Link: http://www.corestandards.org/other-resources/key-shifts-in-english-language-arts/ For my last blog post I looked at the common core's specific math standards. Now I decided to look at the specific English language arts standards as listed on the common core website. The standards on the surface seem to be almost as vague as the math standards. They did seem to focus on reading comprehension and more specifically on the ability to read non-fiction texts and extract information from them, specifically in inter-disciplinary settings. I recall reading in the PISA report that US students are among the worst in the world at applying knowledge from one area of study to another so this could be a useful exercise (the math equivalent was present in the math standards in the form of word problems). The English standards fail to seriously mention writing, instead focusing on reading and comprehension scores. I have noticed throughout my education that this is an strategy shared my many of my english teachers: that reading lots of good writing and studying good writers will teach one how to write well even if one does not specifically study writing per se. While I cannot speak to the efficacy of the approach in the general population I do think that for me more specialized writing education would have been helpful. Like in the math standards the english standards provide vague learning objectives but not strategies for achieving these . My brief appraisal of the common core standards leaves me with the question: once nationalized standards are accepted how specific should they be? Should the government provide only standardized tests while leaving teachers to figure out how to teach the material. i suspect that a federal attempt to standardize the curriculum would be met with even more opposition that the current (already hotly contested) common core proposal. However, there seems no better way of achieving educational equity than mandating not just that the same material be taught in all classrooms but that it be taught in a specif way.

Link: www.corestandards.org For this blog post I decided to explore the proposed common core standards and what exactly they entail. I visited the common core standards homepage and read their academic standards section. I discovered the following six standards upon which the more specific standards are based Research and evidence based Clear, understandable, and consistent Aligned with college and career expectations Based on rigorous content and the application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills Built upon the strengths and lessons of current state standards Informed by other top-performing countries to prepare all students for success in our global economy and society These were about the vaguest pronouncements I have ever seen so I decided to look at the core math standards. They emphasized mastering basic mathematical operations and abstract thinking (word problems, puzzles etc.) in the early grade while building to more complex concepts by the end of elementary school and high school. These standards look appealing and are more specific but they still lack detail. My own elementary school experience corresponds roughly with the common core standards and yet I would say that depending of the teacher or textbook or classroom I learned some concepts very well and some not at all. To me the common core math standards provide too much leeway for a class to cover a topic yet not really learn it. This problem would theoretically be avoided with rigid standardized testing but I still wonder if some students would be short-changed. One solution to this problem would be to provide rigid and specific instructions to math teachers themselves perhaps including lesson plans and classroom tests. While this program would stifle teacher creativity it would also help to standardize math education across the nation It seems to me (and I really have no idea) that a good fractions lesson in Massachusetts looks precisely the same as a good fractions lesson in Mississippi. This brief look at the common core standards has convinced me (as much as any one webpage can) the the common core, while immensely useful is not a magical solution to our nations's education problems. Even a detailed and specific lesson plan would not fund a poor school or increase attendance rates. However, specific math standards can level the playing field in a field that is increasingly important in the modern world.

http://www.dailyorange.com/2014/04/educator-outlines-flaws-issues-with-american-education-system/ Most of what I have previously read has suggested that more rigidity, more standardization and above all more centralization of the school system (mostly by standardized tests) is the best way to help our education system. This article, while it does not argue against centralization of education standards it does argue that they are useless unless the underlying social and economic problems that create educational inequality are solved. Many of the states and districts with the worst school systems are the poorest in the nation. Without money the schools cannot improve. The article correspondingly attacks the No Child Left Behind Act despite its attempt to "leave no child behind" and force the worse performing schools to meet higher standards because it took money away from poor-performing schools, the ones that need it the most. The articles author also attacks the use of student performance to determine teacher pay, arguing that even good teachers will perform poorly in poor districts and will then choose to work in wealthier ones. All of these issues raise question of whether education is an problem than can be targeted and fixed independently of more wide spread social problems. Can someone get an education, even at an excellent school if their family is struggling to survive financially? I think the answer is no and the two problems are intertwined. However, I think a good starting place would be for educational funding to still be paid for by property taxes but to be pooled nationally and distributed to districts on a per-pupil basis.

