Molly Ivins was warning us about Smirk and crew .. and no one wanted to listen. Hopefully more of suburbia is ready to revolt.

Had everyone read Molly Ivins' in 1999 we wouldn't be stuck in the fucking mess we now find ourselves in.

Kevin D --

"...it's silly to think there was a conservative conspiracy to use NCLB to destroy public education because most conservatives didn't support NCLB in the first place. They just voted for it because George Bush wanted them to...."

Silly me. And all along I thought this AEI/PNAC thing and the war on terra was condoned because all the Republicans were on board with the repugnuts. And those doctrinaires looking to get vouchers and church schools going? Not game it?

Blow me down. Silly, silly me. Thanks for setting me right.

Hi Everyone,

I just have a few quick questions for education experts out there. This is mainly involving primary and secondary education.

1. Would it ever be possible, in the United States, to have an education system akin to the German Gymnasium (where they take the Abitur), the French Lycee (ending with the Baccalaureat), or English A levels? If so, how difficult would it be to change?

2. How difficult would it be to implement the International Baccalaureat system in our schools?

3. Would it be possible to have a system, akin to the Advanced Placement exam, where you are graded for the class by your teacher, but the exam itself is used for college admissions?

I am just asking because for research, it seems that school systems in some foreign countries (Singapore, Japan, Germany, France, England) are the equivalent to 1-2 years of an American university. Given the cost of a university education in the U.S., wouldn't it be cheaper, and more efficient, to have a system in place like these? Given the fact that most undergraduates spend the equivalent of one year taking "general education" courses.

Hello All,

One final point. It seems that all of the criticism of education does not take into account the strongest feature of the American education system, which is its universities and graduate schools. Which are hands down the best in the world, and the envy of everywhere else (I know because I have attended universities in three other countries). Yes, at 18-19, your average Japanese, Singaporeon, or university tracked European is probably more knowledgeable then most American 18-19 year olds. But, I think that at 22, most Americans are even with their European or Asian counterparts.

Rural schools have troubles, too. BIG troubles.

And what are the odds of suburban voters letting the government spend money on inner city schools? On poor blacks and latinos?

Zilch. Less than zilch. Remember, these are the people who thought we spent more on welfare than on national defense.

Look, Kevin. The educational system in this country is upside down because in most states the property taxes make up the majority of the local school funding. Even where the district is socio-economically broad enough, there is resentment at too broad a redistribution and, where there is not enought to go around, guess which schools find it easier to raise additional contributions?

Last year in Minneapolis, as a target city, we were waiting in October to know exactly how many new Hmong, Somalis, etc. we were getting that school year although the funding had already been set. I have no idea how much more is needed in resources whether you get 100 Hmong and 200 Somalis, or 200 Hmong and 150 Somali children (and obviously we haven't defined ages yet either), but that isn't fair on the school district.

So it's a federal, state, county, city fiasco. Not just the sods in D.C. And what's the last federal education mandate to be fully funded?

What you're missing is that NCLB is pure punitive. Not only is it possibly the world's largest unfunded mandate, but its enforcement mechanism is to withdraw funding from those districts that can't manage to fudge their numbers.

Well which districts will those be? Suburban ones (and a lot of others) can always find ways to put kids into one or another special category that exempts them from the 100% success pool. But the urban districts don't have the money to do that and can't afford the one proven method, which is a low ratio of students to teachers. They will lose even *more* money and be even more trapped in the vicious cycle they're already in. The law denies them the one thing they really need, a predictable money source.

These districts were so desperate they went along with NCLB because they had no choice and figured they might possibly work something out of it. The other districts also thought they might get something out of it somewhere. Nobody actually read the damn provisions.

So now the suburban districts are cottoning on to the idea that they're not going to get anything and might actually lose something. But they won't really, because they'll figure out ways to game the statistics.

And that's the bush administration in a nutshell, isn't it? You know the statistics you need to manufacture; go thou and do so. Remember Rod Paige and the Houston miracle? This is bushCoWorld, where only the poor have to prove themselves. And like Alberto Gonzalez, they "prove themselves" by becoming lickspittles to people like bush.

What sad excuses for human beings these people are.

adlsad --

I've never really had a conversation in the US where a significant proportion seem willing to look at foreign mechanisms and think they might have an idea that is worth pursuing. True of healthcare, also.

I agree with you on universities to a degree (sorry!), and although most US know this they do not similarly admit the opposite evidence that their K-12 schools suck compared to overseas, even though the comparatives often appear in the papers. Apparently, by crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, US children loose the ability to be similarly taught.

The short answer is "No".

The NCLB passed because Americans aren't realistic about schools: the most important influence on how a kid performs in school is not whether the school is public or private or whether the school uses phonics or whole word or how much the teachers are paid or how big the class sizes are. The most important factor is the kid himself. Smart kids mean good performance.

