Best-Performing US School Districts Lag International Peers

Achievement gaps have plagued educators for decades, and while gaps between genders, races, and ethnicities get a lot of attention, the one that sees little airtime is the gap between the academic achievement of America’s top suburban school systems and their peers in the best-performing school systems around the world. It is hardly news that American students underperform their international peers on many international ranking tables, but what is surprising is that even some of the most academically high-achieving districts in the country don’t do better than middling compared to the top achievers elsewhere.

Affluent suburbanites outperform their urban counterparts by a margin of nearly four to one, yet they still lag when compared to the achievement levels of their international peers. As a whole, suburban school districts stack up poorly compared to students from the best-ranked education systems around the world like Singapore and Canada. While a few – such as students from Evanston, Illinois and Scarsdale, New York – can stand toe to toe with the international competition, most, including schools in high-income zip codes like Grosse Point, Michigan and Greenwich, Connecticut, fall well short.

Of the 70 countries tested by the widely used Program for International Student Assessment, the United States falls in the middle of the pack. This is the case even for relatively well-off American students: Of American 15-year-olds with at least one college-educated parent, only 42% are proficient in math, according to a Harvard University study of the PISA results. That is compared with 75% proficiency for all 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 50% for those in Canada.

Arthur Levine, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says that with the data in hand, we can no longer fall back on the excuse that our country’s education system is lagging because of a larger income disparity than is present in other countries that typically rank above the US. It appears as if the best American school schools are failing their students just as the schools in the urban lower-performing school systems are failing theirs.

While a poor overall level of urban education means that those raised in cities are already hampered when attempting to compete against better-educated peers within the country, the fact that even the best of our schools lag behind those in other countries puts America on very unsure footing when competing in the global marketplace.

So what do Americans do? We talk a great deal about the achievement gap. We write books and reports about it. We wring our hands at its existence. We adopt a revolving door of short-term reforms in response. But nearly 30 years after the alarming federal report “A Nation at Risk,” not one major urban district has been turned around. Many of our suburban school districts are losing ground. We have settled on a path of global mediocrity for students attending our most affluent schools and national marginality for those attending failing inner-city schools.

Comments

wintertime

November 16, 2012 at 6:18 pm

So?…How do we know it the schools that are performing?

Have the contributions of the professional private tutoring, study clubs, parental afterschooling and parental help with homework ever been measured?

Maybe, just maybe, these so-called “highest performing” schools aren’t performing at all. Maybe the high test scores are entirely due to the work done IN THE HOME!

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David Willard

November 19, 2012 at 7:55 am

The conclusions in this article run counter to research findings. For a different take on this issue see: Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth by David C. Berliner — 2014.

The following quotes are excerpts from the article.

“Virtually every scholar of teaching and schooling knows that when the variance in student scores on achievement tests is examined along with the many potential factors that may have contributed to those test scores, school effects account for about 20% of the variation in achievement test scores, and teachers are only a part of that constellation of variables associated with “school.” Other school variables such as peer group effects, quality of principal leadership, school finance, availability of counseling and special education services, number and variety of AP courses, turnover rates of
teachers, and so forth, also play an important role in student achievement. Teachers only account for a portion of the “school” effect, and the school effect itself is only modest in its impact on achievement.”

“On the other hand, out-of-school variables account for about 60% of the variance that can be accounted for in student achievement. In aggregate, such factors as family income; the neighborhood’s sense of collective efficacy, violence rate, and average income; medical and dental care available and used; level of food insecurity; number of moves a family makes over the course of a child’s school years; whether one parent or two parents are raising the child; provision of high quality early education in the neighborhood; language spoken at home; and so forth, all substantially affect school achievement.”

“What is it that keeps politicians and others now castigating teachers and public schools from acknowledging this simple social science fact, a fact that is not in dispute: Outside-of-school factors are three times more powerful in affecting student achievement than are the inside-the-school factors (Berliner, 2009)? And why wouldn’t that be so? Do the math! On average, by age 18, children and youth have spent about 10 percent of their lives in what we call schools, while
spending around 90 percent of their lives in family and neighborhood. Thus, if families and neighborhoods are
dysfunctional or toxic, their chance to influence youth is nine times greater than the schools’! So it seems foolish to continue trying to affect student achievement with the most popular contemporary educational policies, mostly oriented toward teachers and schools, while assiduously ignoring the power of the outside-of-school factors. Perhaps it is more than foolish. If one believes that doing the same thing over and over and getting no results is a reasonable definition of madness, then what we are doing is not merely foolish: it is insane.”

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 116 Number 1, 2014, p. -
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16889, Date Accessed: 10/16/2012 12:53:26 PM

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