First, the part of the article that got me going:
"Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington claims that “non-school factors”, such as family income, account for as much as 60% of a child’s performance in school.
Yet the link is much more variable than education egalitarians suggest. Australia, for instance, has wide discrepancies of income, but came a creditable ninth in the most recent PISA study. China, rapidly developing into one of the world’s least equal societies, finished first." ...
"schools free of government control and run by non-state providers are adding quality to the mix. To date, they seem most successful where the state has been unwilling or unable to make a difference. It is still not clear whether creating archipelagoes of Free Schools and charter schools will consistently drive improvement in other institutions, or whether that is wishful thinking."
[emphasis mine]
Now, my rebuttal:
SIR - In your article on "The great schools
revolution" you briefly site studies that conclude that "non school
factors" such as income are the dominant factors in a child's performance
in school, but then go on to wave away the studies by cavalierly citing China
and Australia's good PISA results as a counter example.
China, the nation, did not take
the PISA; Shanghai and Hong Kong did. If
you care to look, you can find single cities in America that beat them
both. Australia has an average score slightly
higher than the mean OECD score.
However, if you look at the wide variations within Australia, you'll see
that, not surprisingly to "education egalitarians", Australia's
regional scores vary with their "wide discrepancies of income",
ranging from far below the OECD average to far above. Additionally, the administering of the PISA
in Australia has been fraught with difficulty:
biased student sampling, teacher boycotts, etc. Citing China and Australia to throw out the
link between income and testing results is sloppy reporting by any standard.
Schools
are reflections of the local society in which they are placed. Although there is much that can be done
within the school walls, the real work for society is in addressing the pockets
of poverty which ultimately produce the poor educational results. Freeing schools of "government
control" may be the "most striking" element of school reform to
your writers, however, many charter schools in America only graduate a fraction
of the students they admit. Which
students left the charters, and where did they go? In many cases, they were the lowest
performing students, and they appeared quietly in their assigned seat at a school
under "government control".
Ken Rideout,
Boston, Massachusetts
Sources:
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
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