U.S. Rises to International Average in Science

American students’ science performance climbed to the average for leading industrialized nations, while their mathematics performance remained below the average, despite gains in that subject from the last round of testing in 2006, based on results released today from a prominent international assessment.
In reading, meanwhile, U.S. performance was roughly flat compared with earlier testing cycles, with 15-year-olds staying at about the average for the 34 nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In a conference call with reporters, Stuart Keraschsky, the deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the results from the 2009 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment offer some reason for encouragement, at least in science and math.
“The needle doesn’t move very far very fast in education,” he said. Still, he suggested that the changes seen in achievement in those two subjects “were moving in the right direction.”
But at an education forum in Washington this morning, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan bluntly expressed his concerns with the latest outcome.
“The PISA results, to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are outeducating us,” he said. “Americans need to wake up to this educational reality.”
With regard to the gains in science, he said: “I don’t think that’s much to celebrate. ... Being average in science is a mantle of mediocrity.”
PISA compares the performance of U.S. 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science literacy against their peers internationally. It seeks to assess both what students have learned and how well they apply that knowledge in real-world contexts. The results are scored on a scale of 1 to 1,000.

Special Focus on Reading

In science, the U.S. score of 502 increased from 489 in 2006. The new results were not measurably different from the OECD average of 501, according to a highlights report issued by the NCES, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
The United States ranked in the same statistical category in science as 12 other nations, including Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Portugal. Meanwhile, 12 OECD nations had measurably higher scores.
At the top of the pack in science, based on the latest results, were Finland, Japan, and South Korea. (The NCES report says that only the 2006 test and the current one for science are comparable.)
Each PISA cycle assesses one of the three subjects in depth, and this time around that subject was reading. The 2009 results include a combined reading-literacy scale, as well as three subscales that attempt to gauge students’ ability to access and retrieve information, integrate and interpret it, and reflect and evaluate it.
Overall, U.S. 15-year-olds had an average reading score of 500, which the NCES said was not measurably different from the OECD average of 493. Only six countries had statistically higher average scores, while the United States was in the same category as 14 others.
American students scored 504 in 2000 and 495 in 2003. Results for 2006 were invalidated because of major errors in the printing of the test given in the United States. ("Printing Errors Invalidate U.S. Reading Scores on PISA," Nov. 28, 2007.)
The top three OECD performers in reading this time around were South Korea, Finland, and Canada.
U.S. students showed the best relative performance in answering questions that judged students’ ability to reflect and evaluate information. On that measure, the United States ranked seventh out of the 34 OECD nations. The weakest area for U.S. achievement was in accessing and retrieving information, for which students tied for 19th place with France.

Gender Differences

Meanwhile, in math, the U.S. average score was 487, statistically lower than the OECD average of 496. In all, 17 OECD nations had statistically higher scores.
The U.S. score was statistically higher than the average for American test-takers of 474 in 2006, but not measurably different from 2003, the initial year for the same math assessment.
The highest-scoring OECD countries in math were South Korea, Finland, and Switzerland.
The data released today indicate some gender differences in achievement. For example, U.S. males scored higher on average than females in both science and math, while females on average showed stronger results in reading.
PISA was first implemented in 2000. The U.S. sample for the latest results includes both public and private schools, with 165 schools and 5,233 students participating in all. The 2009 data also include results for many other non-OECD nations and educational systems, including Albania, Qatar, and Shanghai, China.
Former Gov. Bob Wise of West Virginia, who heads the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, said in a statement that while the United States has a long way to go, he saw some reasons for encouragement.
“The positive news is that the United States has stopped dropping in the international rankings, and there has even been some improvement in the mean scores in all three subjects since the last assessment, with significant gains in science,” he said.
Mr. Wise also drew attention to data regarding the performance of low-income students.
“Most positively, approximately 25 percent of [U.S.] low-income students tested in the top quartile, showing that with the right support, every child can learn at a high level.”
For his part, Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, drew attention to the strong performance by Shanghai, which participated for the first time in the 2009 administration of PISA.
“Shanghai’s 15-year-olds topped those in every other jurisdiction in all three subjects,” he wrote on Flypaper, the Fordham Institute’s blog. “The 2009 testing cycle marked the first time that youngsters in China-proper participated. To be sure, it was only Shanghai, the country’s flagship city in so many ways, a single megalopolis on which Beijing has lavished much investment and attention, many favorable policies, and even (for China) a relatively high degree of freedom.”
But Mr. Finn, a former education official in the Reagan administration, said “Americans—and the rest of the world—would make a big mistake to suppose for one second that this Shanghai result is some sort of aberration or unique case.”
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Gates Pushes District-Charter Collaborations

Seeking to promote closer ties between charter schools and other public schools, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Tuesday that it is providing grants to enable charter schools and traditional school districts in nine cities to share best practices and solve problems together.
The nine collaborations are set to receive $100,000 each to carry out signed agreements, and they will compete to be among three selected for significantly larger grants from the foundation. The foundation did not specify dollar amounts for the larger grants.
“It’s new that we have funded districts and charters to come together in this way,” Vicki L. Phillips, the director of K-12 education initiatives for the Seattle-based foundation, said in a telephone interview. “For a long time, there have been tensions between districts and charters over an array of things, from facilities to recruitment and retention of staff. This [effort] is designed to say, ‘We want the highest-performing charters to be successful and the highest-performing districts to be successful.’ ”
The cities participating in the implementation of the first round of compacts are Baltimore; Denver; Hartford, Conn.; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Nashville, Tenn.; New Orleans; New York; and Rochester, N.Y. The charter operators who have signed on to the agreements in some of the participating cities include leaders of Aspire Public Schools, based in Oakland, Calif., and the San Francisco-based Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP.
Ms. Phillips said that the Gates Foundation aims with the new funding effort to support charter schools and other kinds of public schools to move beyond what she calls the “false debate” of “effective charters versus effective districts” and share lessons learned for improving student achievement. She said the foundation intends to support the sharing of best practices more broadly nationwide than has happened so far.
In most cases, the dollars will flow neither to the school district nor to the charter operators but rather to a third party to support the collaborative work of the two sectors, according to foundation staff. (The Gates Foundation also helps support Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week.)
Ms. Phillips said that in April, the foundation will roll out another round of grants to a still-to-be-determined number of cities where charter school and school district leaders have signed agreements to work together.

‘Times Have Changed’

The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, Seattle, will provide oversight for the new effort.
The new funding focus is “a mark that times have changed and charter schools are seen by these cities as a partnership model rather than a distinct parallel system,” said Robin Lake, the associate director for the center. She said it will be the center’s job to monitor how well the partners in the nine collaborations are fulfilling their promises. Also, she said, “We will look across the cities to help people understand what is working and what is not.”
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, said the new investment “is positive and quite welcome” in that it urges charter schools and traditional schools to work together. That collaboration may help to allay some educators’ fears that charter advocates aim to undermine traditional schools, he said.
But Mr. Fuller added that he would like to see the Gates Foundation pay for more research to show how so-called innovative tools used by charter schools raise student achievement. “One worry has been that the Gates Foundation and Obama administration are so romantically seduced by charter schools that they aren’t establishing how these innovative practices actually lift student performance,” he said.
In Denver, one of the cities set to benefit from the Gates Foundation funding for collaboration, the 80,000-student Denver Public Schools and local charter schools are already working closely together, according to Tom Boasberg, the superintendent for that school system. The school district is the authorizer for charter schools in Denver.

History of Collaborating

The charter sector and traditional school sector have collaborated in Denver on school enrollment issues. For instance, three of Denver’s charter schools are required to serve all students in their neighborhoods, “regardless of who they are or when they enroll,” Mr. Boasberg said. One of those charter schools is the only public school in its particular neighborhood. Also a charter school opened this school year that serves students with severe special needs, while previously only regular public schools were set up to serve such students, he said.
Mr. Boasberg made a point of saying that the school district had closed or restructured six low-performing charter schools in Denver over the past several years.
The new compact signed by leaders of Denver charter schools and the district sets goals of expanding the reach of the city’s most effective schools, developing a common approach to enrollment, and sharing data systems, among other goals.
The compacts for both New York City and Nashville call for the development of a program through which school district principals and teachers can take a leave of absence for up to three years to work in a public charter school. In New Orleans, charter and district leaders will collaborate on creating a master teacher training program. They’ll also create and implement a common approach to enrollment with a goal of making it easier for families to take advantage of various school options.
Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute and a member of the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, said he is disappointed that the nation’s capital isn’t participating in an agreement supported by the Gates Foundation, which he said he learned of only with this week’s announcement by the foundation.
He said that although Washington has a larger proportion of its students—about one-third of the city’s 28,000 students—enrolled in charters than in many cities, the charter sector and traditional public school sector haven’t communicated much with each other. That was true, he noted, even though, in his view, Michelle A. Rhee, who recently resigned as chancellor of the school system, shared many educational goals with leaders of the charter schools.
“When Michelle Rhee was really pushing for reform hard in Washington, I thought the two sectors would start to converge because her interest was the same as the charter board’s—to raise the quality of chronically underperforming schools,” Mr. Marshall said.
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