More “failing schools”

Today’s Arizona Daily Star’s article on potential failing school rates approaching 82% should be a wake up call. What is really disturbing about the article is the disagreement by the various participants on how to solve the problem. On the one hand, President Obama is alleged to support enactment of new legislation that would loosen the accountability rules. Just what does “loosen the accountability rules” conjure up in ones mind? Maybe lower the standards so we look better. That’s what I get, what about you.

There’s obviously something wrong and I don’t have a fix-it but I do know that any attempt to throw more taxpayer money at the problem is “not” the solution. Unless of course we want to take some credence from the Public Agenda survey referenced below.

One thing that could be beneficial is for us to revisit the “merit-based pay” for teachers. Barack Obama supports merit pay for teachers. He believes teachers' pay should be increased based on performance, not "arbitrary tests". He wishes to work with the NEA to find a new system to evaluate performance. In his first major education policy speech as President, Obama said that he supports "rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay." President Obama negotiating with the NEA would be more like a “How much of a donation can we depend on to drop this”

Take a look and make up your own mind.

But there certainly are some common denominators that can be looked at when trying to determine No. 1.

1.  Many students don’t dog school. More than one in four students in 20 of the 28 OECD member countries surveyed "consider school a place where they do not want to go." With 46 percent, Belgium had the highest proportion of reluctant students, followed by Canada (37 percent), France (37 percent), Hungary (38 percent), Italy (38 percent) and the United States (35 percent).

2.  " U.S. students finished 15th in reading, 19th in math and 14th in science - and in a study that only ranked 31 nations.

3.  The testing used focused on age 15, which purports to allow countries to measure outcomes of learning that reflect both societal and education system influences, and measure students' preparedness for adult life beyond compulsory schooling."

4.  Countries with lower spending per pupil far outranked the U.S.. An average of 10 percent of 15-year-olds in the world's most developed countries have top-level reading literacy skills - that is, they are "able to understand complex texts, evaluate information and build hypotheses, and draw on specialized knowledge." Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand and the UK scored highest in top-level readers, with between 15 percent and 19 percent of their students registering in that range.

5.  In terms of gender, 15-year-old females outperformed males in reading in every country. In mathematics or science, however, there were no significant differences between the sexes. "Significant differences between countries reflect the varying abilities of countries to provide a learning environment or broader context that benefits both genders equally," the study noted. "In all participating countries, males are more likely than females to be at Level 1 or below in reading - in the case of Finland, the best performing country, over three times as likely."

6.  The U.S. has the 3rd highest spending per secondary student in this study.

And coincidentally, perhaps another element of educational quality surfaced in another recent survey from Public Agenda (www.publicagenda.org). That survey asked U.S. school leaders, "Do you have enough freedom and autonomy to remove ineffective teachers from the classrooms?" Only 28 percent of the 853 surveyed public school superintendents said that they "have enough" autonomy to get rid of bad teachers. Of 909 participating principals, only 32 percent said that they had enough clout to dismiss bad teachers. Put another way, in the Public Agenda survey, the folks supposedly steering the ship weren't No. 1.

 

OECD/PISA Study:
Reading Literacy

1. Finland
2. Canada
3. New Zealand
4. Australia
5. Ireland
6. Korea
7 United Kingdom
8. Japan
9. Sweden
10. Austria
11. Belgium
12. Iceland
13. Norway
14. France
15. United States
16. Denmark
17. Switzerland
18. Spain
19. Czech Republic
20. Italy
21. Germany
22. Liechtenstein
23. Hungary
24. Poland
25. Greece
26. Portugal
27. Russian Federation
28. Latvia
29. Luxembourg
30. Mexico
31. Brazil

Source for all charts: OECD/PISA. Outcomes of Learning: Results from the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment of 15-Year-Olds in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy.