The public schools in Washington, D.C. continue to set a record for per pupil costs in the nation. The District has long been the most expensive system in the country and reportedly spends roughly $30,000 per student in a system that continues to produce appalling results in national studies. The latest such study is by the respected National Center for Education Statistics which has found that in 2013 83 percent of the eighth graders in these schools were not “proficient” in reading and 81 percent were not “proficient” in math.
The only improvement is marginal at best. The percentage of students who performed at or above the NAEP Basic level was 57 percent in 2013. This percentage was greater than that in 2011 (51 percent) and in 1998 (44 percent). However, this is an extremely low level of performance and 43 percent are below even that level.
What is equally distressing is that this study went with virtually no mention in Washington. Indeed, the Washington Post gave more attention to the discarding of trash bins than this most recent educational data.
D.C. eighth graders scored an average of 248 out of 500 in reading. Mississippi finished next to last with an average of 253.
DC spends more than twice as other large cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, though figures vary between studies and reports. The figure is derived from dividing total expenditures in Table 1 by enrollment in Table 15 of the Census Bureau statistics. The Census Bureau’s Table 11 puts the per capital costs for elementary schools at over $27,000 up to 2010. (note that this is a different calculation than Table 8 on per capita spending levels).
New York spends $5,353 less per student.
By the way, of that money, only $10,584 per pupil is spent on “instruction” and $1,613 on “instructional staff.”
Whatever the cost, the D.C. schools continue to fail and thousands of students are facing a dim future without basic skills to succeed. Many will be left to a cycle poverty where they lack the necessary skills to succeed in a new and more demanding job market. It is a chilling statistic that is measured in real terms in the lives of thousands of students.
These statistics are truly frightening. D.C. has a long reputation for wasteful and poorly managed systems. This low level of performance is even more striking when it is between two of the most successful school systems in the country: Montgomery (MD) and Fairfax Counties (VA). Clearly D.C. deals with a large number of impoverished students, but that does not explain this continuing failure of this system at such a high cost. Other cities have such impoverished areas and do far better with far less. The city seems to be continuing to discard thousands of students with the same level of care as its recent trash bin scandal. Yet, there remains no serious backlash against the city’s elected officials or demands for a fundamental change in the school system after decades of such poor performance.
Elaine:
Feynman won’t read any article unless it’s written by a Liberal, so HuffPo was what I could find.
mespo,
You missed my point. It wasn’t that the scores of certain students were excluded. It’s that more students began taking the SAT tests. More students from less advantaged/blue collar families were encouraged by their teachers to take them. In years before that, many of those students wouldn’t have considered going on to college after graduating from high school. So…one can’t say that the scores of top students/kids from advantaged had fallen. We had changes in our society. The children of working class families were taking the tests…and many went on to further their educations. If you want to judge if American schools are in decline by SAT scores then go back and see if/how much scores have fallen since the time when the kids who were not top students from advantaged families began taking the tests.
@Nick “The changing economy was accelerated by NAFTA. I don’t pretend that it’s easy for some people to adapt to a changing employment environment. ”
The conversation has moved on so I won’t take too much time here.
But I think you are exactly right, Nick, in that effects of trade agreements are mixed. In the past we seemed to have uncritical acceptance of trade agreements based largely on the promise that free trade increased economic efficiency. The assumption was that increases in economic efficiency raise every bodies standard of living.
But this is a subject where details matter and the great overall trends may not tell us much about the final result for communities and individuals.
Increased economic efficiency resulting from free trade should tend to make things better. I have seen numbers that suggest that free trade saves US consumers 10’s of thousands of dollars, per capita, through reduced prices.
But that does not give consideration to another great overall trend. Globalization, free trade, and increased economic efficiency will tend to push wages and standards of living toward the mean – the average global level. Now over time that mean ought to increase – after all increased efficiency ought to yield more things to consume and enjoy.
If you are living in an area where wages and living standards are below the mean then, over the coming decades, you will likely see wages and standard of living rise because of increased investment leading to new business and more jobs.
But if you are in an area with wages and living standards far above the global mean you might very well see downward pressure on wages as factories close and jobs migrate to areas with lower wages.
If you live in an area of the world with relatively high wages and living standards the next few decades might be very uncomfortable, indeed.
As I said, details matter, and the exact effect, even in the short term, may be hard to predict.
