Next week's PISA results: If we want better results, we have to do better with poor children
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Happy Thanksgiving.
If you want something to ponder after the pie, here is a good piece by Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. He wrotes this piece in anticipation of next week's release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings.
By Dennis Van Roekel
When I taught high school math, a student who received a D in my class asked me what grade I thought he would make in the next semester.
With a slight smile, I responded, “If you keep doing exactly what you did first semester, I believe you’ll make a D.”
On Tuesday, the triennial Program for International Student Assessment rankings will be released, comparing the competencies of high school students from 64 countries. Although I haven’t seen the results, I imagine that the United States will end up about where we did three years ago, when our students ranked behind nine other nations in literacy and 23 others in math.
The reason things probably won’t change much is that we haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance: poverty and its effects on students.
Sixty years ago this month, Thurgood Marshall and other attorneys argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for an end to segregation in our public schools. The court’s landmark ruling, in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, found that the doctrine of “separate but equal” wasn’t really equal at all.
Six decades later, we still haven’t achieved equality in public education. The proof is in the PISA results.
Our students from well-to-do families did fine on the last PISA assessments. In U.S. schools with poverty rates below 10 percent, our students scored higher than those from any other nation — even Finland, which has almost no poverty and is always near the top of the overall PISA