skoolboy has explained, much more eloquently than I can, why achievement gaps matter even if the scores of white, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian students are all rising equally:

There are a great many social institutions that sort and rank individuals on the basis of test scores and the competencies they represent. Most of these institutions don’t have an unlimited number of positions or slots—rather, individuals are competing against one another for access. When these institutions rely on test scores, and there is an achievement gap among racial/ethnic groups on these tests, the lower-scoring group will be underrepresented. Raising everybody’s scores doesn’t change the rankings of individuals, which is the only way to change the representation of minority groups among those who are selected. Only by reducing the achievement gap can we increase the chances that members of racial/ethnic minority groups can get ahead in society via selective social institutions.

In K-12 and postsecondary education, examples of these selective processes abound. Kindergarteners are often placed in reading groups when they first arrive at school, students are selected to be part of gifted and talented or magnet programs, and even less selective colleges have limited capacity. The same processes apply in the workplace. Whether you are looking for a job at Walmart or Goldman-Sachs, there are usually more applicants than positions.

Taking inspiration from the conclusion of skoolboy’s earlier analysis, I performed a basic simulation to demonstrate how black and Hispanic students fare in selection processes given existing NYC achievement gaps. I randomly generated 100,000 student scores, which roughly represents the size of a NYC cohort. In NYC schools, approximately 15% of students are Asian, 15% are white, 39% are Hispanic, and 31% are African-American. I generated these data to mirror the achievement gaps that exist in 8th grade math NAEP scores in NYC: the average African-American and Hispanic student scores .83 and .72 standard deviations below the average white score, respectively, and the average Asian student scores .28 standard deviations above it. I then asked what the racial composition of selected students would look like if we selected 5% of students, 10% of students, and so on.

Let’s start with a relatively selective process. Imagine that we choose the top 10% of students in NYC for a gifted and talented program based solely on their test scores. The graph below shows the difference in the percentage of students that would be selected in each racial group compared to their representation in the NYC student population. Though NYC schools are only 30 percent white and Asian, 66 percent of selected students would be white or Asian under this scenario. Only 17% would be Hispanic and 10% would be black.

Because of the achievement gap, black and Hispanic children are left behind in many selection processes that potentially - and significantly - affect their life chances. When we make these processes even more selective - think, for example, about admission to schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science - white and Asian students will be even more overrepresented, as the table below demonstrates.

And this is not only relevant to very selective institutions. Below, I move the cutoff point for our selective program progressively up. Even if 50% of students would be given a slot, white and Asian students still represent 44% of selected students, though they are only 30% of the population.

In short, the achievement gap has real implications for black and Hispanic kids as they move through their educational careers: they are more likely to be placed in low ability groups in integrated schools, less likely to be selected for gifted and talented programs, and less likely to attend the college of their choice. And, I stress again, this applies to both very selective and relatively non-selective institutions. Gains in proficiency that do not also close achievement gaps on continuous measures do little to help black and Hispanic kids get ahead.

See previous takes from Mike Petrilli and Jay Mathews here.

A few notes: To keep this simple, I assumed that the scores of all groups follow a normal distribution with equal variances. Since achievement gaps are often larger at the top of the distribution than in the middle and bottom, white and Asian students have an even larger advantage than they appear to based on this simulation.

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Here's my hypothesis - teachers don't think like scientists. They're more idealists at heart. They envision a certain role for themselves and they gravitate to approaches that reinforce their idealism. (...)

Secondly, the action of "doing something" is preferable to waiting for valid methods to develop, especially when there is a presumption that teachers and methods are all that stand between equal educational outcomes and wide-ranging gaps in performance. The fact that this model of how things works is divergent from reality is little consequence to idealists, for they're driven, when push comes to shove, by belief, not evidence, and that's why they continue to believe, even with little supporting evidence, that the solution is just around the corner and will eventually be found and can then be easily implemented.

Further, it's assumed that no harm is done by implementing invalid methods because the teacher doesn't mean to cause harm, as though good intention will inoculate the students from bad practices. (...)

Any solution has to start at ground zero, that is, the point where all teachers find common origin, education schools. These institutions must inculcate skepticism into the practitioners of teaching and those who make careers of research....More teachers need to adopt the practice of skepticism and chuck overboard the role of advocate for approaches that appeal to them and the role of progressive educator who is intent on implementing the cutting edge of new approaches (where more emphasis is given to the notion of progress than efficacy.) They need to learn to look at a new approach and find that their first instinct should be to tear it apart, rather than to embrace the approach and try to give it a chance....To put it simply, less embracing and more skepticism needs to be at the core of the education school experience.

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Now that eduwonkette has revealed herself as Columbia doctoral student Jennifer Jennings, skoolboy is gingerly sticking his head out of the closet and looking around. (If I see my shadow, I may go back inside for another six weeks.) skoolboy is Aaron Pallas, a Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. I study inequalities that are created and perpetuated by the ways schools sort and select children and youth, and the role that education plays in individuals’ adult lives. Recently, I went on the record in the New York Sun on a topic near and dear to eduwonkette’s heart: the failure of New York City to make substantial progress in reducing the achievement gap among different racial and ethnic groups.