But free trade agreements are no panacea. In the long run they ought to make things better, but not necessarily for everyone and not necessarily in the short run.
I agree that protectionism is not a solution. But I think that as a community we must think more critically about the effects of free trade and how we implement the trade agreements, particularly what steps we must take to mitigate the negative effects on communities and workers.
Elaine M:
Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.”
********************************
Your comment seems to prove my point that by not including the kids at the bottom in the testing you were actually inflating the American performance scores. We can’t just take the low end out of the equation and say, “See, what a good boy I am!” How does that assertion help your argument when we are analyzing overall student population achievement and the relative rank of each entire group to determine the most optimal system? Isn’t public education about achievement for all and not just for some? And how does that assertion, if true, bear on the greater argument –yet unchallenged — that American education if lagging behind both the Far East and Europe in terms of overall achievement?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/how-us-students-compare-internationally/2013/12/02/7183ad9c-5ba8-11e3-bf7e-f567ee61ae21_graphic.html
mespo – one of the nice things about testing all the students in a school at the same time, is that you get to see how the whole school is doing. Arizona’s tests are designed so the teacher’s name goes on the test as well as the student’s. This way you get an idea of how the teacher’s class is doing as a whole.
Most Western universities use the ACT rather than the SAT so it is not a valid measure. And the SAT is not a valid predictor to begin with. It only covers two areas and until lately did not have a written essay. Now it is being changed to compete with the ACT since many Eastern universities quit using it.
Jerez, I miss all the fun when I’m not here. I guess not being named by name. It wasn’t me this time that got deleted.
Fixing Schools Isn’t Everything: Education researcher David Berliner argues that school reform is only a part of the solution for closing the achievement gaps.
By David Berliner
http://www.nea.org/home/12206.htm
Excerpt:
Do you know the story about the drunk man who loses his car keys? He’s discovered under a streetlight, on his hands and knees, fumbling fruitlessly. Can’t find the darn things! But when asked where he lost them, our sorry fellow points to a dim corner a block away.
“Why aren’t you looking there?” he’s asked. Answer: “The light is better here!”
And so goes the nation’s efforts to reform education. Blindly, we’ve fumbled for years on federal stages such as the No Child Left Behind law, refusing to search up the block.
Over the last three years, I’ve co-authored three reports on the effects of high-stakes testing on curriculum, instruction, school personnel, and student achievement. They were all depressing. High-stakes testing has failed dismally in its intended goals. But these reports did make me wonder, what really could help?
Working on curricula and standards, improving teacher quality, and using technology are certainly helpful. But in the rush to embrace testing, our policy-makers have forgotten, or can’t understand, or are deliberately avoiding the truth about our children’s lives.
That is, they don’t live at school.
I believe we need to peer into the darkness. If we did, we might see what sociologist Elizabeth Cohen saw quite clearly: Poverty is the 600-pound gorilla in the classroom.
I think we need to face that gorilla.
An American Shame
The United States likes to be first, and when it comes to poor children, we maintain our remarkable status. No other wealthy nation in the world has a greater percentage of children living in poverty, except for Mexico. (And the average per capita income there is a whopping $8,900.) In Denmark, 2.4 percent of kids live in poverty, in Germany, 10 percent. Here, it’s nearly 22 percent.
And surely, it’s no surprise to hear poor children do worse in school. If the poor were set off as their own country, it would be a largely Black and Latino nation, and compared to other industrialized nations, it would score near the bottom of any academic ranking. Meanwhile, our White and wealthier students, were they a nation, would score up at the top with the likes of Japan and Sweden.
Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer. So why, when we have as much credible research making connections between poverty and school success, do we keep looking for other answers? (For example, it must be the low expectations of teachers!)
What’s surprising is, in the face of that research, we still concentrate our attention and resources on what happens inside low-performing schools when the real problems are outside those schools.
Poor Neighborhoods
Here’s what happens to a poor child with a recurring ear infection. He stays home, because his parents can’t afford a doctor, and suffers hearing damage. What was that? I said he likely won’t learn words efficiently, and will probably lag behind his classmates in reading.
Poor children suffer from a whole host of medical problems that their wealthier classmates often evade. These days, asthma is an epidemic among the poor. In the South Bronx, a fourth-grade teacher reports that nearly a third of his students carry breathing pumps. They miss school—up to 40 days a year—and, of course, miss out on learning.