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/ http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/20/so-how-overblown-were-no-1-shanghais-pisa-results/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/03/are-finlands-vaunted-schools-slipping/ http://simplystatistics.org/2013/08/23/stratifying-pisa-scores-by-poverty-rates-suggests-imitating-finland-is-not-necessarily-the-way-to-go-for-us-schools/ For this post I am going to explore the idea that Mr. Fischer introduced to me: that the US lags in educational performance because it educates its most disadvantaged citizens whom many other countries fail to educate at all. To investigate this I am going to compare the US to China and Finland, two nations whose educational systems are often touted as being superior to ours First the US: Poverty rate: 14.3% Literacy rate: 99% PISA Score: 481 China: Poverty Rate: 33.1% Literacy Rate: 95% PISA Score: 613 Finland: Poverty Rate: 3% Literacy Rate: 100% PISA Score: 536 On the surface these numbers suggest that China fails to adequately educate 5% of its poorer students even to the extent of literacy. The fact that their scores are still so high high would imply that the scores of the other 95% are astronomical. However, it turns out that only 73% of Chinese student body was adequately represented (mostly poorer, rural schools were missed). It seems likely that the illiterate 5% are simply not being tested. Furthermore while I had previously trusted China's results I recently read that higher-performing students were often bused in to take the test and poorer performing children thrown out of school. While it still seems likely China's school system is better than ours (it certainly is on a per dollar basis) their attempt at removing poorer students from the testing pool imply that a significant % of its students are "left behind" academically. Finland on the other hand has a 100% literacy rate but only a 3% poverty rate. In conclusion, my cursory analysis of the problem would suggest that the US does do a good job of educating all its poorest citizens to a minimum level, essentially literacy and that China's test scores are inflated by the exclusion of its poorer students. However, nations such as Finland seem to be even more inclusive but has such a low poverty rate that it does not make that much difference.

Sputnik Moment

Article Links: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/obama-calls-for-new-sputnik-moment/ http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/october-4-1957-soviet-union-launches-sputnik-satellite/ I wanted to investigate what Mr. Fischer told me about the US education system including poorer students while other, higher ranked systems fail to educate the less-fortunate, thereby boosting their scores. I would discover that this theory had some merit but that is what I will address in my next blogpost. For now I want to write about an article I found while researching explanations of our educational differences with other nations. This article essentially argued that no explanation or justification matters because we, as a society need the motivation of failure to improve our education system. It was not explicitly mentioned but it seemed to me the author was calling for an exaggeration of the education crisis in order for us to have a "sputnik moment" (the original sputnik moment happened when the USSR's satellite launch in 1957 reveled just how behind we were and lead to a period of educational and scientific investment that culminated with the moon landing) and reinvest in our education system. It is true that we have a disproportionately high level of satisfaction with our educational system compared to our outcomes and we do have a history of high-level educational achievement and an economy that can support more educational investment. However, is misleading people about the quality (or lack thereof) of their education worth enough to outway the dishonesty inherent to such an action? I don't know but it seems to me that in education, more than anything else, honesty is vital. Nonetheless I do think that not matter what the true state of our education system is we should always be striving to make it better, even the best nations (and US states) are cosntantly redefining their educational policies, re-training teachers and finding new ways to teach students.

Article Link: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf PISA country report: the United States This report explains the multitude of disheartening failings in the US education system. I describes below average (for OECD nations) scores in every subject area. It also describes how American students seem generally happy with their education despite below average results. My first response to this was that the US is only-below average for industrialized, first-world nations and since every nation cannot be number 1, are we not better off accepting inevitable mediocrity? However, according to the report the US spends the third most per pupil of any nation in the world. Furthermore, as a nation we have a long history of educational brilliance and we still have the best tertiary education system in the world. There is no reason for us to have an average education system, nor is there any reason to be complacent. The US currently has the world's biggest economy, that can not continue if our education system continues to slip. We must look at why our education system is failing and attempt to correct it. The PISA report singles out Massachusetts for its excellent performance and specifically for its strong state-wide education standards (which manifested themselves to me as the MCAS). The report also mentions that conspicuous lack of a national standards in the United States. Recommending the implementation of the common core standards. These standards are already being put in place but when I did further research on the common core I was shocked to discover the level of vitriol, especially from parents, directed against the standards. This I cannot comprehend, no reasonable person could possibly see the common core as a "way for the government to control local education". Nor could one think that common core standards would eliminate important regional-specific lesson plans such as local crop-cycles. Such information is essentially useless in the modern-world. These complaints against the common core seem to have their basis in a sense of regional pride or identity, one that I cannot understand. How can a citizen of Mississippi not see that their state is doing poorly and that nationalized standards would help it. It is tempting to see this distrust of central government as a symptom of the recent-wave of anti-government sentiment but the US has gone its entire existence, more than 200 years with the institution of a national curriculum, a step almost every other nations has taken. According to PISA without the common core the US will be hard-pressed to tread water in international rankings. I can only hope they are implemented. This article also brought to my attention the issue of school funding which, almost uniquely in the US is done through local property taxes an issue that I will explore further in my next post.

