School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade

By Diane Ravitch
The New York  Review of Books
September 13, 2011

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/

It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis.
Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white
and Asian children. The performance of American students on
international tests is mediocre.

Less well known are contrary facts. The black-white
achievement gap, as a recent report put it, "is as old as the
nation itself." It was cut in half in the 1970s and 1980s,
probably by desegregation, increased economic opportunities
for black families, federal investment in early childhood
education, and reductions in class size.1

Another little-known fact is that American students have
never performed well on international tests. When the first
such tests were given in the mid-1960s, our students usually
scored at or below the median, and sometimes at the bottom of
the pack. This mediocre performance is nothing to boast
about, but it is not an indicator of future economic decline.
Despite our students’ mediocre test scores, the nation’s
economy has been robust for most of the past half-century.
And the news is not all terrible. On the latest international
test, the Program for International Student Assessment,
American schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the
students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland,
Japan, and Korea. Even when as many as 25 percent of the
students were poor, American schools performed as well as the
top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students
rises, the scores of US schools drop.2

To put the current "crisis" into perspective, it is well to
recall that American education was in crisis a century ago,
when urban schools were overcrowded, swamped with students
from Eastern and Southern Europe who didn’t speak English.
The popular press at that time warned that the nation was
being overrun by a human tide from inferior cultures, and the
very survival of our nation was supposedly at risk.

To read more, go to
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/

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