The list goes on and on. Even small amounts of lead can diminish a child’s ability to learn and millions of children suffer lead poisoning annually. Do they have anything else in common? They’re mostly children of color, living in contaminated, inner-city buildings.
And it’s not just the body that suffers, but the mind too. A “good” zip code can make a bigger difference than good parenting. Take two students in the same school with identical family backgrounds—the first lives among wealthy neighbors and the other among poor. The difference in their scores can be as much as the gap between the 10th and 90th percentile!
But move that child from the ’hood to the ’burbs, and watch his scores soar—a stunning effect that was well-documented when the Gautreaux program began moving families out of inner-city Chicago in the early 1970s.
Yes, family involvement and school programs can help and yes, of course, they should be supported. But other adult role models obviously mean a lot. Strong peer influences mean a lot. The availability of well-paid jobs, decent housing, greater stability, and higher expectations all mean a lot.
mespo,
“Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.”
*****
That’s not quibbling about methodology. More kids–many who were not top students as in the past–began taking the tests. Thus, the test scores dropped.
Elaine:
While the report was far from perfect, few challenge it’s central thesis that American education was lagging behind that of other developed nations. Last year, the Washington Post documented that this trend continues even now some 30 years later. It seems to me that quibbling about the rate of decline or the methodology employed really misses the point.
Karen S
…
You’ve mentioned you have a PhD. What was your thesis?
======================
I did not say that, it was inferred by Paul et al. I said “PHD” in the context of “ADD” and genetic dynamics I was questioning.
mespo,
Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report
Nearly a quarter century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong.
By Tamim Ansary
http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Excerpt:
This Means War!
The heart of the document is an indictment that lambastes America for letting schools slip into precipitous decline but praises the nation’s good heart, great potential, and mighty past. No paraphrase can do justice to its tone, so here’s a verbatim sample: “Our Nation is at risk . . . . The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people . . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war . . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament . . . .”
Hear that, folks? Our very future. The Nation threatened!
Well, the rhetoric reflected the times. It was 1983; the Cold War was in full flower, and Reagan had swept into office on a promise to confront the Soviets. This stand had won him strong support — among men.
But Reagan had a couple of political problems. First, polls indicated that women still tilted toward the Democrats, who owned such close-to-home issues as housing, health, and education. Second, the U.S. economy was tanking. And it wasn’t our enemies driving our industries into the ground, but rather our allies, Japan and Germany.
In this anxious context, Bell put together an eighteen-member commission to report on the quality of education in America. Through the U.S. Department of Education’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, he hoped to link the country’s economic woes to the state of our schools. Bell got all he wanted and more.
When the report was released in April 1983, it claimed that American students were plummeting academically, that schools suffered from uneven standards, and that teachers were not prepared. The report noted that our economy and national security would crumble if something weren’t done. But the sobering report received immediate publicity for an almost comically accidental reason.
As commission member Gerald Holton recalls, Reagan thanked the commissioners at a White House ceremony for endorsing school prayer, vouchers, and the elimination of the Department of Education. In fact, the newly printed blue-cover report never mentioned these pet passions of the president. “The one important reader of the report had apparently not read it after all,” Holton said. Reagan had pulled a fast one, for political gain.
Reporters fell on the report like a pack of hungry dogs. The next day, “A Nation at Risk” made the front pages.
Once launched, the report, which warned of “a rising level of mediocrity,” took off like wildfire. During the next month, the Washington Post alone ran some two dozen stories about it, and the buzz kept spreading. Although Reagan counselor (and, later, attorney general) Edwin Meese III urged him to reject the report because it undermined the president’s basic education agenda — to get government out of education — White House advisers Jim Baker and Michael Deaver argued that “A Nation at Risk” provided good campaign fodder.
Reagan agreed, and, in his second run for the presidency, he gave fifty-one speeches calling for tough school reform. The “high political payoff,” Bell wrote in his memoir, “stole the education issue from Walter Mondale — and it cost us nothing.”
What made “A Nation at Risk” so useful to Reagan? For one thing, its language echoed the get-tough rhetoric of the growing conservative movement. For another, its diagnosis lent color to the charge that, under liberals, American education had dissolved into a mush of self-esteem classes.
In truth, “A Nation at Risk” could have been read as almost any sort of document. Basically, it just called for “More!” — more science, more math, more art, more humanities, more social studies, more school days, more hours, more homework, more basics, more higher-order thinking, more lower-order thinking, more creativity, more everything.
