NEW YORK, Dec. 14 (AScribe Newswire) -- The following commentary is by Greg Anrig, vice president for policy at The Century Foundation and author of "The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing."
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The response to the newly released 2006 Programme for Student International Assessment (Pisa), which showed U.S. 15-year-olds ranking lower in scientific understanding than their peers in 16 out of 29 other countries, has been pretty much the same as it always is after the publication of similar studies reporting mediocre American performance. The disappointing results portend long-term dangers to the country's economy, experts warn, while the Bush administration and the conservative echo chamber recycle their arguments for more testing, tougher standards and private school vouchers.
But hardly anyone dares talk about what such tests most vividly illustrate: America lags many other countries because an unusually high share of its students attend racially isolated, high-poverty schools that are in far worse condition that the public education system as a whole. The United States is much more ethnically diverse, with 41 percent of its public school enrollment comprising minorities, than relatively homogeneous nations like Finland, Canada and Japan that generally rank at the top of international assessments.
The differences in skin color matter not because of crackpot genetics theories, but because blacks and Hispanics remain largely segregated in low-income urban neighbourhoods from the rest of society. Among fourth-graders in 2005, 48 percent of blacks and 49 percent of Hispanics attended schools in which more than 75 percent of the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. By comparison, only 5 percent of white students attended such high-poverty schools. Nearly three-quarters of all black and Hispanic students go to schools with at least half the enrollment eligible for subsidized lunch.
Around the globe, the Pisa results affirm, the socio-economic background of students significantly affects test performance - the lower the income of a child's family, the worse he is likely to do on the exam. But an even more important factor in predicting any child's score is the collective economic and social circumstances of his classmates. According to the Pisa report: "Regardless of their own socio-economic background, students attending schools in which the average socio-economic background is high tend to perform better than when they are enrolled in a school with below socio-economic intake. In the majority of OECD countries, the effect of the average economic, social and cultural status of students in a school ... far outweighs the effects of the individual student's socio-economic background."
Largely because such a large portion of U.S. black and Hispanic students are isolated in high-poverty schools that universally face enormous educational obstacles, their average test scores are far below the levels for whites. African-American and Hispanic students attending middle-class schools, however, do much better on standardised tests. Though there is still a gap for those children, it is substantially smaller and narrowing over time.
To evaluate the extent to which the racial gaps in U.S. test scores affect international comparisons, researchers Erling Boe and Sujie Shin looked at the results of five different tests after sorting the American results by race. Boe and Shin found that in reading, white Americans in grades eight, nine and 10 scored substantially higher than students in the other, more ethnically homogeneous, G7 countries. In both math and science, the white American students trailed only Japan while producing better results than the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Canada combined.
The U.S. public education system as a whole is unquestionably imperfect. But the reason why it seems to be inferior to so many other countries remains the same American dilemma that Gunnar Myrdal wrote about decades ago, compounded by the ghettoization of many Hispanics and African-Americans. Concentrated poverty, perpetuated by racial isolation in American cities, continues to impose enormous costs that extend far beyond the competitiveness preoccupation of test-result commentators. Unfortunately, talking about other concerns that seem less intractable has supplanted focusing on action against what remains America's deepest problem.
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NOTE TO EDITORS: The above opinion piece is available for
free and immediate use with the following attribution: This
opinion piece originally appeared in The Guardian. If used,
please contact Christy Hicks, 212-452-7723 as a courtesy to
the contributor.
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