The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) released its 2012 study of 65 participating nations/education systems this month. The news that 15-year olds in the U.S. once again were in the middle of the pack was printed as “PISA Test Results for U.S. Students are ‘Sobering’” (NPR), “American Kids Whiffed the PISA Exam” (Slate), “Testing Education: PISA Envy” (The Economist).
What price would need to be paid for the United States to climb the rank of education systems displayed in the PISA study? Let’s consider two elements – political commitment and cultural willingness. What would it take on these two fronts to affect a change in the U.S. PISA fortunes? For political commitment, we will examine my home state of Wisconsin.
This week Governor Walker received a letter from Tea Party and in- and out-of-state conservative groups calling for him to be a “hero” and bring legislation that would reject the Common Core Standards in Wisconsin schools. Be a hero? Abandon what more than 400 school districts have already accomplished in moving local instruction to the Core? Be a hero – for whom?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/27/scott-walker-common-core-standards-tea-party_n_4351092.html
Let’s see what this really means.
In 2010 the Thomas B. Fordham Institute evaluated the academic standards in each state and ranked Wisconsin’s mathematics standards with a grade of F. “With their grade of F, Wisconsin’s mathematics standards are among the worst in the country, while those developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative earn an impressive A-. The CCSS math standards are vastly superior to what the Badger state has in place today.”
The Fordham Institute awarded the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards for English Language Arts a grade of D. “Wisconsin’s ELA standards are generally clearly written and presented, and include some rigorous content. Unfortunately, their failure to provide grade-specific expectations creates critical gaps in content that leave teachers without the guidance they need to drive rigorous curriculum, assessment and instruction.”
The letter to Governor Walker does not offer a substitute reform of educational standards or academic goals to replace the Common Core. The state legislators who held hearings around the state on the question of whether Wisconsin should support the Common Core also have not exposed anything but their disdain for the Common Core. Hence, abandoning the Common Core in the absence of any other improvement in academic standards returns Wisconsin schools to the Model Academic Standards that were graded with an F and D for their inadequacies. Interestingly, Model Academic Standards for all other subject areas remain the standards for instruction in those subject areas in our state’s public schools. How would they be graded?
Standards make a difference in a discussion of PISA. The assessment of 15-year olds not only assesses their achievement on a once-every-three years test, but also assesses the instruction that is the foundation of that achievement. The dilemma in Wisconsin is the grave disconnect between the Model Academic Standards and the standards underlying the PISA test.
PISA views math literacy as “an individual’s capacity to formulate, employ, and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes reasoning mathematically and using mathematical concepts, procedures, facts, and tools to describe, explain, and predict phenomenon. It assists individuals to recognize the role that mathematics plays in the world and to make the well-founded judgments and decisions by constructive, engaged, and reflective citizens.” As fact, the Fordham study found this definition of math literacy to be undeniably absent from the Wisconsin standards. Any Wisconsin student taking the PISA assessment could not rely upon his or her annual math instruction based upon the Model Academic Standards to assist their responses to PISA literacy in mathematics.
The problem is that current political commitment in Wisconsin is to politics and not to reforming the essential skeletal structure of public education, its academic standards. Any inference connecting the 2012 PISA results to public education in Wisconsin must be answered with the statement that state leadership is more interested in using education to improve its political advantage rather than using politics to improve public education.
The political price for Wisconsin’s improvement on PISA-like assessments is the commitment of our political leadership to real reform and measured improvement, like what the leaders in Massachusetts have rendered. Massachusetts, and Connecticut and Florida, were accepted as independent education systems in the 2012 PISA assessment. Massachusetts’ results rank the achievements of its 15-year olds among the top ten international education systems in the PISA data. Those results did not happen by accident. The are the result of a state commitment to achieving high results in the outcomes of their public education. Way to go Massachusetts!
The status of cultural willingness is not much better off than political commitment when related to public education.
Frank Bruni, op-ed columnist for the New York Times recently asked “Are Kids Too Coddled?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/bruni-are-kids-too-coddled.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Mr. Bruni cites the complaints by parents, teachers and social workers in New York who recently testified that “kids are not enjoying school as much; feel a level of stress that they shouldn’t have to; are being judged too narrowly; and doubt their own mettle.” While he accepts the earnestness of these complaints, he says, “…we need to ask ourselves how much panic is trickling down from their parents and whether we’re paying the price of having insulated kids from blows to their egos and from the realization that not everyone’s a winner in every activity on every day.” Bruni points to the awarding of trophies not to the winner of a contest but to every participant, of the 20 to 30 valedictorians honored at high school graduations, and a court suit brought in Texas where a parent believes that a lopsided football score is a form of “bullying” an underachieving rival.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Education wrote in Education Week that “our students have an inflated sense of their academic prowess. They do not spend that much time studying, but they expect good grades and marketable degrees.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/10/tales_of_the_common_core.html
“The questions asked when international comparative tests are given show that American schools typically believe that they are better at math and science than students in other countries believe they are, even though the converse is true; foreign students outperform ours…
The single biggest challenge in implementing the Common Core will be raising the expectations of Americans for their children’s achievement. While American parents are pulling their kids out of tests because the results make the kids feel bad, parents in other countries are looking at the results and asking themselves how they can help their children to do better.”
Cultural willingness has a major impact upon the achievement of children in school. The price of improvement is an upgrading of Wisconsin’s “grit” quotient. Can you hear your grandparent when you were feeling dejected or defeated or sorry for yourself say “when the going gets tough, the tough get going!” Grit keeps children in Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, and Massachusetts at their learning tasks when new learning is difficult. It is their culture.
The capacity for children in the U.S. to be competitive in any international assessment is present. At some time soon, there will be a determination of who the adults in the room are and those adults will make a political commitment to improving educational achievement and those same adults will show a willingness to teach their children to “redefine self-esteem as something achieved through hard work. Students may not enjoy every step of it,” wrote David Coleman, President of the College Board and member of the Core authoring team). Coleman went further to say, “But if it takes them somewhere big and real, they’ll discover a satisfaction that redeems sweat. And, they’ll be ready to compete globally, an ability that too much worry over their egos could hinder.”
The price for the U.S. to achieve glory in the international competition of educational systems is not an insurmountable sum. Money is spent on public education every day. Politics is a game played every day. A political commitment could redirect money and human effort in a direction that already is available – the support of a public education based upon rigorous academic standards that align with the international educational community – movement up the PISA ladder is very realistic. At the same time, parental effort is expended every day to direct the lives of children. There is an equally important new call for parents: a willingness to redirect children toward to the work of an academically challenging studenthood and the connection of hard work, earned success, and self-esteem. Past generations of young Americans have been challenged with wars and depressions and questions of humanity. Being a more diligent student is doable.
The next PISA tests will be administered in 2015. History will record whether Americans were willing to do what needed to be done to achieve glory.