What’s my relationship to eduwonkette? She took a couple of courses with me, and I’m on her dissertation committee. (Her dissertation contrasts the consequences of accountability systems in education and medicine. A provocative entry into the topic is her Ed Week commentary, under her own name, here.) More importantly, though, we’ve been collaborating on a series of studies that look at the mechanisms by which some New York City schools garner more resources than others. All of the qualities that make her blog compelling and so much fun are just as evident in her approach to academic research.

eduwonkette said the other day that she stands behind everything she wrote under the pseudonym. I do too, on substance, but I’m not as sure about tone. I think the conventions of blogging, especially anonymously, allow for shooting from the hip quite easily, and my usual writing is more painstaking. (More long-winded than my interminable dreary posts? Yep.) Also, I think that sometimes I try to emulate eduwonkette’s style, which is appealing—and she is expert at it—but I’m not skilled enough to pull it off. So if I’ve offended anyone through my tone, either in the past or in the future, my apologies.

Finally, unlike eduwonkette, I did become an academic to talk to five guys in a room with transparencies. Only now, we use PowerPoint.

And I’m so glad it’s no longer just guys.

Apologies to Ed Week: earlier, I said that only subscribers could get to eduwonkette's Ed Week article on accountability and risk adjustment in education and medicine. You can get to it through the link above. eduwonkette's better at the technology than I am, too. And while I have the floor: Thanks, Ed Week, for giving eduwonkette the space to create such an interesting forum for discussions of education research and policy.

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1)Klein Petrilli Barcelona: Mike Petrilli has a stalker, he says, and it's not the sizzling Javier Bardem. Nonetheless, the NY Times blog chronicles it all here.

2) Welcome Meredith Kolodner!: I'm a little late, but the Daily News has a new education beat reporter who, from this article on NYC's SAT scores, seems to like digging into the numbers. Though the DOE stressed that the number of students scoring at 600 or above went up 3.6 percent, Kolodner recognized that if the average is falling, there must be more low scoring students as well. As she wrote: At the same time, the number of students scoring below average also increased by 3.2%, reflecting a polarization in student results. This is neither here nor there in terms of policy - simply put, more students are taking the SAT in NYC than in the past - but I'm impressed with her smarts already.

3) A Tale of Two Schools: NYC Parents posts a letter from a Jamaica High School teacher about the resource disparities separating his school from the new small school in the building.

4) Grad Rate Round-Up: Philissa Cramer at GothamSchools has the skinny on NYC grad rates.

5) Mimi is the Best: The author of It's Not All Flowers and Sausages is possibly NYC's funniest teacher: Rumor has it that we are going to be getting new seat sacks emblazoned with the school's name and mascot. However, we will NOT be receiving any paper what-so-ever.

6) Core Knowledge x NYC: Dan Willingham weighs in on the role of content knowledge in reading - relevant to NYC's pilot of the Core Knowledge reading program - over at their site.

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Bruce Fuller, sociologist and professsor of education and public policy at the University of California - Berkeley, has co-edited a new book, Strong States, Weak Schools: The Benefits and Dilemmas of Centralized Accountability. Below, he provides a Q&A on the book’s findings.

Q. Media reports summed-up your findings by saying that teacher responses to the No Child Left Behind Act and state accountability efforts have been “haphazard”, and teachers are feeling demoralized. Didn’t we know this already?

A. We do know that teacher associations are eager to revamp No Child following the November elections, and even recraft Washington’s role in education. And the Bush Administration, business groups, and some civil rights advocates claim that No Child is working.

The seven research teams that came together to produce Strong States, Weak Schools set the stage by first showing that student achievement has inched up at a glacial pace since No Child was enacted in 2002, even slowing progress observed in the 1990s, as state-led accountability and school finance reforms were successfully pursued. Progress is more discernible in certain states.

But few researchers have hung out in schools, interviewed teachers and principals, and asked how front-line educators interpret new accountability regimes. This includes how teachers try to address state curricular standards, how they might use more textured data on what students are learning (or not), and the extent to which principals (and their district superintendents) motivate their teachers to focus on improving their pedagogies.

Earlier ethnographic studies tended to be conducted by scholars with a priori agendas, hoping to detail how teachers feel overly controlled by accountability measures, or how teachers held deep affection for them. Instead, our seven contributing teams probed different parts of the implementation elephant. Do front-line educators in elementary versus secondary schools hold different viewpoints? Do exit exams prompt different responses inside our high schools? Do the rules and tools of accountability programs operate differently to boost average student achievement, in contrast to factors that narrow racial gaps inside schools?

Q. So, does teacher resistance to top-down accountability programs help to explain the tepid gains in student test scores?

All seven teams found that teachers and principals have redoubled their efforts to assist low-performing students, in part because of accountability programs advanced from either state capitals or Washington. The spotlight placed on how student subgroups are doing, the availability of richer data on individual student competencies, and the threat of sanctions are motivating teachers to buckle down and collaborate to devise new pedagogical approaches and build stronger relationships with students.