Now, every single person knows that when they are looking to buy a house. In LA, according to Sandra Tsing Loh of the LA Times education section, you pay about $1,000 per API test score point at the local school in home prices. Nobody cares what policies are followed at the school. What you are paying for is a smart peer group for your kid.

Everybody behaves like this in private, but nobody talks like this in public. Instead, everybody BSes as if all kids were at least of average intelligence. But we don't live in Lake Wobegon. We lie to each other in public, and so we get idiotic laws like NCLB ... because that's what we deserve!

I graduated from a public high school in the burbs last year, just as they started implimenting testing for the grades below me. My school passed, barely. Yet it was ranked in the top 300 schools in the nation. NCLB is possibly the most harmful law passed by Bush. (On second thought, maybe fourth or fifth) It kills creativity and motivation. Why would anyone want to go to school to take a crappy test? Why would any teacher want to teach to one.

If it get renewed, that'll probably kill my dreams of being a teacher. Maybe I'll be a lawyer instead...

adlsad-

I wish we impliment college courses while students are in high school better. Kids are "encouraged" to take AP courses. But in today's culture, why go through the extra work of AP?

Mandating AP courses would, honestly, be the only way we could compete with the German/European style of learning.

egbert, Al, etc: "Liberal teachers!"

Oh, they haven't written yet? Yes, well, education IS a sore point for those boys.

Several writers, including Kevin, note that NCLB operates to punish. Americans love to punish. There is a widespread belief that we can punish our way to our goals. Don't know where it comes from, but it's there.

With respect to education, the punitive component of NCLB doesn't do much to improve schools or student achievement. It does, however, satisfy the voters' desire to express their anger. Politicians feed that anger because it is the second-best way, after fear, to get votes.

Americans do not really want good schools for everyone. They want good schools for their own children. As long as that attitude is promoted as a virtue, public schools serving working class communities will be low performing.

Notthere and Declare,

Sorry for the rant, but here it is.

Thanks for the responses. I think that another thing that is missing from these debates about education is that other countries (especially in Europe, but also in Singapore) track their students. Good students go to good schools with a rigorous curriculum. I knew kids who went to the German Gymnasium, and they had three hours of homework a night, and when they went to the U.S. on exchange (usually during their 11th grade year), they had less than 3 hours of homework a week. Less academically gifted students either go to "trade schools" or leave school around 15 or 16. Here, we keep everyone until they are 18, whether they want go or not.

Second, the U.S. has a lot more "second chance opportunities" than most other countries. If you goof off or struggle in high school, you can always go to the local junior college or night school. In most other countries, you are just stuck with an exam score you took when you were 18 years old which determines your options for the rest of your life. Also, related to this issue is there is a lack of incentive for a lot of students. If the high school exit exam determines what you are going to do the rest of your life, of course you are going to study harder to pass it.

I think that the problem with debates about the U.S. educational system is that there are so many factors that are involved. These include: the school a child goes to; the make up of the student body; the socio-economic area the child lives in; how much funding for the school; the parents; the education level of the parents; the teachers; the administration; how the parents view education; the student himself; the students' friends; the intelligence of the student; the motivation of the student; and many more. I mean, there are so many seperate factors that go into a child's education, it is impossible to say "you do this, and everything will work out."

And finally, our education system is criticized a lot. And I criticize it too. And there are definately problems. But there are a lot of good points about our education system that never get discussed: sports (not to the extreme levels), an emphasis on extra-curricular activities, an emphasisi on a life outside of school, developing a "whole person," delayed specialization, a sense of "community" that many schools foster, and there are a lot more that I can not think of this time at night.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope that this can stir a debate or something...

Declare A Vision,

Don't despair. A lawyer is a wonderful career choice! This country needs more attorneys.

adlsad --

I'll add a little more. Not familiar with Singapore although, strangely, I lived there as a small child, but with Europe there are further assists to the system: post-natal leave, childcare and pre-school, better in-school discipline.

I agree with the points about not having one-size for all but what would be an earlier form of Vo-tech here.

The main problem with the US is that the responsibilities, targets and funding is all so fragmented that there is no way to look at education in a comprehensive way. So, no comprehensive solution.

There was good reason why our political forebearers named legislative budget committees "Ways and Means". Members of such panels are supposedly enjoined to consider simultaneously the ways to accomplish a given objective, and the means to support or fund the initiative.

Unfortunately, our politics today is sadly reflective of the self-absorbed constituency we have become, at once emboldened and burdened with a perversely inflated sense of personal entitlement. Therefore, rather than address responsibly society's long-term needs, we appear perfectly willing to defer our own children's needs and mortgage our own grandchildren's futures, in order to gratify our own short-term desires.

As long as that's the case, we're going to see in perpetuity the type of cynical legislation exemplified by NCLB and the Medicare / prescription drug "reform" boondoggle -- always gratuitously long on the ways, while woefully short on the means.