Article Link: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/09/19/innovation-what-american-education-needs-more-than-anything/ My first two articles were from CNN and the NYT and so I decided that a fox news article would provide me with a different perspective. It did. Each of the previous articles I read provided a different argument about our educational failures. The NYT blamed them of funding, CNN on too little government control. Fox blamed it on too much government control and a failure to trust in the "educational miracles of the free market." The author of the article, Peter Roff, argued that the same funding could produce better results in our education system if it was given to private enterprise. He then attacked the high tuition rates of supposedly non-profit colleges. I wholeheartedly agree that college costs are unjustifiably high and they should by no means by even 1/5 of what they are at many colleges I completely disagree with his solution. First of all, almost every other country on earth has kept college costs down not by privatization but through more government control. In fact many governments are the sole providers of higher education. Prices are therefore kept down because there is no competition between colleges driving up prices. While in some industries competition does increase the quality of the product offered, education does not seem, to me, to be one of them because it is almost impossible to accurately measure educational outcomes. Furthermore, nationalized with nationalized university systems often have national curriculum standards that extend through college, meaning that the quality of education is not supported by competition in a difficult to measure area, but by the law itself. While I disagree with Roff's point in this area I do understand his frustration with our college system. What I do not understand is his seeming desire to privatize every level of education, starting in elementary schools through charter schools and school vouchers. While I understand how competition acts as useful motivation for innovation I fail to see how a for-profit kindergarten would be in anyone's best interest. In fact what Roff seems to be suggesting, however obliquely, is a full-scale privatization of our education system, which would have disastrous consequences for education equality. I read several other of Roff's articles and was interested to learn that he seems to advocate "innovation" "privatization" and "less government" in every single situation. I then looked him up on the internet and discovered that not only is he employed by on organization, Frontiers of Freedom, that takes money from, among others, oil and mining companies, but that Roff has personally received research funding from Kaplan university, whose work he relentlessly extols. Roff states that new government regulation of the private sector would be "an opportunity killer for students.” In reality it would be an opportunity killed for Roff himself.

Article Link: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/12/education.schmidt/ This article (which consists largely of an interview with Bill Schimdt, director of the education policy center at Michigan State University) argues that we fail to do well in math and science not necessarily because of a lack in funding or even because of cultural disinterest. Rather, the article argues that educational inequality is to blame. In some states (like Massachusetts) math and science scores measure up to other first world nations. However, in other states, mostly southern, math and science scores are closer to those in the developing world. Schmidt attributes this to a lack of coherent national education standards. While I agree with his generally premise that standardized curricula such as the the common core and related standardized teacher training would help I believe that the greatest impediment to educational success and educational equality is money. In the United States schools are funded directly from local property taxes, a system that, as far as I know, is used no-where else in the world. As a result nationally mandated standardized testing and teacher training standards, unless properly funded would be essentially useless as local schools do not have the money to fund them. In addition to problems with national standards Schmidt alludes to cultural problems with our education system. He seems to argue that some parents don't care about their children's success, some have given up hope that they can compete globally and some believe that despite poor understanding of science and math their children can make up ground in other areas such as reading (which the US also does poorly in). I personally believe that these attitudes are symptomatic rather than causal. Parents feel hopeless because their child's school is inadequate, not the other way around. I do agree with Schmidt's final point that the educational crisis is far more severe than many believe and that it must be resolved in the United States is going to continue to be competitive in the global economy.

Article Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 I wanted to start my study of differences in national education systems by establishing which countries do better on international standardized tests. I first discovered that the test used for international academic comparisons is called the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA. Then I found a New York Times article from 2010 entitled "Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators" that article had two main points. First, that the Untied States has fallen behind not only other first world-nations but even some developing or semi-developed nations such as Poland and China. The articles' second point was that China and Shanghai in particular was head and shoulders above not just the United States bu the rest of the world. These facts were interesting to me but what I found most fascinating and peculiar about the article was the extent to which the various people interviewed attempted to detract from China's brilliant academic performance. Excessive time studying, cultural obsessiveness and outright cheating were all used to explain away the massive test score differences between the US and China. While China's government does not have a great track record of honesty the PISA tests were independently administered by disinterested international non-profits and I find it hard to believe that such a large achievement gap could have been produced entirely through cheating. By refusing to acknowledge the validity of China's results we loose the ability to emulate what as worked in their system and apply it our own. I did find it comforting that Massachusetts routinely outpaces the rest of the nation in PISA performance, but we still did not do nearly as well as Shanghai.