Yet two factors constrain whether teacher responses are coordinated and effective over time. First, the RAND study, led by Laura Hamilton, found that the attention that teachers pay to curricular standards, whether they study student data, and the value they place on accountability pressures vary enormously within schools. The good news is that teachers in poor communities are not more or less responsive to accountability rules and tools, compared to those in middle-class neighborhoods. The bad news is that teacher responses are highly variable and eclectic within schools. This suggests that relatively few principals motivate their staff to pull in the same direction and employ new training and data tools that accountability programs often support.

Second, the uneven leadership of district superintendents and the stickiness of school institutions – especially high schools – tend to disempower principals. Tom Luschei and Gayle Christensen probed deep into these dynamics, hanging out over time in a few districts. They found that district leaders often respond to accountability demands in ritualized fashion, failing to work intensively with their principals to mobilize rules and tools. Two studies of high school responses, appearing in Strong States, Weak Schools, detail how growth targets, program improvement triggers, and exit exams turn teacher attention to low-achieving adolescents. But these individual-level responses rarely lead to innovative structural change in balkanized high schools.

Q. What is working to motivate teachers and raise student achievement, then?

Two studies in the book offer insights here: Melissa Henne and Heeju Jang examined what worked in 111 California elementary schools as they variably succeeded in closing achievement gaps between Anglo and Latino students. They show that disparities narrow when teachers report that their principal motivates staff to focus on raising achievement and delivers tools that make everyone feel efficacious. This is not simply a mechanical process: more equitable schools have teachers who report strong, respectful relationships with their principal and colleagues.

And Soung Bae went deeper into a California school district that had narrowed ethnic achievement gaps over time. She discovered district leaders who banked heavily on inservice teacher training – hammering on state curricular standards and inventive pedagogies. Then, district staff followed teachers back into their classrooms to provide ample clinical follow-up.

Q. So, what do these implementation studies say to state and federal policy makers who will soon be debating changes in accountability programs?

Pay attention to what motivates teachers, who, like other professionals, seem eager to pursue shared goals if they are trusted to improve their craft. The link between district staff and principals appears to be key. If district leaders are simply messengers of government – with little agility in adapting to rules and mobilizing tools – then their principals will have less capacity to motivate their teachers.

Teachers do report enormous dissatisfaction, at least in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, in being forced to ignore certain subjects and topics if they do not appear on state tests. Somehow, policy makers must face the sharp-edged dilemma of simplifying tests and the curriculum, while recognizing that tying the hands of teachers may erode everyone’s motivation.

All seven empirical studies can be viewed here.

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A few readers might be wondering: if all students in a school (or at least nearly all) are being tested, where does sampling error come into play? After all, in the case of polls, sampling error arises because one has in hand the responses of only a small percentage of the people who will actually vote. This is not the case with most testing programs, which ideally test almost all students in a grade.

This question was a matter of debate among members of the profession only a few years ago, but it is now generally agreed that sampling error is indeed a problem even if every student is tested. The reason is the nature of the inference based on scores. If the inference pertaining to each school...were about the particular students in that school at that time, sampling error would not be an issue, because almost all of them were tested. That is, sampling would not be a concern if people were using scores to reach conclusions such as "the fourth-graders who happened to be in this school in 2000 scored higher than the particular group of students who happened to be enrolled in 1999." In practice, however, users of scores rarely care about this. Rather, they are interested in conclusions about the performance of schools. For the inferences, each successive cohort of students enrolling in the school is just another small sample of the students who might possibly enroll, just as the people interviewed for one poll are a small sample of those who might have been. (p. 170)

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

skoolboy’s jaunt to the Olympics concludes today with an examination of how much going to one school versus another matters for students’ achievement in different countries. The basic approach is to look at the average achievement in a sample of schools within a country, and to see how much those averages differ from one another. If students were randomly distributed across schools in a country, and each school had similar resources, we might expect to see relatively similar average achievement across schools, and we might conclude that which school a student attends in that country doesn’t matter that much. On the other hand, if some schools in a country enroll poor students and others enroll wealthy students, and the schools serving poor students have fewer social, cultural, and economic resources available to support student achievement than the schools serving wealthy students, we might expect to see large differences in achievement across schools, suggesting that which school a student goes to in such a country matters a lot.

Data such as these don’t tell us about school effects , because they confound two different processes: selection into a school, and what happens to students after they enter the school. The latter is what we usually think of as a school effect. School-to-school differences in achievement could represent either selection or impact; they could occur because some schools raise students’ achievement more than others, or because schools enroll students who are already achieving at very different levels, or some combination of the two. In contrast, school-to-school differences in the social and economic composition of who is enrolled are best interpreted as evidence of selection, because going to one school or another doesn’t typically affect a student’s family background.