The document had, however, been commissioned by the Reagan White House, so conservative Republicans controlled its interpretation and uses. What they zeroed in on was the notion of failing schools as a national-security crisis. Republican ideas for school reform became a charge against a shadowy enemy, a kind of war on mediocrity.
By the end of the decade, Republicans had erased whatever advantage Democrats once enjoyed on education and other classic “women’s issues.” As Peter Schrag later noted in The Nation, Reagan-era conservatives, “with the help of business leaders like IBM chairman Lou Gerstner, managed to convert a whole range of liberally oriented children’s issues . . . into a debate focused almost exclusively on education and tougher-standards school reform.”
The Inconvenient Sandia Report
From the start, however, some doubts must have risen about the crisis rhetoric, because in 1990, Admiral James Watkins, the secretary of energy (yes, energy), commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to document the decline with some actual data.
Systems scientists there produced a study consisting almost entirely of charts, tables, and graphs, plus brief analyses of what the numbers signified, which amounted to a major “Oops!” As their puzzled preface put it, “To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
One section, for example, analyzed SAT scores between the late 1970s and 1990, a period when those scores slipped markedly. (“A Nation at Risk” spotlighted the decline of scores from 1963 to 1980 as dead-bang evidence of failing schools.) The Sandia report, however, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup — ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students — held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. How could that be?
Simple — statisticians call it Simpson’s paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.
By then, however, catastrophically failing schools had become a political necessity. George H.W. Bush campaigned to replace Reagan as president on a promise to confront the crisis. He had just called an education summit to tackle it, so there simply had to be a crisis.
The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report.
mespo,
A Nation at Risk
http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/a-nation-at-risk/
Excerpt:
The Manufactured Crisis Challenges Report
A book published more than a decade later, The Manufactured Crisis, remains one of the most popular challenges to the report’s conclusions. The authors of the critique, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, question the statistics documenting educational failure, on which the report was based, and decry how politicians used the report as a reason to implement what Berliner and Biddle see as misdirected reforms. The book alleges that the report was just one example of the ways political leaders at the time were misleading the nation about the quality of public schools (1995).
The prominent education scholar John I. Goodlad writes that the report was able to gain a great deal of media attention, but that the attention seldom focused on its recommendations, looking instead at the “bad news” and the problems the report showed existed in schools. Goodlad also argues that the link between student achievement and the national economy was overstated in the report (2003). Other criticisms of the report point to its emphasis on high schools, virtually ignoring K-8 education (Peterson, 2003), and to a lack of citations for the numerous statistics used as evidence of the low quality of American schools (Berliner & Biddle, 1995).
Even though the report had its weaknesses, it still had a strong impact on American education. Most notably, the report led to comprehensive school reform efforts, was the impetus for the academic-standards movement, drew attention to the importance of education policy, and led to a focus on school accountability (Weiss, 2003).
In April 2003, the 20th anniversary of the release of A Nation at Risk triggered numerous analyses of the progress of American education over the past two decades. The attached chart shows areas where progress has been made, especially in the development of more rigorous course requirements and academic-content standards.
Not every recommendation made by the report has taken hold over the past 20 or so years, however. According to the Koret Task Force, a group organized by the Hoover Institution and Stanford University to study the status of education reform, there has been “uneven” implementation and only minor gains in academic achievement during this time. The Koret Task Force argues that A Nation at Risk did a good job of pointing out the problems in American schools, but was not able to identify the fundamental reasons for the problems or address the political influences in the public education system (Peterson, 2003).
Elaine:
In 1983 a much anticipated report was issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education called “A Nation at Risk.” It documented declining educational standards for American schools vis a vi International standards. American education was slow to adopt the recommendations of the report which advocated raising our standards to match European ones. Only in the mid90s did significant change come about to combat the rising tide of mediocrity.
mespo,
I don’t know what you mean by in decline. When I began teaching in 1968, it seemed nothing much had changed from my parochial school experience in the 1950s. There wasn’t much room for children working on creative projects, critical thinking, meeting the individual needs of children. Over a course of years, things began to change in elementary education. Kids were no longer only reading programmed basal readers. They started doing more hands on learning in science and math. They did more work on projects and less filling out of workbooks. We took children on more field trips. My daughter (who was born in 1980) had a very enriching elementary school experience. It was much different and much better than the one I had had.
