How to Destroy Public Education
In Four Easy Steps

ONE: Invent a Crisis

By now the news accounts have acquired a familiar echo: American students are lagging behind their counterparts in other developed countries. With increasing frequency we are told that a handful of small countries with largely homogeneous populations such as Finland, South Korea and Singapore consistently top the international tables in reading and math, while the United States founders near the bottom among nations with which we would not wish to be compared in any meaningful way.

It has become a truism in politics and among the punditocracy that American education has been in trouble for some time, and that major reforms are necessary to turn things around before the country slips into an irreversible decline. However, before any argument can even begin about what to do about a crisis in education, we ought to endeavor to establish whether there is a crisis in the first place. The introduction of "school choice" in the form of vouchers and charter schools, a vastly increased emphasis on testing, and heightened pressure on teachers to produce better results on these tests, are answers to a problem that has not definitively been proven to exist, let alone defined.

Many in the media and politics who routinely greet any utterance from the U.S. Department of Education with calls for its abolition nonetheless embrace with ardor any conclusion by the government that America's schools are failing. But the evidence for wholesale failure is based on statistical studies, either promulgated or embraced by the government, that do not account properly for national differences in pedagogical methods or demographics. Nor have the tests themselves been proven to be reliable barometers of student progress.

Consider the main source of international comparison, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is overseen by the Organization for Economic Co-ordination and Development (OECD). PISA purports to compare the educational attainment of 15-year-olds in the approximately 70 countries and regions that participate in its triennial study. Among the most obvious problems with using PISA as a measure of achievement of American students is the size of the testing sample. Here is what the government itself says:

There are approximately 56 million school-aged children in the United States, more than 4 million of them in the 15-year-old cohort. Can .0014 percent of the country's 15-year-olds, or .00009 percent of all children in school, be considered a representative sample of American public education? Should we be basing wholesale educational reform on the results of such a minuscule effort to test our children? In some countries, such as Iceland, every 15-year-old must be tested for the country to be counted in the international comparison. By what methods does the OECD go about deciding how to massage the data to make a comparison relevant between one country's entire population and another's tiny sample? By what methods does our own Department of Education interpret that data and render it meaningful? When statisticians must weight the scores and otherwise manipulate the data in arbitrary ways in order to make any sort of comparison, how reliable are the conclusions?

A second way in which international students are judged is by forgoing this tiny sample group and comparing PISA directly with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered more widely. A study by Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance & Education Next asserted that differences in PISA and NAEP scores demonstrate clearly that American students are far behind their peers in other countries. However, this entire study is based on the decidedly undemonstrated premise that the two tests are sufficiently compatible as to warrant comparison. PISA tests students at age 15, which for most American students is Grade 10. As it happens, NAEP is not even taken by students in grade 10, but only in grades 4, 8 and 12. This is how the Harvard study purports to iron out this major wrinkle:

This "crosswalk" is shorthand for a panel of self-described educational experts deciding that a particular score by an student in grade 8 or 12 on NAEP is equivalent to a particular score by a student in grade 10 on PISA, even though American tenth-graders don't sit for NAEP, and only an infinitesimally small number of them take PISA. Every educational statistician worth his salt knows perfectly well that weighting grades is based on any number of arbitrary assumptions, which, however well-intentioned the effort, can be recalculated in any number of ways to produce any number of different results.

An additional question is whether any test is capable of accurately reflecting wide variations in culture and teaching methods. For decades we have had an ongoing and thoroughly unresolved debate in this country about whether testing norms are fair to American students of poor and/or minority backgrounds. Imagine how much more complex and irreconcilable are the differences between students from entirely different cultures with long and varied histories of educational practice. A study published by the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Department of Education, in 2010, itself cast doubt on the validity of the resulting comparisons. Consider these two pertinent excerpts about the differences between the reading portions of PISA and NAEP:

What does seem clear is that while tests in the U.S. have in recent years increasingly emphasized higher-order thinking skills, many other countries whose students are supposedly doing better than ours rely principally on rote learning and memorization. One is tempted to respond that we ought not to pass value judgments on the educational systems of very different kinds of societies, but the repeated and alarming reports about the critical state of American schooling are based entirely on value judgments, which are based entirely on the results of these tests. The onus is on those making these pronouncements to demonstrate that their dire warnings are based on demonstrable differences in performance, not on artificially weighted scores on incompatible tests of unrepresentative samples of students.

Even if we were to suppose that differences in culture and pedagogical methods could be compensated for, we have still not proven that the fault is with America's schools or its teachers. Furthermore, even if we suppose that American students overall do in fact perform less well than their foreign counterparts, this does not in and of itself prove that the majority of students is less well prepared to enter the work force or succeed in college. There is strong evidence that only a portion of America's education system is in fact underperforming, namely its poor urban schools. The dysfunction at many of the nation's large city districts has long been known and documented. The black-white achievement gap is irrefutable. The talents of millions of our children are undeniably wasted every year in schools that are unable to overcome the social enormities that enter the door each day on the backs of the students. This is our education crisis.

However, this is the not the crisis that we read about in the studies that are featured regularly in the news. We have been led to believe that the crisis is systemic throughout America's schools, so that even in the suburbs, where most American children go to school, failure is the norm. But there is little if any evidence to support this broad conclusion. Diane Ravitch, writing in The New York Review of Books last year, finds evidence in the same government report cited earlier, in which the authors concluded that the crisis in in fact system-wide. She quotes the authors contradicting their own conclusion:

This is the truth that we as a nation still do not wish to face: The primary causes of educational failure are poverty and racial inequity. It is neither the decades-long deterioration in moral values bemoaned by the right, nor the rapaciousness of industry or the consequent corruption of politics by money which is shouted from the left. American students are not falling behind the rest of the world because we have lost our way as a nation. Only America's poorest students continue to be left behind, as they have always been. Ravitch writes:

Why, then, are we blaming teachers for societal problems that were identified long ago, and for which policy makers have never mustered a sufficient response?

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