Once again, I’m using data from the PISA 2006 assessments of science, reading and math, a sample of about 30 OECD countries and an additional 25 partner countries or economies. (For those playing along at home, the data are from Chapter 4 of the report PISA 2006: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World.)

The first figure below shows the proportion of the variation in individual student achievement in a country that is between schools; put differently, how much the average achievement in a school differs from one school to the next within a country. I’ve averaged the proportions for reading, math and science for each country (they’re very highly correlated with one another.) This proportion can vary from 0% to 100%. Zero percent of the variance in achievement between schools would be observed if every school in the country had exactly the same average achievement, with some students in each school doing very well, and others doing poorly. It’s hard to picture what 100% of the variance between schools would look like, but imagine a ladder with many, many rungs that are pretty far apart, and each rung represents a particular school’s average achievement, with everybody in that school scoring right at the level of the rung. Some schools would have very high average achievement, and some would have very low average achievement, and there’d be no overlap among the schools—if you knew which school a student attended, you could predict that student’s performance perfectly.

Not surprisingly, the reality lies somewhere in between, and the figure shows that countries differ substantially from one another in how spread out achievement is across different schools. Fifteen countries, headed by Hungary, Slovenia, and Germany, have systems in which more than 50% of the variance in student achievement lies between schools. Conversely, Scandinavian countries have the most even distribution of student achievement across schools, headed by Finland, Iceland and Norway. In the U.S., 25% of the achievement of 15-year-olds is between schools, which is significantly lower than the proportion in 37 countries, and significantly higher than the proportion in a dozen countries.

The second figure shows the proportion of the variation in individual students’ socioeconomic background that is between schools—how much the school average socioeconomic status differs from one school to the next within a country, using the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status I described last week. If none of the variance in students’ socioeconomic status were between schools, we could say that students are randomly distributed across schools according to their socioeconomic backgrounds. If a great deal of the variance in students’ socioeconomic status is between schools, schools in that country are socially segregated from one another.

The U.S. is pretty much in the middle of the distribution of countries in terms of how spread out schools are from one another in their socioeconomic composition. 26% of the variance in individual student socioeconomic status is between schools in the U.S., which is significantly lower than 18 countries, and significantly higher than 16 countries. The countries that have the most socially segregated schools are headed by Chile, Bulgaria, Thailand, and Hungary; those that have the least socially segregated schools are the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland.

It’s likely no surprise to thoughtful readers that schools differ substantially in their achievement levels and social compositions in most countries, but what is intriguing is that this happens in spite of the fact that there are substantial differences across countries in how education systems are organized, with some systems centralized, and others decentralized; variability in the extent to which schools are run by the state or by private entities such as religious institutions; and differences in the extent to which the secondary schools in a country prepare students for particular vocational or postsecondary destinations. The U.S. is recognized as a large, decentralized system of schools that are mostly local. Residential segregation by race, ethnicity and economic status leads to neighborhood schools that are similarly segregated, as poor people live in different places than rich folks, and therefore generally attend different schools. Increasingly, we see in the U.S. more explicit processes by which students and schools mutually select one another, on the basis of economic status (in the case of private schools charging tuition, or high-spending suburban districts with high property taxes), or on the basis of prior academic achievement (in the case of schools with entrance exams or, as eduwonkette has shown repeatedly in New York City, in the ways that new small high schools enroll higher-performing students than the large, comprehensive high schools they’ve replaced). It is important to recognize that when a school is selecting on achievement, it’s also selecting on social class background, and vice versa, because achievement and family background are correlated.

A final caveat: The PISA data I’ve reported are at the country level, but this may not be the most meaningful geographic unit when it comes to the distribution of students across schools by socioeconomic background and achievement. What we see at the national level might not apply to geographic subunits such as states, counties, or large school districts.

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I think that the evidence is becoming clearer that many of the hopes of high-stakes accountability advocates and many of the fears of high-stakes accountability critics are correct -- school administrators and teachers can and do respond to accountability pressures, at least at the margins.

A number of recent studies have shown that schools subject to greater accountability pressure tend to improve student test performance in reading and mathematics to a meaningful degree -- my recent study of Florida with Cecilia Rouse, Jane Hannaway and Dan Goldhaber (working paper on the website of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or caldercenter.org), for instance, suggests test score gains of one-tenth of a standard deviation in reading and math associated with a school getting an "F" grade relative to a "D" grade. We find that these test score gains persist for several years after the student leaves the affected school. Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University has a new working paper studying New York City's rollout of school grades that suggests that responses to grading pressure seem to happen immediately -- grades released in November were mainfested in test score changes in the same winter/spring.

In the case of my study with Rouse, Hannaway and Goldhaber, we try to look inside the "black box" by studying a wide variety of potentially productive school responses, and it appears that Florida schools responded to accountability pressures by changing some of their instructional policies and practices, rather than "gaming the system."

The rapid and apparently productive response of school personnel to school accountability pressure suggests that educators are, at least to some degree "magisters economici," responding to the incentives associated with the system. And this makes getting the system right so important, because if schools and teachers respond quickly to incentives, the incentives had better be what society/policymakers want.