The real problem is that Republicans long ago won the battle to "improve" education by commanding obedience to standards instead of paying money for education. It's that simple. Then, because of the crazy way the courts deal with schools, the educators lost the ability to discipline children and school boards sold out their standards in order to get every possible dollar from the state and at the same time decided to let the parents overrule the teachers on classroom matters and as a result the situation is nearly hopeless.

Kevin --

On your complaint about the 80/20 problem, I'd say yes and no. NCLB was designed almost entirely with low-income schools in mind. One of the goals of the bill, however, was to make sure that accountability was consistent within each state, which meant that a lot of the implementation in terms of developing standards and choosing tests had to take place at the state level. Meanwhile, no one wanted to hold low-income schools to the fire while giving high-income schools a pass (even if they were struggling performance-wise) so the accountability measures had to be put in place at every school.

Statewide accountability meant standardized testing at every school, which sounds like it's one of the main complaints from sub-/exurban school districts. That raises some questions for me; not to get all BoBo about it, but the parents in those districts do tend to be "achievement oriented" in a sort of corporate managerial way, and whatever you think of that attitude you have to admit that those who hold it tend to love their metrics. Especially when it comes to their kids, and especially when it comes to choosing a school/district for their kids.

I think that a lot of their complaints probably stem from a degree of cognitive dissonance (wanting a metric when it's time to choose where to live but not wanting accountability for their school). At the same time, I think that they sometimes come from a real difference between a school’s NCLB rating and its actual performance, even on tests. That difference stems from the crudeness of the “percent proficient� metric, which is the percent of students scoring above X points on the relevant test. Think about what that means: if X is 60 points and a school raises all of its students' scores from the teens to the 50s it gets no credit—and that’s just one of many ways they could raise students’ scores across the board without increasing the number that are above 60. That creates a legitimate impression of unfairness, and once that impression is there people start finding all sorts of other flaws, real and imagined, in the system.

I do also worry that some of the complaints may stem from a less savory issue. Just to be extra-clear: I’m really not sure that this is anything close to commonplace, but it’s something I have seen. NCLB requires schools and districts to meet proficiency benchmarks for subgroups in addition to those for the overall student population. Each subgroup has different benchmarks, depending on where it stood when NCLB was first implemented. If a school misses the benchmark for any subgroup it is said to be “making insufficient progress," or something to that effect (whatever press reports often shorthanded as "failing"). One of those subgroups is low-income students, who often make up a large enough cohort to be counted even in relatively wealthy schools and districts. I have seen parents get upset about NCLB because their school met all of its benchmarks except the one for performance of low-income students (or some other cohort that has been struggling), and was labeled a "failure" in the press as a result. I think that most people realize that there is limited sympathy for complaints along these lines, which is why I worry that some people may hide them (at least in public) behind talk of "declining innovation," etc.

I should say that there are also some schools where just the opposite happens -- that is, a subgroup that is generally doing very well fails to improve enough and thus causes the whole school to get the "failing" label. I have a lot more sympathy for this complaint, but I suspect that for the most part it is made openly, because almost everyone else will sympathize too.

In any case, I don't really think it's much of a problem that we implement statewide programs that are primarily designed to help school in low-income areas. I do think that it's a problem that the metric is as crude as "percent proficient," but that wouldn’t be terribly hard to fix—California's API system is based on the same tests as its NCLB system, but the API takes all scores into account (weighting lower scores more, so there's still an extra incentive to help lower-performing students).

Accountability systems will always upset some parents. Nobody wants their kid's high school to be branded as 'failing,' even though the consequences are more often managerial than financial; there's a natural fear that the label itself will somehow hurt the students’ future prospects. On the other hand, in a good system (and I’m certainly not saying we’re there yet) the label would actually help in that the school would get the necessary aid, financial and otherwise, to fix whatever problem triggered the alarms. If you get the measurements right (again the API is a decent model), you also won't have nearly as much dissonance between a school's accountability rating and the views of its students’ parents. And of course the whole thing needs to be funded properly or it's pretty much worthless. Meanwhile, restricting an accountability program to low-income areas without comparing their schools' performance to that of high-income schools would only increase the proportional burden on districts that already deal with more than their share.

Is statewide school accountability a tricky sell, politically? Sure. So is universal health care, energy independence, and even withdrawal from Iraq. That doesn't mean they're not worth doing.

Kevin, to your point - NCLB's only teeth are to cut or deny Title I funding to schools that don't meet the arbitrary testing standards. Most suburban schools receive little or no Title I funds. As a result, the only punitive meaasures are levied against the schools least able to bear them - the poor ones. However, this is consistent with conservative's "blame the victim" mentality.

On a different topic, I hope you put up a thread about the supposed "confession" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) at Gitmo. Apparently, KSM confessed to the 9-11 attacks and something like 30 other terrorist attacks worldwide. I'm surprised he didn't confess to the JFK assassination, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the influenza epidemic of 1918. I'm betting the man has been tortued past the point of insanity, like Jose Padilla, and is a mass of quivering goo at this point in time. Not that I want to see the dirtiest T-shirt in the world ever again, but I think Democrats should demand that KSM be shown live and have a fair and open trial. Even a monster like KSM deserves a fair trial - his torture and mock "confession" give lie to the fact that America is a beacon of truth and justice in a world of gathering darkness. We used to be - but not in Bushworld.

The United States needs to raise Title I funding by $10 billion and IDEA funding by $10 billion. Anything else is preventing students in poverty from having a chance.

I teach at a school in an American suburb with higher test scores than the schools in Europe. Our Math Department compared our curriculum to the International Baccalaureat curriculum a few years ago, realized that ours is better, and convinced our school not to use IB. Schools in the United States do not adopt IB generally because IB tells you what to teach. However, there are a small number of IB programs in the United States, and anybody living in a major city can probably find such a program to put their kids into.

Starting in 1966, the conservaboobs and Repukeliscum have declared war on the public schools. Their mission was accomplished by NCLB.

NCLB gives no responsibility to private schools or christian madrasses. Thus, these schools look good.

It presents impossible goals for public schools. It makes them look bad.

It's a deliberate plot to destroy the public schools.

Adam:Actually, in the quoted paragraph, it makes clear why the backlash from suburban parents. Their crown programs, innovative (at least to their thinking) things to help sometimes the gifted, but sometimes to CREATE the gifted, are finding themselves cut back in money and time, or sometimes fully cut altogether, so they can focus on teaching to the test and getting as high a metric as they can.

Four points.

(1) No conservative conspiracy? Grover Norquist! Not necessarily the person in this case but the approach - and the same approach taken with social security. If there are small issues, even if the overall system isn't too far afield, let's blow the whole thing up and get what we really want even if we need to approach the issue obliquely. Conspiracy? Was there a conspiracy on social security? It was simply an oblique approach to get a desired result - in this case the demise of public education.

(2) 80/20? Much as I hate to admit it, I think that's wrong. The schools that are often used as examples of poor education often do quite well - GIVEN the socio-economic mix that they start with. If you have a school where 90+% of the children qualify for free/reduced lunch, you have a school where many children come to school with "issues" unrelated to school that make learning much more of a challenge. These are the schools that are the first to be labeled "failing" but a 50% pass rate there may be more impressive than an 80% pass rate as a school drawing primarily children from middle-income backgrounds. And rural schools present another set of issues!

(3) Related to the above, NCLB begins with the premise that children come to school prepared to learn or ready "not to be left behind." Unfortunately, that's simply incorrect, in many cases dramatically so. For example, how many children start in U.S. schools with series problems because their mothers drank heavily while they were pregnant? Many of those children were left behind before they were born, and to label a school failing simply because it has a student body that contains too many of these children is simply wrong.

(4) Perhaps most importantly, it doesn't cost the same to provide education in all locales. Sounds obvious yet this is the key to the puzzle. Middle income and suburban schools where children generally don't have to deal with non-school "issues" can provide education relatively inexpensively. Urban districts, rural districts, districts with high percentages of special ed students have higher costs to provide education. Nevertheless, we have a funding system that, at best, treats all schools equally or at worst biases funding toward the middle/upper income schools.

Kevin: ": it's silly to think there was a conservative conspiracy to use NCLB to destroy public education because most conservatives didn't support NCLB in the first place."

I think the idea of a vast conspiracy to destroy public ed is overblown - it's rather more complicated than that. We're talking mutiple levels and actors including
1) specific factions who obviously - sometimes explicitly - wanted to damage or destroy public ed, for ideological and political reasons.
2) factions who were pushing to help public ed, as we would understand it. For example, iirc, the provisions for breaking out subgroups was only included after intense lobbying by advocates.
3) sheer boondogglery, pushed by various edu-related industries - testing, etc. - and their supporters.
4) Lakoffian strict-father mentality. Hence the punitiveness.
5) The domestic-policy version of what's been dubbed, (by Matt, no less) as the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics - it's all about willpower.
5) Refusal to come to terms with the reality of school failure, which is largely ) an issue of savage socioeconomic inequalities. Kevin's 80/20 point may be a little oversimplified - as mentioned, rural schools have their own set of problems - but not by all that much. This doesn't just affect well-off schools - due to this refusal to understand the problem, it leads to provisions that are useless or harmful (such as allowing parents to transfer kids, without grasping that most of the schools they'll be able to transfer them to, within anything like a reasonable and time/money-affordable commute (there being no meaningful provisions for that, of course) would be of similarly lackluster quality).
6) Various ideological hobbyhorses - funding, control, etc.
7) Assorted other stuff I don't have the time or understanding to talk about.