It may be true that education was in decline in some places–but I know for sure that there were many school systems that were doing an excellent job educating their students. Massachusetts was doing well back in the early nineties when school reform came along. Why reform the schools that were doing well? Why throw the baby out with the bath water? The mantra from the media that all schools were failing kept being repeated–and it seemed that most people believed it.
Just look at what’s going on in our country. We have elected officials who are science deniers, who don’t want evolution taught in schools, who insist the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. We have people on school boards who want to censor the books our children read. Some of our great works of literature/best books for children have been highly challenged by school boards and citizens. Some of those books have been removed from school reading lists…and from school library shelves. Yet, all the blame is placed on teachers not doing their job. They’re an easy target. Few want to look around and consider that the issue is a complicated one. Yes, poverty is a serious problem. Some parents are at fault too. After all, they are their children’s first teachers. Lots of kids come to kindergarten today who don’t know the alphabet, colors, numbers, any nursery rhymes. Some have never been read to. Why reform all schools? Why not look at the failing schools and try to figure out what the causes of the problems are and try to figure out ways to address those problems?
Elaine – I cannot speak for other states, but school reform started in Arizona because employers were getting high school graduates who didn’t have the basic education knowledge they required for the job. Motorala actually set up a school on one of its campuses to teach its new employees what they should have been learning in high school.
My problem with many of these new ideas for education is that what is forgotten is that teachers are there to teach and students are there to learn. It’s not a big laboratory that, at the end of a ten year period you say “oops, that didn’t turn out so well, lets try this next.”
These are peoples lives they’re playing with and the most formative years of their education that they will not get back if somebodies little plan for the future of education fails to live up to expectation.
Public education works just fine if you remember that students are there to learn, with lunch in the middle. Keep them occupied and interested and answer their questions. They will have questions, that’s a good sign.
Just don’t waste their time.
Elaine:
I agree testing has been a wrecking ball to learning but it’s also true that education was in decline before the movement to test all the problems away. Your story about teaching the test driving away good teachers also rings true. As for your use of sources, I prefer to analyze the content of the article rather than its source.
RE: Charter Schools: “Saint Paul, Minnesota wrote the first charter school law in the United States in 1992. As of 2011, Minnesota had 149 registered charter schools, with over 35,000 students attending. The first of these was Bluffview Montessori School, opened in 1992. Other schools include the City Academy (1992), Cedar Riverside Community School, The Toivola Meadowlands K-12 Charter School T-M Charter School (1993–2005), Metro Deaf School (1993), Community of Peace Academy (1995), the Aspen Academy (2007), and the Mainstreet School of Performing Arts (2004).
Since then, 41 states and the District of Columbia have approved the formation of charter schools. The state government of Texas approved the formation of charter schools in 1995. Early critics feared that charter schools would lure the highest-performing and most gifted students from centrally administered public schools. Instead, charter schools have tended to attract low-income, minority, and low-performing students. ” (Wikipedia).
I don’t get it….Prof Turley links to the Census Bureau report that says DC public schools spent $18,667 per student but he wrote that the figure was ‘reportedly…roughly” $30K. What gives?
Here is an excerpt from his link: (don’t be misled from the lede)
D.C. Leads Nation as U.S. Per Pupil Tops $10,600, Census Bureau Reports
The nation’s elementary-secondary public school systems spent an average of $10,615 per pupil in fiscal year 2010, up 1.1 percent from the previous year, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. District of Columbia public schools spent $18,667 per student in 2010, which is the most of any state or state equivalent. States that spent the most per pupil were New York ($18,618), New Jersey ($16,841), Alaska ($15,783), Vermont ($15,274) and Wyoming ($15,169). (See table 11. Excel | PDF).
Here’s another Washington Post article that states M. Rhee got rid of tenure in DC:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/teacher-tenure-goes-on-trial-in-los-angeles-courtroom/2014/01/26/b6574ed0-8545-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html
Exerpt:
Backing Welch are some of the most incendiary players in the national argument over the future of public schools, including Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor who got rid of tenure in the District in 2009 and went on to form an advocacy group aimed at eliminating it across the country. Parent Revolution, the group behind the controversial “parent trigger” laws, is another supporter.
My day is complete!
Cato AND AEI shot down. Dare I hope for a correction from Prof. Turley?