Many people raise concerns about teaching to the test, and there is certainly evidence of this -- consistently, estimated effects of accountability on high-stakes tests are larger than those on low-stakes tests -- though the low-stakes test results tend to be meaningful still, especially with respect to math. Harder to get a handle on is the narrowing of the curriculum to concentrate on the measured subjects; there is a lot of suggestive evidence that this is taking place to a small degree at the elementary level, though studies of the effects of accountability on performance on low-stakes subjects typically don't find that performance on these subjects suffers -- but of course, those subjects are still being measured with tests. Still there is certainly the incentive to reduce focus on "low-stakes" subjects. One possible solution for those concerned about low-stakes subjects being given short shrift would be to impose requirements such as minimum time spent of instruction or portfolio reviews.

There is a lot of evidence that accountability systems can have unintended consequences that are predicted by the magister economicus model. Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach at the University of Chicago note that accountability systems based on getting students above a given performance threshold tend to induce schools to focus on the kids on the "bubble." I've found that that type of system may lead schools to employ selective discipline in an apparent attempt to shape the testing pool, or even to utilize the school meals program to artificially boost student test performance by "carbo-loading" students for peak short-term brain activity. These types of unintended consequences are much more likely in accountability systems based on the "status" model of getting students above a proficiency threshold, rather than the "gains" model of evaluating schools based on how much these students gain.

But there's a tradeoff here. The more we evaluate schools based on test score gains, where gaming incentives are lower, the more the focus is taken off of poorly-performing students whom society/policymakers would like to see attain proficiency. How the system is designed is crucially important.

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I still disagree [that] it is the responsibility of the parents (husband and wife) to deal with a woman's problems in the workforce due to children, rather than the responsibility of employers.

If a husband says, "OK, I will cut back on my hours to help out around the house and with the kids," his employer may fire him.

If a husband says, "I will willingly work part time rather than full time," he will probably be denied that choice by his employer.

If a husband says, "I will work nights so that one of us can be home with the baby," the employer may well say, "Too bad, not going to happen."

If a husband says, "I will go into work early and come home early, to be there for the kids when the get home from school," the employer may well say, "No you won't."

If a husband says, "I will swap places with you and stay home on bedrest, as you were ordered by the doctor, so that you can continue at your job for the rest of the pregnancy," obviously that is not a possible solution.

A supportive husband is great, but from my take on the situation, a husband and wife together can only do so much. If businesses were willing to deviate just a bit from their current 9-5, 40 hour week, no breaks in service model, I think families across the country would all benefit.

Posted by at 8:41 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

For more than three decades, political correctness has required that educators and parents pretend that gender doesn't really matter. The results of that policy are upon us: a growing cohort of young men who spend many hours each week playing video games and looking at pornography online, while their sisters and friends dream of gentle werewolves who are content to cuddle with them and dazzling vampires who will protect them from danger. In other words, ignoring gender differences is contributing to a growing gender divide.

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Perhaps in their coverage of the No Child Left Behind law the mandarins of Eighth Avenue have fallen victim to the law of Not In My Backyard. They'd certainly be in good company. Announcing the latest graduation rate results, Mayor Bloomberg could not for his life fathom why our reporter Elizabeth Green might inquire as to his opinion on the charge that graduation rates are inflated by schools trying to put on a good face.

"I'm sort of speechless," the mayor said. "Is there anything good enough to just write the story?"

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Raising student achievement has long been a major issue in the American public education system. But with the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act and its testing mandates, even more attention has been directed towards this issue. As states release their annual school report cards, testing and accountability have once again emerged as hot topics of debate, with New York City Public Schools receiving considerable scrutiny of late.

Consequently, many observers have questioned whether state testing and accountability systems are accurately depicting student performance and the size of the achievement gap between groups.

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1) What are three things your teachers would say about you?
2) What makes you want to attend a school that will demand your very best academically and will expect you to work harder than you probably ever have before?
3) What are five future goals you have for yourself?
4) Mention the title and authors of some books you would like to discuss during your interview.
5) What are some activities to which you belong either in school or outside of school?

The most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.

Her behavior is not represented as obsessive or self-destructive, but driven — necessary, even. She is forced into making these sacrifices by the aggressive neglect of the school’s administrators, who won’t even let her take books from the bookroom. The film applauds Ms. Gruwell’s dedication, but also implies that she has no other choice. In order to be a good teacher, she has to be a hero.

(...)Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.

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I don't know who invented the term "empirical epistemologist," but I do know that when I first heard the term I knew that it was a perfect phrase for describing what I do. Almost all people believe that they are epistemologists in a vague sense; after all, isn't everyone searching for the truth? But empirical epistemology implies the search for methods that will help researchers who design studies and collect data. For each supposed fact in social science, one could ask "How do we know that this is true?" My teaching and research is devoted to helping researchers answer this question.