Mix it all up, and then have it administered by Bush appointees (as opposed to folks who might have blunted some of the sharp edges produced both intentionally and by the interaction of all these disparate parts), and it's amazing that our educational systems haven't just collapsed yet . ..

Rich - re: your point #3 - lead fucking paint. One of my wife's kindergartners had, when tested, the highest level of lead in her bloodstream that the doctor had ever seen. And they've just released some study suggesting that it has even worse and more pervasive effects than previously thought.

and re: your point #4 - it really is ridiculous that the struggle is generally , at best, for equalizing funding. In a sane world, we'd be arguing over how much more poor schools needed to get, over and above the most lavishly supplied affluent ones.

As a father I can tell you first hand that it's a waste of my child's time to spend it preparing for and taking these exercises in mendacity. My child spends hours and perhaps days in preparation, accompanied by automated calls home to make sure the we get him to bed early.

Learning is about more than just mastering tests, particularly when it comes to these type of tests. What does anyone learn from filling in dots?

Kevin --

I've blogged on some of this before -- I wrote a dissertation on standards and accountability, and filled in for Andy at Eduwonk once or twice.

On your 80/20 split point, I think what we actually have is 3 groups -- highly struggling urban schools in concentrated poverty (20%), a vast middle where anti-intellectualism is the norm and kids are undereducated (60%), and a top 20% of top mostly suburban schools. We tend to talk about the top and the bottom, but it is fair to say that there is much that could be achieved in the middle, as well.

Where I think your point is right on is that we have a dialogue that talks as if we have one problem (this is a A Nation at Risk legacy, which shifted the lens from inequality across districts to inequality across nations, thus implicitly linking all our schools as caught in a "tide of mediocrity"), when in fact we have a range of problems that should be handled differently. Urban schools in highly concentrated poverty need powerful and broadly shaped reforms similar to what KIPP provides (not necessarily the KIPP pedagogy, but in terms of overall time, individualized tutoring for kids who are behind, etc.) as well as targeted help to deal with all the problems that comes with concentrated poverty. Schools in the vast middle need a different type of intervention -- less focused on community strategies, and more on teaching that expands the mind, critical thinking, etc. (Not that we don't want poor kids to think critically, but they need other help as well.) Schools at the top mostly just need the vast layers of strings to be pulled off -- they already are high performing institutions (in large part b/c of the community support they have) and so it is not surprising that they are unhappy with the law. This kind of differentiated strategy is a tough political sell, but it is a closer match to what is actually needed.

Kevin,

If you were a black student or a student with disabilities in a suburban school you might not think that the problem is only with the 20 percent of schools in inner cities. Look, I have a lot of problems with NCLB but the law has exposed the fact that many students have been poorly served, even in supposed good schools. And those schools are the ones that are complaining. Should they simply go back to ignoring the minority of their students who don't happen to go on to Ivy League colleges?

I am just asking because for research, it seems that school systems in some foreign countries (Singapore, Japan, Germany, France, England) are the equivalent to 1-2 years of an American university.

I think you are being generous to foreign systems. They achieve those rates by early tracking. Certainly in England, the system I am most familiar with, only those students who go on to their 'A' levels are equivalent to 1-2 years of an American university. In this country, if you go to a good public high school in relatively well off suburb (like I did, Downers Grove South in the Western Suburbs of Chicago, and there are dozens just like it in the collar of middle to upper middle class suburbs around Chicago) you can certainly get an education that is as good as any in the world. We had college level courses in Chemistry, calculus, Biology, and English.

Concerning education; primarily someone should have the balls to condemn giving money to parochial schools as unconstitutional. Drafting legislation concerning public education should require having actually worked in a school. Local government officials should work as a substitute teacher at least one day a month then they may know what it is like.

I'm not an expert in education by any means, but have at least a dozen friends who are teachers. They HATE NCLB, mainly because it doesn't allow them to actually teach anything.

Instead, it's all about passing some goddamn test.

Their biggest complaints about the school system fall in a few areas:

1. Pay -- this is something NCLB doesn't cover, and still manages to screw things up. It's hard to get good people (and more importantly, keep them) because one can only work from the heart for so long before the wallet cries for attention.

2. Lack of parent involvement. This, IMHO, is probably the biggest problem in urban schools. It's hard for a parent to get involved when he/she probably doesn't have that good of an education either, or when he/she is working two jobs just to make ends meet.

3. The schools are too big. Smaller schools aren't the panacea some think, but having more neighborhood schools can in no way be a bad thing. It makes them a bigger part of that neighborhood, rather than just some big building miles away.

4. Cuts in Phys Ed and art. Kids have a lot of energy and, when I was in school (20-some years ago) we had an hour a day to release some of it. They don't have that now. And art teaches creativity, which can surprisingly be applied in a number of different areas. Now, they have "Art in a Cart," where a teacher (usually part time) gets like a half hour a week to teach art or do projects. It's sad.

