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Charles Fowler

President,

SCHOOL LEADERSHIP, LLCNew York City

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT NOT IMPROVING ???

Incorrect and incomplete. . .

In Woody Brock’s New BookAmerican Gridlock

* why the right and the left are both wrong. . .

• “What about politicians? Do they and their Left-wing/Right-wing think tanks really want to know the truth. . .or do they merely wish to bolster their ideological prejudices. Regrettably, data are increasingly cherry-picked for precisely this purpose. . .”

Richard Rothstein Writes On TheEconomic Policy Institute Web Site

• “Education reformers have a common playbook. First, assert without evidence that regular public schools are “failing” and that large numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score gap between minority and white children remains large. . .”

Richard Rothstein Writes On TheEconomic Policy Institute Web Site

• “Then propose so-called reforms to address the unproven problem—charter schools to escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.”

Rothstein Cites An All Star Cast Who Are Humming This Tune. . .

Cuomo: “the great equalizer. . .the public school system. . .now be the great discriminator.”

Rothstein Calls The Cuomo Applause Line an URBAN MYTH. . .

• “Careful examination discloses that disadvantaged students have made spectacular progress in the last generation, in regular public schools with ordinary teachers. Not only have regular public schools not been the ‘great discriminator’, they continue to make great gains for minority children. . .”

Rothstein’s Use of Data

• NAEP data are most useful for national comparisons (NAEP questions are not identical—state and local exams change little, year to year, making them predictable fodder for test prep)

• NAEP shows “average black fourth graders’ math performance in regular public schools has improved so much that it now exceeds average white performance as recently as 1992. . .”


• “The black-white gap has narrowed little because whites have also improved.”

• “These irrefutable facts characterize both the nation as a whole and New York State. . .in fact, New York State’s black children made enormous gains in the 1990’s and much slower gains once NCLB and the test-based reforms kicked in.”


• In commenting on the greater gap in reading than math, Rothstein notes: “We do know that the verbal gap between middle class and disadvantaged is well established by age 3.

• “Rather than spending such energy imagining how schools have failed, so we can fix them, we might devote attention to investigating what schools have done well, so we can do more of it.”

Professor Larry Cremin Wrote In 1975

• “The public school ought never to take the entire credit for the educational accomplishments of the public, and it ought never to be assigned the entire blame. . .”

The Horace Mann League, Dedicated To The Principles of the “Founder” of Public Education, Believes Other

Input Indices Are Also Important

• National unemployment: 8% for whites, 17% for African-Americans

• Single parent homes: 24% for whites, 67% for African-Americans

• Parental unemployment has a demonstrable impact on student achievement (stress increases, health insurance is frequently lost, loss of homes and frequent moves, less pre-school care, etc.)

The Horace Mann League Believes Other Input Indices Are Also Important

• The League is beginning the development of a series of such “input” indices reporting how we are doing as a nation in measures such as children in poverty, average family income, children’s physical and emotional health, availability of Pre-K experiences, education levels of parents, costs of higher education, fiscal support of schools, etc..

A Stanford Researcher Demonstrated The Importance of This Clearly

The reading score divide between rich and poor children has escalated dramatically in the last half century by two grade levels.

The reading score divide between black and white children, regardless of income, has decreased by two grade levels.

So How Should The Public School “Report Card” Read ?

• There are many input factors which impact a child’s ability to learn—some within the control of the school and some outside the control of the school. ALL the factors need to be reported on.

So How Should The Public School “Report Card” Read ?

• Public School children in the US have made dramatic gains in achievement over the past several decades---they should be celebrated and analyzed so that reform can be based on documented successes rather than imaginedfailures.