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skoolboy doesn’t know who was the first to say that the true measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members, but it’s an appealing proposition. All societies have children and adults who vary in their economic, social and cultural status within the society. In virtually every modern society, the more advantaged, as a group, do better than those with lower status, although individuals can rise or fall in relation to their peers. Today’s visit to the Olympics looks at the relationship between a child’s socioeconomic status and proficiency in math and science across countries.

PISA 2006 created an index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status (ESCS), which is based on a parent’s occupational status (using a standard international scale); the highest level of a parent’s education, in years of schooling completed; an index of family wealth (e.g., number of computers, automobiles, and televisions; whether the child has own room); an index of home educational resources (e.g., a dictionary, a calculator); and an index of possessions in the home representing “classical” culture (e.g., classical literature, works of art). The index was standardized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 for OECD countries. Keep in mind, though, that PISA sampled youth currently enrolled in school as 15-year-olds in the participating countries, and in some countries (e.g., Mexico, Turkey) fewer than 60% of youth at this age are still in school. (In most OECD countries, more than 90% of this age cohort is still enrolled.) Out-of-school youth are, on average, of substantially lower socioeconomic status than youth still in school at age 15.

The figure below shows the percentage of 15-year-olds in each of the PISA countries and economies whose ESCS is in the bottom 15% of ESCS among students in OECD countries. Countries are arrayed from highest to lowest, and columns in red represent significantly higher percentages than the U.S. percentage of 11%; columns in blue represent significantly lower percentages than the U.S.; and grey columns are statistically indistinguishable from the U.S. Ten countries, headed by Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey and Tunisia, have more than 40% of the PISA participants in this low-ESCS category. Three countries—Norway, Iceland and Canada—have fewer than 5% in the low-ESCS category. Based on the ESCS scale, which is intended to be standardized across countries, there are many countries with higher concentrations of low-SES students than the U.S.

The next figure shows the correlation between ESCS and mathematics proficiency for each PISA country and economy. The correlation can range from -1.0 to +1.0, with 0 representing no correlation. A positive correlation indicates that students with higher ESCS score higher, on average, in math proficiency than students with lower ESCS. The presence of such a correlation is almost universal—only in Azerbaijan is there a realistic possibility of no correlation. Columns in red represent countries with a significantly higher correlation between ESCS and mathematics proficiency than the U.S. correlation, which is .42. Blue columns represent countries that have significantly lower correlations than the U.S., and grey columns are countries that are statistically indistinguishable from the U.S.

Only Chile and Hungary have significantly higher correlations than the U.S., whereas 28 countries have significantly lower correlations than the U.S. does. Along with Azerbaijan, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Montenegro, and the Russian Federation all have a correlation between ESCS and mathematics proficiency that is less than .30.

The “sweet spot” for schools, districts, and countries is a configuration in which average achievement is high, and the achievement gap between the more and less advantaged is low—a configuration that some would describe as both excellent and equitable. skoolboy’s summary based on the PISA data: the U.S. isn’t very sweet.

A topic for another day: What should the correlation between a student's socioeconomic status and his or her school achievement be? Is it possible that some degree of correlation between socioeconomic status and school achievement is appropriate? Or should we not rest until we've driven the correlation to zero?

Posted by skoolboy at 7:40 AM | Permalink | 30 Comments | Recommend

On Friday, eduwonkette wondered about how gender figured into my Olympics-inspired international comparison of high student literacy in math and science. Ask and you shall receive, e. Today I’m reporting data on the percentage of males and females in different countries and economies that are high achievers, and within-country differences in these percentages. On Friday, I was looking at the top 5% of students in each country. Today, I’m using the percentage of students in each country scoring at the highest level on the 2006 PISA science and math literacy scales. (Yeah, proficiency scores, but what can you do.) In science, there are six levels of proficiency, with 1.3% of students across the OECD countries scoring at Level 6. This is more selective than the top 5% in each country. But I should point out that PISA assesses the real-world application of math and science skills, and is not a narrowly-tailored test of particular math and science disciplines. Such tests might well yield different country rankings and gender differences.

Only five countries have a statistically significant difference in the percentage of males and females achieving the top level in science: Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong-China, and Israel. In 37 other countries, including the U.S., the percentages of males and females at the top level in science are statistically indistinguishable. Among males, seven countries have a significantly higher percentage at the top level than the U.S. does, and 19 countries have a significantly lower percentage. 17 countries have a percentage of males at the top level that is indistinguishable from the U.S. percentage. (Finland and New Zealand are at the top of the international heap, with 4.6% and 4.4%, respectively, whereas 1.6% of U.S. males are at the top level.) Among females, only two countries (also Finland and New Zealand) have a significantly higher percentage scoring at the top level in science than does the U.S., whereas 19 countries have a percentage that is significantly lower. 20 countries are statistically indistinguishable from the U.S.’s percentage of 1.5% of females at the top level.