Granted, there are a ton of other issues (social, economic, etc.) that cause issues. But those four things could be addressed without too much effort (except for the neighborhood schools, which could be a logistical hassle) and could go a decent way to fixing things.

ESPECIALLY #1. If more parents showed concern about a kids schooling, I think we'd be stunned how much better our schools would be.

Thanks for making the point Kevin that many public schools are just fine. It really infuriates me when people make broad generalizations about failing public schools, without even bothering to visit their local school to see what it's really like.

I had a friend who was bemoaning the fact that he and his wife would have to spend a large sum of money to send his son to private school, because the local public school system was so god awful.

I gently pointed out that a) our county has one of the best school systems in the country b) My siblings and I went to the very same public school system that he was now bashing and received superb educations.

We started reading Shakespeare and Charles Dickens in seventh grade, had studied the history of the world, in depth, by the time we reached high school (I remember my little sister in sixth grade writing a report on class differences in ancient Greek society, while in the sixth grade I had to write a report on the state of medicine in present day Africa). We did actual DNA testing in biology, we blew stuff up in chemistry, dropped different weighted items, including bowling balls, in physics, to learn about Newton's laws and gravity. It was a great education, better than many private schools in the area.

As people have pointed out in comments, rather, public schools tend to fail in certain areas:

1. Rural areas, especially in the south.
2. Inner city.
3. Anyplace that suffers from a high level of poverty, basically.
4. Special ed/poorly performing students. Even in my school, if you were placed in a remedial class, the quality of education took a quick nosedive.

Of course, to address the problems in impoverished schools, you'd need to increase funding and address larger societal ills, which isn't easy. It's much easier to kvetch about the public school system in general and how the whole system is doomed to fail.

Of course NCLB was intended to destroy public education. That's why its standards are impossible to meet and that's why vouchers are the remedy for failure.

Why are the Republicans now trying to end it? Republicans are stupid.

There's going to be problems with education in an anti-intellectual society.

If you have A you get B. You can't avoid it.

Kevin Drum says

we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone.

*cough* bullshit *cough* *cough*

not so fast--
Do you remember the predictions in A Nation At Risk? The predictions were that if economies in the 1990s were going to based on using knowledge, then the US economy would suffer a horrible depression while Asian economies took over the world.

Please find any example of any prediction that anybody every made that turned out to have less truth.

What really bugs me is that politically we're forced to create (and fund) a system that applies to every school system in America even though we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone. It's the other 20% -- the low-income schools located largely in urban inner cities -- that need help. But for a variety of reasons, it's nearly impossible to target our reform efforts there.

While certainly it is the case that schools in areas that are impoverished, particularly inner cities, may have the most problems, I don't think that's at all true.

First, it asserts without proof that a subjective belief is not merely widely accepted but, in fact, universally known as fact. I'd like to see some evidence that that belief is anywhere near as widely accepted as you suggest or, alternatively, see the concrete standard you use for "basically okay" and see the evidence that 80% of the schools in the country meet it, and that the 20% that don't are all "low-income schools in urban innter cities".

I don't as much mind you claiming that that is true without support (after all, its a blog, not a scholarly book) as I do you claiming that its universally known to be true without evidence either of its factual truth or wide acceptance.

Testing is a waste of time. Every educator knows it. Our high school will spend at least 4 weeks on testing kids, be it NCLB, district benchmarks, STAR, High School exit exams, etc., and most the time these tests don't count for anything concrete for the kids. What is their motivation? More money for their school? Ha!

NCLB is a joke which have its last laugh soon enough. So is the high school exit exam, a test which I actually think is AOK; but HS exit exam is so biased towards white English speaking kids (in my school esp.) that it is pretty much useless. It is all basic reading comprehension, and in my low income underperforming school, only a few ELD kids are caught in its sticky web, now that RSP kids don't need to pass.

"Of course, this also leads me to one of my biggest complaints about NCLB and education policy in general. No, not testing. I'm agnostic on that for the moment. What really bugs me is that politically we're forced to create (and fund) a system that applies to every school system in America even though we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone. It's the other 20% -- the low-income schools located largely in urban inner cities -- that need help."

My biggest complaint is that we view the problems in inner city schools as a funding issue, or a "bad schools" issue, or as being a symptom of some fundamental problem with the American education system. Its a socio-economic problem, not an educational one.

The schools are just forced to deal with it.

Not that this means schools should wash their hands. Anything improvements are welcome. My point is just that we should stop blaming the education system for socio-economic problems that it isn't creating.

Warning! Double quote below!

""Kevin Drum says we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone."

*cough* bullshit *cough* *cough*
Posted by: not so fast"

I checked out your PISA link, and it largely confirms Kevin's hypothesis. US matcombined scores are indeed low, because of the low scores of black and hispanic kids (417 and 443 points respectively) - those 20% of inner-city schools he was talking about.

White and asian US kids score 512 points and 506 points respecively - while not as good as Finland, certainly on par with many European countries. Public schools just aren't the menace you make them out to be.

