The World of Linda Darling-Hammond. 

...The National Education Association bestowed its Friend of Education award this year on researcher and education policy expert Linda Darling-Hammond. Her acceptance speech had the delegates cheering, mainly because she painted a picture of a U.S. school system that neglects students and fails to support teachers. By way of comparison, she extolled the virtues of high-achieving nations, which seemed like a teacher's paradise.
 
From the moment Dr. Darling-Hammond said, "California has literally starved its schools" - by which she meant, of course, figuratively - assertion after assertion issued from her lips that were far less than the complete picture. NEA posted the full text of her speech. You can follow along if you are so inclined. Perhaps you can find even more questionable claims, but here are just a few that can use a little context:

"[California is] 48th in the nation in spending…">

This is the favorite statistic of the California Teachers Association, and its single source is Education Week's Quality Counts report. The relevant table is posted here. This might confuse you since the National Education Association's own rankings show California either 24th or 32nd, depending on whether you use enrollment or average daily attendance. So why the discrepancy? As this article explains, Education Week uses "a 1990 federal geographic cost of education index" to adjust the numbers. That's their choice, but it does place states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and Nebraska in the top 20 in spending.

"We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's inmates…because we wouldn't spend $10,000 a year to offer them high-quality schools in Oakland and Compton and East Palo Alto."

I went to the California Department of Education's Ed-Data web site and ran a report to check the per-pupil spending figures for those three districts. It won't allow a hot link, but you can repeat the search yourself. In 2007-08 Compton fell short of the magic $10,000 figure, spending only $9,128 per-pupil (its average teacher salary, however, was $61,789). Oakland spent $11,943 per-pupil, while Ravenswood City Elementary school district, which covers the city of East Palo Alto, spent $13,216 per-pupil. By Darling-Hammond's reasoning, there should be no crime in Oakland or East Palo Alto.

"You know, when you go to high-achieving nations around the world, they don't have children who are homeless. They don't have children without health care."

"The highest achieving countries in the world not only provide high-quality preschool and health care for children, they also fund their schools centrally and equally with additional funds to the neediest schools."

"If you were entering teaching today in Finland, in Singapore, in Korea, you would have full government support for three or four years of teacher preparation in a high-quality program with a stipend or a salary while you trained to teach."

"…in all of these countries, you would have 15 to 25 hours a week for collaborative planning, for observing other teachers teach, for engaging in research and lesson study, for developing and scoring assessments because teachers manage and control the curriculum and assessment system in high-achieving nations.

I could spend the rest of the summer deconstructing these four paragraphs, but our time would be better spent by simply stating there is a lot more to such international comparisons than meets the eye. Here are a few links to provide some much-needed perspective:

* The executive summary of the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the student achievement survey conducted through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

* " What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?" from the February 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal.

* An even-handed discussion from the October 18, 2007 issue of The Economist, headlined " How to be top."

"It is sad for me to see how little things have changed since I entered teaching in 1973."

I hear this sort of formulation from union officers all the time, and I always have the same reaction. In this case, Darling-Hammond is speaking about California, which in 1973 did not have collective bargaining for teachers. Therefore, some 35 years of unionization and collective bargaining have led to little change, and the state's teachers are overworked, underpaid and disrespected. There's a selling point for you. Maybe you need a different union.

"If you entered [teaching] in Singapore, you would earn more than a beginning doctor in your first days on the job."

I have heard this repeated over and over, from reputable sources, so I assume it's true, though I can't find anything definitive to back it up. The advantage can't last very long, because PayScale.com shows secondary school teachers with less than a year's experience earn 32,400 Singapore dollars, while doctors with 1-4 years' experience earn 108,000 Singapore dollars.

"We need a Marshall Plan for teaching."

The Marshall Plan spent $13 billion over four years, approximately $115 billion in today's dollars. The United States currently spends more than $187 billion each year in school employee salaries alone.

International comparisons are always problematic, and we should all avoid the temptation to choose the practices of high-achieving nations that coincide with our own philosophies, while discarding those that don't.