Achilles heel of American education: inequality – KansasCity.com

Great article on Education….

The latest shocker came with the results of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which showed students in Shanghai well ahead of the global pack. The study tested 15-year-olds from 65 Organzisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member nations in math, science and reading. (China wasn’t assessed as a whole, but Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao were separately.)

The United States ranked 24th, the middle of the pack. Cue the cliches …

“Fifty years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back,” declared President Barack Obama.

“Wow, I’m kind of stunned. I’m thinking Sputnik,” Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in Ronald Reagan’s education team, told The New York Times.

Faced with the new rankings, Britain, France, Germany and other nations announced plans to study and overhaul their educational systems. The U.S. pretty much shrugged. And some began searching for faults in the analysis.

Every time such figures are released, some Americans content themselves to do a little math. They subtract the inconvenient students. Take out underachieving minority students, they say, and we’re not doing so badly.

True, white and Asian students have vastly better graduation and achievement rates than African American and Hispanic students do. But if you want to know the biggest problem in the U.S. education system, it’s this: inequality.

Tucked into news stories about the testing was the finding that the highest achieving school systems in the world were the ones where social class tends not to predict student achievement. Think about that. In countries where students from all social and economic backgrounds are well represented among highest academic achievers, student achievement on the whole is higher.

Inequality is America’s Achilles heel. Class level still matters greatly when it comes to student achievement. No Child Left Behind has made that infinitely clear. I realize this is hardly rocket science. Turning it around will be.

via Achilles heel of American education: inequality – KansasCity.com.