Kevin, really! Of course there wasn't a "conservative [per se] conspiracy to use NCLB to destroy public education..." because you are not properly distinguishing between "conservatives" per se, many of whom are honest and just want limited government, and the Rove/Bush/Cheney-Dixiecrat-Christianist-Corporatist/compromised "libertarian"-Neocon-malgovernment machine. That machine wants to wreck things, not just simplify in any honest way. Please, this distinction is important.

"we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone."

This is a common misconception. Blacks and hispanics perform just as badly (controlling for SES effects) in affluent suburban schools as they do in inner city schools. Thanks to NCLB, we now have disaggregated data that shows the discrepencies between black/hispanic performance and white/asian performance. Nearly every school in this country shows this pattern.

Just go to S$P's schoolsmatter and troll through the data for all these supposedly well-performing affluent suburban schools and find me a statistically significant percentage of schools where the black.hispanic performance equals the asian/white performance.

The fact of the matter is that our schools do a piss poor job of educating the lower half of the IQ curve no matter the race of the students or the amount of resources available to the schools.

No one here would be interested in my thoughts on your federal prison system for the young. But I was once an English teacher, and have graded the above statements for spelling and grammar. Unless you all went to school in Europe, there is a problem with "our" primary and secondary schools. Thank you all.

Lots of really good observations on this thread. I think the assertation by Kevin that 80% of our public schools are "fine" really depends on how you define "fine". I also think that distinctions need to be made between the different levels of schooling within the K-12 universe. For example, I think our elementary schools are by and large quite good. However, things start to fall apart as you enter middle school, and by high school, the situation is quite dire.

We graduate kids from high school who cannot write, who have poor reading comprehension, who can't do basic algebra, who do not undestand how their own government works, don't understand the laws of supply and demand, and who are largely ignorant about the rest of the world. Yet most of these kids were doing just fine academically in 4th/5th grade.

Now that said, while people bemoan the relatively low quality of many of our high school graduates, they also are fighting tooth and nail to lower the standards for high school graduation.

Here in Washington, students get four chances to pass a 10th grade level test (the WASL) in order to graduate high school (i.e. 12th grade). Yet, much like in other states, the response to the fact that passing rates on the math section are pretty low (50-60%, vs. 80-90% in Reading and Writing), is to lower the standards and try to postpone the requirements. And this is a test that was written by in-state teachers and parents, not out-of-state experts.

So going back to what Kevin originally asserted, I would guess that while probably 90% of our elementary schools are "fine", and while 70-80% of our middle schools are "fine", probably only 30-40% of our high schools are "fine".

However, when making comparisons to other countries at the high school level, keep in mind that in the US, we are trying to educate kids who have already been shunted off the "academic" track in many other countries, something which doesn't happen here because we do not really have a system of vocational education for students under the age of eighteen.

The only way to meaningfully change "failing schools" in America is to deal with the failing parents and families that send these ill prepared and ill mannered dumb asses to our public schools.

There are a lot of poor RURAL districts as well that do not produce good students. Because schools are funded mostly by property taxes, it is only the suburban schools that are properly funded.

Get ready for a big fat smooch (welcome or not) from Bob Somerby over this one, Kevin.

I'm sorry; I haven't read the whole thread.

I just wanted to say that my children attend a wealthy suburban school everyone takes to be high-performing. $19,000 per pupil spending.

I suspect that if our district adopted value-added assessment we'd find that in fact our school (certainly the middle school) is low-performing. I suspect it's the parents and tutors who are providing a great deal of the educational value.

My own 7th grade son, for instance, is reading at a 12.6 level -- 12th grade, 6 months -- according to the ITBS. But at school he is assigned books rated 5.1, or 5th garde, 1st month.

Who is responsible for his high reading comprehension, his parents or the school?

In the accelerated math track parents and tutors are doing a huge amount of the teaching. Perhaps over half of our "advanced" kids are being retaught math at home by parents well-educated enough themselves to be able to teach math or well-heeled enough to hire private math teachers at $80/hour. (Often these high-paid tutors are teachers in the district. I knew one family that was paying their son's own math teacher $80/hour for tutoring outside the class -- tutoring that didn't work.)

Meanwhile the disadvantaged children in our school, whose parents (probably) can't reteach math at home and can't pay our teachers $80/hour to tutor their kids, aren't doing well. I'm hearing rumblings that the middle school might not make AYP.

NCLB is the only thing motivating the school to want to increase achievement for our disadvantaged students. That's it.

The law forces districts like mine to disaggregate their data, to publicly state how well kids who don't have parents reteaching the courses at home are doing.

I've come to believe that the proper measure of a school's performance is the performance of its disadvantaged students.

How well are the children who don't have tutors and parent reteachers doing?

I've also come to believe that wealthy white schools may be the worst place disadvantaged children can go to school.