In math, about 3% of the students in OECD countries score at Level 6, the top level of mathematics proficiency. In 24 countries, the percentage of males at Level 6 is reliably higher than the percentage of females, and in no country does the percentage favor females. (In 22 countries, including the U.S., the percentages of males and females at Level 6 do not differ statistically.) 26 countries have a statistically greater percentage of males at Level 6 than the 1.5% of U.S. males who achieve this level, and only 9 countries are lower than the U.S., with 15 countries at about the same percentage. U.S. females don’t fare much better against their international peers. In 15 countries, the percentage of young women scoring at Level 6 exceeds the U.S. percentage of 1.0%, and in six countries the percentage at Level 6 is significantly lower than the U.S. percentage.

Most striking to skoolboy was a comparison of the math performance of females in other countries to that of U.S. males. In 15 countries, the percentage of females achieving Level 6 on the PISA mathematics assessment exceeds the percentage of U.S. males at Level 6. Chinese Taipei (which is kicking everybody’s butts), Hong Kong-China, Liechtenstein, and Korea all have at least four times as many females at Level 6 in math, proportionally, as the U.S. has males at Level 6.

What about reading? About 8% of students in OECD countries scored at Level 5, the top proficiency level, in 2006. In 35 countries, the percentage of females at Level 5 exceeded the percentage of males by a statistically significant amount. In 18 countries, the percentages for males and females were indistinguishable. Unfortunately, the U.S. is not included in this comparison, because we dropped the baton in the relay: a mistake in printing the reading test booklets invalidated the scores.

Posted by skoolboy at 7:36 AM | Permalink | 27 Comments | Recommend

Finland systematically includes the arts at a young age--although not in what we would consider to be "school" (more like after-school programs that all students attend). In Japan, the "shadow" system--which some think of as "cram" schools, actually functions to offer enrichment to most young students (with a more academic bent as high school levels are approached). Many of countries the countries mentioned include languages at a very early (elementary) age. In Finland instruction begins with "mother-tongue" (Finnish, Swedish, Sami, or the homeland language of immigrants), with the addition of a second national language soon after. I would call this evidence of "[well-]roundedness."

Unlike some people, I know what "half off" really means. Not that I would buy a Gap sweater even if it was half off. But I know the difference between a "storewide sale" and a "discount on selected merchandise." Trust me. You don't want to be standing at the cash register screaming at a clerk for overcharging you only to realize you messed up your math. Not hot.

And Mike and Joel, let me just say on a personal note that I understand that people make mistakes. As a famous New Yorker once said, "I have always believed in second chances." But let me warn you -- when something you did that a lot of people think was really wrong gets out on the internet, it won't go away. My advice to you is to swallow your pride, lay low, and hope none of your friends talks about it to the press. The last thing you need is that white-haired wrinkly dude talking about you over and over and over again because that will just make people google your name. And guess what they will find? Exactly. In 24 hours, your dumb mistake will be the most searched phrase in the entire world. Everyone will link to it. Everywhere. People might even forget that you are a singer and a model and so much more.

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Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

skoolboy has always found Olympic medal counts by country to be silly. Sure, it's fine to take pride in the accomplisments of one's countrymen and countrywomen. But the Olympics for me are about appreciating excellence, regardless of the flag (or swoosh) on the uniform.

Ah, but student achievement! That's a horse race of a different color. We have a venerable tradition dating back at least to A Nation at Risk of comparing the academic achievement of U.S. schoolchildren to the performance of kids in other countries. The Olympics serves as a quadrennial site for seeing how we measure up to other countries.

Yesterday, eduwonkette decried former West Virginia governor Bob Wise's comparison of the relative performance of elite U.S. athletes against the world in the Olympics with the relative performance of average U.S. students against the world in high school graduation rates. Aren't our elite students doing just as well as those in other countries?, she asked.

skoolboy doesn't have the performance of elite students cued up for comparison, but here are some data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international survey of 15-year-olds in 57 countries. The figures below show the performance achieved by students at the 95th percentile--that is, the top 5%--in each country. The countries are arrayed from lowest achievement to highest on the PISA assessments, with each column representing a country. Dark blue columns are countries scoring significantly higher than the U.S. Grey columns are statistically indistinguishable from U.S. performance, and bright red columns are countries doing worse than the U.S. The length of the column represents how far away a country is from the U.S. based on the standard deviation of individual scores around the world.

In mathematics, the performance of top U.S. students is dismal. In 28 countries, students at the 95th percentile score significantly higher than students at the 95th percentile in the U.S., and the gaps are surprisingly large. Students in Chinese Taipei, Korea, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Liechtenstein all score at least .5 standard deviations above the U.S. in this comparison.
Things look a little bit brighter in science achievement. Ten countries have students at the 95th percentile scoring higher than the U.S., and 35 countries have students at this level scoring significantly worse than U.S. students at the 95th percentile. Eleven countries are statistically indistinguishable from the U.S. Still, the best that we can claim is that the U.S. is tied for 11th internationally, although the magnitude of the gap between U.S. elite students and elite students in the top-ranked countries (e.g., Finland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan) is smaller in science than it is in math.

