinois last week promising to "promote great teaching," boasts a roster of local supporters who aren't exactly known for their educational expertise: the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, and the Illinois Business Roundtable.

Backers of Performance Counts say it's pro-student, not anti-teacher or anti-union, but the wide-ranging changes it proposes are nearly all aimed at the state's teachers. The legislation would link tenure decisions to performance evaluations, make it easier to fire teachers, prohibit them from negotiating on issues such as class size, and make it virtually impossible for them to go on strike.

It's also no shock that the proposal has gained traction among corporate-minded reformers. It fits nicely within a narrative that's been gathering momentum since early last year, when both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan publicly applauded the mass firing of teachers at a Rhode Island high school: Our public schools are woeful, and teachers are a big part of the problem.

Shortly after the firings, Newsweek accompanied its cover story, "The key to saving American education," with a photo of the words "We must fire bad teachers" written repeatedly on a chalkboard. More recently, the much-discussed film Waiting for Superman hammered home the same theme, depicting teachers as dozing mopes in New York City's infamous "rubber room" or screaming lunatics manipulated by out-of-touch unions.

But focusing on getting rid of weak teachers as a cornerstone of school reform is a distraction from the kinds of changes we should be pursuing.

What kinds of changes? Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said in response to Performance Counts: "How do you improve schools? Lower class sizes, limit instructional time spent on standardized testing, fund schools based on need, not clout, and be sure that all children receive a full diet of art, music, physical education and foreign languages."

That'd be a good start. And it's what affluent parents -- including the Duncans and the Obamas -- demand for their own kids.

But the mainstream discussion about schools has a decidedly different character. An underlying assumption of almost every utterance is that standardized tests are an essential tool and are here to stay. Poverty's not on the radar. And the arts? What arts?

A big part of the problem is that the conversation has been hijacked by corporate leaders who think they know best how to improve our schools. I'll concede that some of these "new reformers" may have good intentions. But their arrogance is astounding, and their lack of interest in the wisdom of those who spend their days in classrooms speaks volumes.

The thing is, it's tough to understand the complexity of teaching if you've never done it. Sure, it's possible to come up with catchy slogans like "performance counts." But what exactly is teacher performance? For most of the business-minded reformers, it means raising student test scores. They may nod toward multiple measures of assessing teachers, but they're really looking at "the data," the bottom line.

During the decade I spent teaching in Chicago, I came to understand that being a good teacher is about far more than that. It's taking time after school hours to get to know the community in which you teach. It's figuring out how to create an opportunity for learning when one of your students uses racist or homophobic language in class. It's effectively planning research projects when your classroom has just two computers for 31 kids. How does "performance count" in situations like these?

I'm not trying to dodge the issues raised by the proposed Illinois legislation. And I would agree, as would many teachers I know, that tenure and evaluation processes need to be revisited and improved. But if we're serious about making schools places where meaningful learning happens, not just test prep, then directing our energies toward further dis-empowering and firing teachers is a horribly misguided approach. What's really strangling the life out of classrooms across this country are the myopic, test-crazy policies of the past 10 years.

Then again, I'm an education professor, so what do I know about schools? Maybe only this: If you really want to understand what's going on in them and the direction we need to be headed, don't ask Bill Gates or the Business Roundtable. Ask a teacher.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/how-to-be-taken-seriously-as-a.html?wprss=answer-sheet

Remember when school uniforms were the silver bullet

With a nod to the Sherman Dorn blog

Remember when school uniforms were the silver bullet that would end our education woes? It really wasn’t that long ago that school uniforms was the reform du jour that was going to save our children and turn our schools around. Very few people now days talk about the need for school uniforms. I wonder if it’s because the Bush family or their cronies couldn’t figure out how to make money off them. Instead they have turned to improving teacher quality, vouchers, standardized tests and charter schools as solutions, things the Bush family and its cronies have found a way to make money off of.

In a few years there will be another solution (trained chimps hitting play on a VCR or holograms perhaps) and the powers-that-be will steer us to something else. That’s if public education can survive the current school reforms.

Knowing what I know now, we should have gone with the uniforms.

The Affluent, Failing, Public School: Does It Really Exist?

By Martha Infante, History Teacher in Los Angeles, Former Teacher of the Year

It is impossible to open up a magazine, click on a website, or listen to talk radio without hearing about the issue of education reform. As citizens, it frightens us to hear that out the Chinese are overtaking our place as top test takers, or that the state of public schools is so dismal that only a superhero can save it.

How much of this talk is accurate? How much is just a faulty interpretation of facts which then get repeated ad nauseum?

One of the major stories we are hearing here in California (and across the nation) is the issue of teacher quality, and how some say it is the number one determinant in student academic outcomes. On this issue hinges key decisions that will be decided this year such as seniority-based layoffs vs. performance-based layoffs, merit pay, and teacher evaluation based on test scores (also known as value-added measure). It is an important issue, and some of the leading figures in education reform today will tell you the entire future of America's education system rests on making a fundamental change in how we define teacher quality.

Does the viability of our public school system truly rest on the shoulders of America's classroom teachers?

I got to thinking about schools labeled as failing, as mine was a few months ago, and how the label contains the implicit belief that were it not for such low teacher quality, my school would not be failing. But all public schools in California are under the umbrella of the teachers' union, and no teacher is (yet) assigned to teach at a public school based on value added scores. "Bad" teachers then, should appear on the radar all over the state. They must exist in wealthy public schools too because forced teaching assignments are not the norm in this state. If bad teachers are everywhere, then failing schools must be everywhere too. Thus I began my search for affluent, failing schools with the information available on the world wide web.

My methodology was to research the 10 wealthiest communities in California based on per capita income. They were:

1.Belvedere, Marin County 113,595
2.Rancho Santa Fe, San Diego County 113,132
3.Atherton, San Mateo County 112,408
4.Rolling Hills, Los Angeles County 111,031
5.Woodside, San Mateo County 104,667
6.Portola Valley, San Mateo County 99,621
7.Newport Coast, Orange County 98,770
8.Hillsborough, San Mateo County 98,643
9.Diablo, Contra Costa County 95,419
10.Fairbanks Ranch, San Diego County 94,150
Figures from Census, 2000

Using the greatschools.net website, I located all the public schools located within the attendance boundaries of these areas, and double checked their free and reduced price population, a national measure of economic status, to verify that they did indeed serve an affluent population.

Finding: there was not a single, failing, public school located in the wealthiest communities. In fact, the wealthiest communities produced schools with the highest possible score, a 10, in the GreatSchools rating system.

All of these schools, with the exception of Menlo-Atherton High School, had a free or reduced lunch rate of less than 10 percent. Not coincidentally, the average class size was below 20 for most of these schools (how are they affording this during the recession?)

Now skeptics will say that the wealthier schools' parents would not tolerate the presence of an ineffective teacher. They would pressure the principal for their removal, pull their child out of the school, etc. But if that is the case, we are saying that parent education level does matter and that parental participation in school does make a difference in the academic achievement of students. Most likely families in wealthy schools have had experiences with lackluster teachers but the effect was mitigated because Johnny has grown up in an environment filled with all the resources he needs to be successful in school, with or without a stellar teacher.

While the correlation between family income levels and student achievement is not news to educators and those in the education field, the American public, by and large, does not keep up with the minutiae of education reform. They do not have the luxury to be connected to Twitter for hours at a time, to interpret the academic papers published by universities and think tanks, to fact check movies like Waiting for "Superman". Who is telling the truth, who is twisting it, and what's their motivation? Sometimes it is easier to just watch a movie that turns a complicated issue into a simple good guys vs. bad guys narrative, with the solution neatly presented to the audience in a bow-tied box.

But I believe that the general, inquisitive reader who has stumbled upon this education page wants to dig a little deeper, wants to make up his or her own mind about what is really happening in schools. Does teacher quality matter? According to several studies teacher quality is the most important in-school factor that impacts student performance. But the most important factor overall is socioeconomic class, and this trumps even the most spectacular teachers on any given day. Any classroom will tell you that it is more difficult (but not impossible) to teach students who are not well fed, have not had a good night's sleep. It is hard to concentrate on the lesson when your toothache is so painful you just want to put your head down and cry. And more frequently today, many of our students do not even have the simple comfort of having a roof over their head and must travel from place to place each night, looking for shelter. Even the greatest of teachers cannot teach a child, who for reasons like these, is unable to even make it to the classroom.

Does knowledge of the impact of poverty mean teachers have given up on high expectations for students who live in it? Absolutely not. In fact, it is the knowledge of these inequalities that drives many teachers who work in impacted communities to go above and beyond what their colleagues in Beverly Hills and Malibu do, out of necessity. They have made a conscious decision to teach in communities that struggle with the issue of poverty, crime, and violence expecting no praise, fame, or acknowledgment for it. They don't let students use their hard knocks as a crutch.

Are there ineffective teachers that exist in these schools? Yes, there are ineffective workers everywhere. But common sense will tell you that firing all of them, and they should be fired, will still not put food on a child's table, will not pay the rent at the end of the month.

Today, it is controversial to state obvious truths such as these. It is easier to blame the very teachers who have committed to working in impacted schools for the achievement gap that exists across the country. The federal government has instituted policies that in some cases call for the firing of entire faculties when a school does not make the appropriate gains in schoolwide test scores, and has labeled calls to heed socioeconomic factors as "making excuses."

There is no denying that public schools have been neglected for too long, and have much room left for improvement. Instead of hunkering down to do the hard work of educating students, states argue with each other over the standard of proficiency in exams, parcel taxes allow affluent communities to raise more funds for their school than others, and unions and management have made contentious contract negotiations a way of life. Additionally, in California, schools are reeling from over $21 billion dollars in education cuts over the last two years. As we begin 2011 with a renewed commitment to improving public schools, let us hope that the people who are most charged with this task will fulfill it based on solid, logical truths and not on political ideologies.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-infante/failing-public-school-education-reform_b_803368.html

To Fix Education: Fire Human Teachers, Hire Holograms

By Adam Bessie

50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back,” President Obama declared at a recent speech at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; this time, however, we aren’t just losing to the formidable U.S.S.R., but now are being beaten senseless by wimpy little nations like Finland, for cripes sake.

Friggin’ Finland.

Thankfully, in Shanghai we have a far more scary-looking foe than Finland, one actually worthy of replacing the Red Scare. Fifty years after Sputnik, we still have a healthy fear of a communist takeover of our country, which has been fed not only by Glen Beck’s chalkboard conspiracy theories, but also by the reality that China owns most of our debt, a fact feverishly exploited by both liberals and conservatives to grab votes in the midterm election. Now, in outperforming us in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), these communist children have given us a “wake-up call,” as Obama concludes, demonstrating that we are “in danger of falling behind,” and waking up to a Red Dawn.

Our imploded economy, and the subsequent Red Scare, has led to a sudden, well-publicized “crisis in education,” one which – of course! – has nothing to do with the imploded economy, and everything to do with poor performing teachers, and inefficient, poorly run schools, a refrain popularized by the documentary Waiting for Superman, promoted by billionaires Bill Gates and Oprah, and one that has made a star of former Washington D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee. Fixing the “educational crisis” is also the policy that underlies Obama’s Race to the Top, a policy that places faith in the free-market – yes, the same free-market that imploded the economy – to fix education, and to make sure that we beat those dastardly commies in the classroom, and thus, the global economy. That, and of course, we can regain our honor by besting those bothersome, socialist Finns, who outperformed us, and don’t even believe in competition in education!

An important cause of our “educational crisis”, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan points out in a speech before American Enterprise Institute, a powerful neo-conservative think-tank, is inefficiency. In “Bang for the Buck in Schooling,” Duncan pushed superintendents to look to their inner CEOs for ways to cut all that fiscal waste, and to “make tough decisions that will pay off long term, including rethinking teacher compensation and class size and integrating technology into school systems.”

Here is a modest proposal for America, one that will help our educational system become far more efficient, one that will help us get considerably more “bang for our buck” out of public education by integrating technology and thus dramatically reducing wasteful overhead: holograms.

Yes, to win the Race to the Top, we should fire human teachers, and hire holograms.

Think this is mere science fiction?

In Japan today (who also beat us on the PISA), Hatsune Miku is the first holographic star, playing to sold-out audiences. The product of cutting edge software, Miku appears on stage as a real person, and is, according to Huffington Post “incredibly realistic,” and has been drawing a massive following. While the initial cost of the software may be pricey, unlike a human star, Miku won’t require travel expenses, five-star lodging, specialty water from the Amazon, the Betty Ford Clinic, beefy security guards, a greedy agent, nor, well, anything other than a steady power supply and a competent programmer. What’s more, Miku can play live at simultaneous locations around the world, rather than a single location, and won’t say or doing anything embarrassing – that is, unless programmed to!

Unlike Miku, teachers are human beings, and humans – even non-stars – are exceptionally expensive: each individual expects fair compensation in trade for their specialized labor, including a wage commensurate with cost of living, health care, and retirement when they have completed decades of public service. What’s more, humans can only be in one place at a time, and can only provide effective attention to a limited number of students at a single time. Thus, to run an entire educational system, one which serves nearly 80 million children and adults we need to hire millions of human teachers, which requires billions of our hard-earned tax dollars, all for an enterprise that that doesn’t appear to produce any clear profits. Unfortunately, these human teachers don’t seem to appreciate how expensive they are, and often stand in the way of efforts to lower costs, and make education more cost-effective – imagine just how much money we can save through simple math, by increasing class sizes to 40 and 50 students, rather than the paltry national average of half this.

Worst of all, human teachers have conflicting ideas of how education should work, and all too often, they say and do things in the classroom that do not prepare students for standardized tests, nor their careers. For example, many human teachers don’t believe constant standardized testing to be an effective way to capture the learning process, and some even believe these tests harm substantive learning. These wayward teachers use class time to explore unquantifiable wastes of time such as imagination, creativity, and empathy, none of which can be accurately assessed in metrics, nor converted into reliable data points, nor analyzed into standard deviations, and bar graphs. These teachers don’t seem to appreciate Public School Operating System designer Bill Gates declaration that “If you want something to be excellent, it can’t go unmeasured.”

Unlike Miku, unlike the latest edition of Windows, human teachers don’t always do what they are commanded to do!

Hal could solve all the inefficiencies inherent in public, human education. Rather than hire millions of fallible, inefficient humans, hire a single holographic teacher, Hal, to perform in all classrooms across America at the same time. Just as industry thrived from automating manufacturing processes, so will education under Hal, who can simulate effective education, sans all the pesky human costs and problems. Hal won’t require a living wage, health care, nor will he form unions, nor will he ever – ever – deviate from the lesson that his programmers in Washington, DC, have designed.

Hal will provide a frictionless, perfectly efficient transfer of information to students’ minds, at a fraction of the current cost.

Think this is too big a leap for the public? That they won’t accept a human-less educational experience? That they still want actual, breathing humans in the classroom with their children?

Hal wouldn’t be that big of step beyond what many college students already experience, as they “attend” their lecture class with 1400 other students via Webcast, and take many classes online with a teacher they never meet, all from the comfort of their dorm room. Further, programs like Accuplacer – used by many universities already – can automatically grade student writing, at a fraction of the cost of even low-paid, coffee addicted, grumpy graduate teaching assistants.

What does it matter if the teacher exists or not, in the first place? If we accept Automatic Teller Machines to dispense cash, why won’t we accept Automatic Teaching Machines to dispense information?

We are already on the path to Hal, who may be here sooner than we think. Holograms aren’t far from the home, according to virtual reality visionary Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget, who sees a future in which mass broadcasting will be transformed into “telegigging,” where a performer could be “telepresent” via holographic projections. He predicts that within five years, holographic technology may be in our homes. And given how much money can be made in the emerging educational market – especially when we downsize millions of obsolete human teachers – there will be a new breed of educational entrepreneurs that will be highly motivated to move holograms from the home, to the classroom.

Bill Gates and his team can serve as the primary programmers for Hal: they have the technical infrastructure, and have already invested half a billion dollars in quantifying the qualities of an effective instructor. With these metrics, Gates will be able to produce an algorithm to program Hal, one that could inform exactly what material to cover, at what pace, and how, precisely, to respond to all types of students in all situations. Future versions of Hal will include realistic simulations of sympathy, if the student is stuck amidst a messy divorce, or dealing with the death of a parent. Hal can extend a holographic arm of sympathy for an ailing student, without fear of any sort of real, human touching that might result in a lawsuit – and again, at a fraction of the cost.

And all of this new technology will finally make education profitable, pumping billions into our economy, rather than just taking from it.

Humans will still play a vital role in supporting Hal: we will need technical support if the projector has problems, which can easily be outsourced to Microsoft branch offices in more cost efficient countries, like India. To update content, the ruling political party can select a panel of CEOs from Fortune 500 corporations to manage the Central Bank of Knowledge (based on Google servers), that will hold all the information that students need to know in order to stay competitive in the global marketplace. The Central Bank will download into Hal’s mainframe at any time, and from there, directly into students’ minds.

The only inefficiency left in the Public School Operating System will be the human students themselves, who have the unfortunate tendency to act irrationally, much like their human teacher counterparts. These human students may have a crush on the girl across the room, or want to socialize with a friend, they may feel sad for some inexplicable reason, or more generally, have emotions that deviate from Hal’s educational algorithm, and thus, combating Shanghai in the global war for jobs.

This is an easy bug to fix, though. Simply replace the students with holograms.

http://dailycensored.com/2010/12/29/to-fix-education-fire-human-teachers-hire-holograms/

Times Union off base

By Roger Daily

The Times-Union starts out the New Year conversation on education (which should be a firestorm in Florida in 2011) by comparing education to coaching football. I have done both extensively and I can vouch there exists some similarities. Their "analogy?" Since high-profile football coaches are held accountable for their team's performance (e.g., get fired) then a similar hot seat for teachers is in order. The problem is that football players are there VOLUNTARILY. They WANT to be there. They love it, are getting a scholarship, getting a salary, etc. K-12 students are compelled to attend. The difference there is obvious. Add in the fact that those high-profile coaches are compensated with a significantly higher salary, and the analogy falls apart. Are you serious, T-U? The analogy was cute, concise, and totally misleading. C'mon!

.

Insulted again

They wrote: "If you could make all the teachers as good as the top quarter, the U.S. would soar to the top ... So can you find the way to capture what the really good teachers are doing?" - Bill Gates in Newsweek.

"Football teams do this all the time." - Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in Newsweek.
Our comments: Many of us have no patience with even mediocre football coaches before a change is made. Why do we have so much more patience with fair-to-poor schooling?

I have three questions for the editors of the TU, my first two are; What do you propose we do times union, and couldn’t we use this same argument with any profession, including ignorant newspaper editors.

At this point the Times Union have gone from ridiculous to embarrassing. They should put on the mastiff, we hate teachers. Why not be honest?

My last question is, do you (the TU editors) really believe teachers as a group are horrible or the number one problem facing education or are you just trying to curry favor with the rich and powerful, the flavor of the moment. If it is the former back up what you say with some facts and if it is the later which is what nobody with with any knowledge about education agrees with (hello poverty, destroying creativity and initiative, wrecking discipline, teachers being forced to pass kids without the skills they need and one size fits all curriculum) then admit it because you not doing so is doing all of society a disservice.

Hi, mu name is TU editor, I hate kids and teachers, please buy my paper.

sick

Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher

NBER Report: Great Teachers Are Worth $400,000 A Year

From the Huffington Post

How much is a good teacher worth? Some would say they're priceless, but recent findings in the National Bureau of Economic Research's The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality, is a bit more exact. The report, written by Eric A. Hanushek, suggests that quality teachers with 20 students are worth $400,000 more in the future earnings of their students than an average teacher, annually.

Hanushek examines how the quality and effectiveness of a good teacher can impact a student's future success and how this achievement can effect future economic outcomes for the country as a whole.

According to his calculations, it isn't just that good teachers are worth a lot when considering our economic future as a country; alternatively, bad teachers are costing us trillions. Hanushek says that by exchanging the bottom 5-8 percent of crummy teachers with average teachers, the United States, as a country, could jump up the ranks to top in math and science, generating an astounding $100 trillion in present-day value. Hanushek writes:

The policy of eliminating the least effective teachers is very consistent with the McKinsey analysis of the policies found in high-performing school systems around the world (Barber and Mourshed 2007). Their analysis suggests that the best school systems do not allow ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom for long.

His research brings up a huge concern, no matter your take on educational policy and reform; emphasizing the necessity for good teachers means much for the country's economic future.

However, education policy reformers aren't left with a simple solution. These numbers leave much up for debate. The writer suggests that we fire the lower percentile of bad teachers, which opens a pandora's box of battles with teachers unions committed to teacher tenure.

Further, the ultimate measurement for teacher effectiveness remains unclear. Standardized testing appears to be the most obvious solution. But if teachers begin to fear being fired by being in the bottom percentage, they could refocus their efforts on standardized tests again or also choose to work in higher-performing schools, where they won't have to worry about low test scores

Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute blogs in a section of the Washington Post against Hanushek's proposed solution:

Instead of trying to fire our way to the high performance of Finland or anywhere else, why not try to emulate the policies that these nations actually employ? It seems very strange to shoot for the achievement levels of these nations by doing the exact opposite of what they do.
These findings also unearth another debate regarding teacher salary; if good teachers are worth more, should they be paid more?

This means we should be willing to pay more for good teachers, but it also increases the benefit of getting rid of bad teachers and ensuring we have a system that can do that. After all, every dollar spent on a bad teacher has the high opportunity cost of good teachers.

With such startling findings, and many questions needing solutions, there is still much up for debate.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/22/nber-teacher-evaluation-findings_n_800525.html

How are merit pay, charter schools and vouchers going to fix poverty

By Cynthia McCabe

This week’s release of international education rankings placing U.S. students in the middle of the pack for reading and science and below average in math contained few surprises. But what might have been overlooked in the horse race coverage of how the students stacked up is an economic link that further supports the argument that their poverty levels are potentially the most significant factors in their success.

The head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals took a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunched program for students below the poverty line. Here’s what he found:

* In schools where less than 10 percent of students get free or reduced lunch, the reading score is 551. That would place those U.S. students at No. 2 on the international ranking for reading, just behind Shanghai, China which topped the ranking with a score of 556.

* In schools where 75 percent or more of the students get free or reduced lunch, the reading score was 446. That’s off the bottom of the charts, below last-place Greece’s 483.

Money matters and countless studies have demonstrated a link between parents’ income and students’ test scores.

“These data remind us that U.S. schools do rather well by students who come to school ready to learn, but it’s impossible to ignore the persistent correlation between poverty and performance,” said Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the association (at right). “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.”

Tirozzi points out that other nations sort students into professional and labor tracks in early teen years. Not so in the U.S., where educators commit to educating all students and encouraging them to high standards into the high school years.

“The release of the (Program for International Student Assessment) data gives school leaders occasion to recommit to that goal” Tirozzi said. “And we hope policymakers and all with a stake in the success of U.S. schools will take this occasion as well not merely to consider the problem, but to recommit with us to solving it.”

Here’s the full chart of disaggregated U.S. reading score data from the PISA results:

When less than 10 percent of students are free and reduced lunch: 551
10 to 24.9 percent: 527
25 to 49.9 percent: 502
50 to 74.9 percent: 471
75 percent or more: 446
U.S. average: 500
International average: 493


http://neatoday.org/2010/12/09/a-look-at-the-economic-numbers-on-international-education-rankings/