At the KIPP Academy in the Bronx 80% of all 8th graders pass Regents Math A at the end of the year.

At my school only 30% of the kids are being prepared to take the exam.

Not one of those children is low-income, black, or Hispanic.

NCLB doesn't force my district to accelerate the learning of disadvantaged kids -- or of advantaged kids, either.

But it does give parents like me a weapon to use when I push my district to do so.

The very existence of NCLB creates a moral climate that strengthens my case.

"...when suburban parents complain, politicians listen"

You nailed something, here, Kevin.

All my teacher relatives and friends hate NCLB.

Absolutely ruins the teaching experience, they say.

And since we pay them bupkus to take care of our most precious resource, The Children, how can we also push this piece of merde on them and take away what joy and creativity they bring to their jobs.

You want to lose good teachers?

HERE's how to lose good teachers: NCLB.

Catherine Johnson -
What you need is a competent School Superintendent and Board, not NCLB. Fortunately the teachers at my sons' school offer differentiated instruction so that kids are being reasonably well challenged, whatever their level. The testing and preparation required by NCLB has been a waste of time.

Suburban schools look like they are "ok" because they have middle class kids. Do you really think that suburban school districts use a superior curriculum or methods? Allmost all schools in the US use the same ineffective pedagogies, its just that white middle class kids are able to on average learn despite the schools.

If you realized what suburban kids were capable of doing and compared it to what they are doing, you would realize that they are just as F**ked up as the rest of the countries education system.

We have differentiated instruction.

Our disadvantaged black children are doing badly, and without value-added assessment there's no way to tell what the advantaged kids are getting from the school as opposed to from their parents.

We go to meetings with administrators who tell us, "Student achievement correlates directly with how many books are in a student's home."

Parents around town say, "The high school's getting better, because wealthier parents are there now." (This isn't completely wrong, of course, because at least for advantaged kids peers set the pace.)

Our new middle school principal gave a skit on "How to evaluate your school" on back to school night.

He opened by saying that if you "just evaluate the school, you're putting too much on the school."

The way to evaluate your school is to use 4 criteria:

* quality of the school
* quality of the students
* quality of the parents
* quality of the community

When he explained quality of the community he said that in his previous school, in Albany, there were drug dealers on the street.

In our town we have "nice lawns."

Therefore our middle school is high quality.

Black kids are doing badly all over Westchester County. Everywhere you go, the black kids are sitting in special ed or "building support."

A 28-year old black man who works with our autistic kids, who was educated in Mamaroneck K-7, has a 3d grade level of math. I know, because I tested him myself. (We're trying to get him through college.)

Thanks to his mom, who is college educated, he has college level reading.

If he'd had to rely on wealthy Westchester schools to teach him reading comprehension he might have 3rd grade level reading, too.

He's one of the brainiest people I know. Very, very smart.

His wealthy Westchester school supplied him with 3rd grade level math.

BTW, the parents who are best clued in to the situation with black kids inside advantaged schools are probably parents with special ed children.

When I first started trying to find out exactly how our black students are doing, I asked a friend of mine who has a daughter in "high end" special ed. (My two special ed kids are severely autistic.)

She said, "Well, I know how they're doing, because they're all in the same clas with my daughter. It's her and the black students."

Westchester County holds an annual SPED day at Rye Playland.

The first time I went I couldn't understand it, because perhaps half -- maybe over half -- the students there were black and they all obviously had normal intelligence.

I kept thinking that maybe the county was having two special days in one, a Playland day for SPED kids and a Playland day for low-income kids.

Now I understand the situation.

Of course I'd always read that black kids were overrepresented in special ed, but I'd never seen it with my own eyes.

Special ed day at Rye Playland is 1/2 severely disabled white children and typical black children who've been classified special ed.

Sorry - I meant 1/2 severely disabled white children and 1/2 typical black children classified special ed.

I for one am extremely grateful for the transparency that NCLB accountability has provided parents.

Conejo Valley Unified School District administrators were shamelessly promoting our well to do district as “second to none� and “one of the best in the state�.

According to California’s API similar schools ranking one of our wealthiest neighborhood schools received the worst possible score for this comparison, a 1 out of 10 when compared to 100 other demographically similar schools. In fact many of the wealthy neighborhoods scored below a 4.

When publicly confronted with these facts the school board hacks had to tone down their rhetoric to claim we were “one of the best� districts in the county. CVUSD couldn’t even achieve “best� in the county, funny that. Notice how easy it is to misread county and instead read it as country, for those parents whose heads might still be in the sand.

The upshot is that CVUSD K-6 enrollment dropped by 600 students this last fall, that’s enough students to fill one entire elementary school. NCLB transparency has helped some parents vote with their feet and place their children where they hope to receive a better education than CVUSD’s “great schools� provide.

It will be a tragic loss for parents and students if the accountability aspects of NCLB are gutted from the legislation.