These comparisons don't address the performance of students entering the most selective of U.S. colleges and universities--the MIT's, Cal Techs, Harvards, Princetons and Yales. In a national cohort of 3 million 15-year-olds, the top 5% is 150,000 students, and the vast majority of these are not entering the most selective colleges. Still, the fact that the top 5% of U.S. students are getting their butts kicked in math and science is alarming to those who tie U.S. global competitiveness to the academic performance of American youth. Just as in sport, there are no quick fixes: a well-planned training regimen (including plenty of time in the academic weight room) is the key to success.

Posted by skoolboy at 1:36 AM | Permalink | 21 Comments | Recommend

Many of the athletes coming here have trained to compete against their foreign counterparts. This is like America’s high school students, who also prepare for many years, and they also must now compete internationally….What would you say if I told you right now that our American athletes will finish far down the list of nations in this year’s Beijing Olympics? Well, I think you would say “Bob, that’s just crazy.” We train some of the best the fastest and the most agile athletes in the world. Why, in the 2004 games in Athens, the US ranked first in overall medal count. But while our United States athletes usually bring home the gold, silver, or bronze, there is one international competition this year in which our young people ranked 13th. I’m talking about HS graduation rates."

This Friday, America's team of finely-tuned physical specimens will start piling up medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the Education Olympics will face the world's best in a contest of academic acumen, an arena in which the United States has lost its edge in recent decades....Students will compete in 58 events based on four main international measures of student performance, as well as selected measures of educational attainment.

Posted by at 8:23 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Regular readers know that eduwonkette was an early endorser of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education policy statement crafted by Sunny Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, and co-signed by some of skoolboy’s favorite scholars, policymakers and activists. The fundamental premise of the policy agenda is that efforts to advance student’s learning and development need to combine policies intended to improve schools with policies designed to transform the social and economic contexts in which children and youth develop. The approach is described as broader and bolder because it postulates that school improvement—which includes holding schools accountable for students’ learning and development—can’t do it alone. Rather, investments in communities, families and other social institutions that shape children’s lives outside of formal schooling are critical to moderating the powerful linkage between socioeconomic advantage and children’s learning and development.

The potential of this approach is illustrated through the research of Suet-Ling Pong, a cool person you should know. Dr. Pong is Professor of Education, Sociology and Demography at Penn State, where she serves as the Professor-in-Charge of the Educational Theory and Policy Program. (Some colleges and universities have program heads, or chairs, or coordinators. At Penn State, apparently, someone is actually in charge!) Over the past 15 years, she has pursued a program of research that has illuminated the mechanisms by which families, neighborhoods, and labor markets – important out-of-school contexts – shape students’ achievement in school.

Dr. Pong’s research strongly suggests that policies can weaken the links between a child’s social and economic background and her achievement. A key example is in the arena of family structure and family policy. In the U.S., we are accustomed to thinking of single-parent families, typically headed by women, as inherently disadvantaged. Female-headed families without another adult in the household struggle economically, and these mothers find it difficult to balance long hours at work and the time they spend with their children at home. As David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks point out, single-parent families are defined as an economic problem, a child development problem, and a moral problem; and the moral overtones have shaped American family policy.

Suet-Ling Pong and her colleagues have shown that there is nothing deterministic about the correlation between growing up in a single-parent family and children’s school achievement. Instead, she finds, the association between single-parenthood and children’s academic outcomes varies across countries. In the U.S., children growing up in single-parent families are comparatively worse off in their math and science achievement, relative to similar children in two-parent families, than is true in other countries, and some European countries have much smaller achievement gaps between single-parent and two-parent families than do others.

A country’s family policy environment is what makes the difference. Family policy takes many forms, including maternity and parental leave, child-care programming and subsidies, public after-school programs, and housing subsidies, to name a few. Countries which Pong and her colleagues describe as having strong family and welfare policies have smaller achievement gaps in math and science between children in single-parent and two-parent families than are found in other countries.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that policies that have helped to close gaps in other countries will have the same effect in the U.S. Policy-borrowing is a very delicate matter, and the successful enactment of a policy depends on many factors beyond the substance of the policy itself. Nor can we conclude that family and welfare policies are likely to eliminate the many disparities in academic outcomes observed in the U.S. Schools can’t do it alone—and neither can families and communities. But policies that unite these social institutions in a concerted effort have more potential to create progress than those that treat them in isolation from one another.

Posted by skoolboy at 6:11 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

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That question has important ramifications for college admissions and affirmative-action policies. The schools claim the answer is yes....as yours truly will further argue in the ridiculously long post after the jump, that doesn't appear to be the case.

The proficiency view, to my mind, is certainly important to consider when we are thinking about building stocks of human capital. But if we are concerned about inequality and social stratification - ensuring that, on average, every demographic and socioeconomic group is equally prepared to compete in higher education and the workplace - relative achievement measured on a continuous scale is what matters, not proficiency rates.

Dear New Yorkers,

This last Sunday I denied a public information request inappropriately. When one is overcome with a bitter, “them vs. us” attitude on top of a penchant for political game-playing and a disinterest in public communication, surely you understand how these things happen.

Posted by at 7:24 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend