U. S. Education by the Numbers

The year now coming to an end has been good for education reformers.  That doesn't mean it has been a good for education, necessarly; but reformers have had a field day, blaming teachers and teachers' unions for almost every problem in the schools. 

In 2011 we were warned that America's educational decline undermined our standing in a global economy.  We heard that charter schools and vouchers would save U. S. education.  Arne Duncan, U. S. Secretary of Education, pushed the idea that standardized testing was the key.  Michelle Rhee, the Queen of Hearts in reforming circles, insisted that all school improvement boiled down to better teachers in the classrooms.  Steven Brill--a lawyer, by trade--wrote a book, laying out the same essential case.  And Davis Guggenheim's savaged teachers as lazy, incompetent union bums in the movie Waiting for Superman.

Meanwhile, I continued to amuse myself, trying to write a book about teaching.  Naturally, I am making myself the handsome hero of the story.  When Hollywood buys the rights, I even know who I want to play me in the film version:  Brad Pitt. 

(I think we look like twins.)

At any rate, here are some education statistics you might have missed recently:

0:  We know U. S. schools are killing our nation's standing in the global economy, right?  This number represents the growth in the Japanese economy since 1991 (it was $5.7 trillion two decades ago and it's $5.7 trillion now), despite a "superior" education system.  In a survey done in 2009, comparing fifteen-year olds from 65 countries, Japanese students ranked #5 in reading, #4 in math, and #2 in science.

1:  Number of unions representing teachers in the Wyoming City Public Schools, here in Ohio, where graduation rates are 98% and 2% of children qualify for the federal free lunch program.  Same number representing teachers in Cincinnati Public Schools (bordering the Wyoming schools) where graduation rates are 81.9% and roughtly 60% of students qualify for the same program.

1.8:  Estimated % growth of U. S. economy in 2011; critics say it's the public schools' fault.  (U. S. public school teachers are apparently a bunch of miscreants.) 

4.4:  In 2009, Finland ranked #2 in that same survey of fifteen-year olds in reading, #2 in math and #1 in science. Finland is also a socialist country and only 4.4% of children grow up in poverty. In the United States, the comparable figure is 22%. 
5:42:  Hours and minutes spent daily watching TV or playing video games, average child in the U. S., age 8-18, compared to 38 minutes with printed material.  (See:  U. S. test scores below.)

6:  Number of years actually spent in the classroom by leading voices in education reform, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, Joel I. Klein and Catherine Black, two recent chancellors of the New York City schools, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad, billionaire philanthropists, Jon Schnur, who runs the school-reform group New Leaders for New Schools, Brill, Rhee, who promised to save the Washington, D. C. schools, Guggenheim, Chester Flynn Jr., think tank expert and staunch advocate of No Child Left Behind, Duncan, and six other U. S. secretaries of education, combined.  That's right:  combined.

8:  Percentage growth of Brazilian economy in 2010.  Brazil ranks 52nd in reading, 57th in math and 53rd in science out of 65 nations.

10:  Percentage of babies born in Scioto County, Ohio, with illegal drugs in their blood.  (You can see where this might be hard to pin on teachers.)

12:  U. S. ranking in survey of 65 nations in reading (three-way tie with Iceland and Poland).

14+:  Hours the average student in South Korea spends per day in school, doing homework, and in special after-hours tutoring sessions. In 2009, South Korea ranked #1 in the international survey noted above in reading, #1 in math and #3 in science.

15:  One out of every fifteen U. S. high school students admits smoking marijuana on a nearly daily basis in 2011.

17: U. S. ranking in science knowledge, for fifteen-year-olds, out of 65 nations.

25:  U. S. ranking in math, above.

33:  U. S. standing, out of 33 "advanced economies," in a survey by the International Monetary Fund, in a ranking of preterm births and infant mortality.

36:  Dollars per month, average pay for garment workers in Bangladesh, where exports have doubled since 2004.  (You figure a superior system of education has nothing to do with this trend.)

43:  Number of points higher--average SAT math scores--of Asian American students, who attend the same "failing schools" as white, black and Hispanic students.

46:  Percentage of American adults who admit they did not read a single book last year not required for school or work.  (See U. S. reading scores above.)

96:  Number of reporters who showed up in 2009, to watch Tom Brady's first practice after missing most of the preceding NFL season with a serious knee injury.  (You couldn't get 96 reporters to show up to watch the best teacher in America work in the next 96 years.  We don't exactly focus on education in this country.  See Japan and South Korea, above.)

108:  Number of major league baseball players taking prescribed medications for A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. in 2008,  after Major League Baseball began testing for amphetamines.  (It makes you wonder if doctors might not be over-doing.)  More generally, the Mayo Clinic estimates that 7.5% of all U. S. students are now taking Ritalin for A.D.D. and A.D.H.D.

200:  Estimated murders of children in the U. S. by their parents every year.  (Not all parents are the same and it's hard to see how vouchers will solve every "school" problem.)

240:  Days spent per year in school by the average Japanese student.  If U. S. students score lower than the Japanese it may be due in part to the fact that the Japanese boy or girl attends as many days in 3 years as his or her American peer does in 4.

245:  Chicago public school students killed or wounded, mostly as a result of gang violence, during the 2009-2010 school year, almost entirely outside of schools and off school grounds.  (This is the district Arne Duncan "fixed," by the way.) 

670:  Length in pages of the No Child Left Behind Law, designed to close the achievement gap between races, (see Asian American students, above) and passed by Congress in 2002, requiring schools to insure that every child is proficient in reading and math by 2014.  This gap is entirely the fault of schools, even though black males are six times more likely to be murdered than white males, blacks have an unemployment rate twice as high as whites, a life-expectancy four years shorter, and are three times more likely to raise their children in single-parent homes.

8,500:  child abuse and neglect cases in one year in Hamilton County, Ohio.  Call Children's Services in your area for comparable statistics.  (See:  vouchers and charter schools, above.)

17,000:  School resource officers presently employed in U. S. schools (a euphemism for "police" in halls). 

132,000:  Students now in U. S. public schools, classified as "severely disabled" .  (See:  No Child Left Behind, above.)  This represents only a small fraction of the 6.5 million students on special education plans in the public schools.

954,914:  Homeless children in America, according to most recent statistics by the U. S.  Department of Education.  (Charter schools?  Really?  That's your answer?)

1,500,000:  U. S. students, grades K-12, with at least one parent behind bars at any given moment.

5,000,000:  yearly salary of Ronald J. Packard, chief executive of K12 Inc., the biggest for-profit company in on-line education.  Packard's schools are almost entirely funded by taxpayer money, based on number of students enrolled. 

26,500,000:  Money spent by K12 Inc. in 2010 on advertising; i. e. spending taxpayer money to convince students to sign up for internet classes, funded by taxpayer money.  (Repeat cycle until taxpayers get too dizzy.)

31,650,000:  Value in dollars, added incentives not included, of 8-year contract signed by John Calipari in 2009 to coach the University of Kentucky men's basketball team.  Ironically, schools where Calipari coached previously were twice forced to forfeit games due to NCAA rules violations.  Memphis forfeited its entire 2007-08 season (38 wins) after investigators discovered that at least one star player, reportedly guard Derrick Rose, and probably two, had other students take the SAT tests for them.

Could it be that we have a social problem in this country, not really a school problem?

As I. F. Stone once noted, "There are countries in which the ignorant have respect for learning.  This is not one of them."

Numbers Don't Lie: Our Teachers (and Doctors) Are Failing

I RETIRED FROM TEACHING three years ago. So I finally have time to do a little writing. If you follow education news these days you have to know public school teachers are being fed a steady diet of abuse by critics. When U. S. students are compared and ranked, internationally, based on test scores the results are depressing.

It has to be teachers, right? Not long ago, Glenn Beck lumped teachers’ unions in with Islamic terrorists. Seriously. The movie Waiting for Superman made it look like teachers were a bunch of slugs. Here in Ohio Governor Kasich acts like we’re Vikings intent on ransacking the State Treasury.

I talk to teachers these days and find them more discouraged than at any time since I first became interested in a career in education. So my blog will always be a defense of good teachers—but never bad ones. 

There’s a difference, which most of our leaders and almost all of the critics seem to forget. Take Arne Duncan. He says education reform is “all about the talent.”

He means it’s all about teachers.

Trust me:  I’m a liberal. I voted for President Obama and always knew he had a valid birth certificate. But I’d like to sock Mr. Duncan, his Secretary of Education in the jaw. (Same goes for Davis Guggenheim, producer of Waiting for Superman, by the way.)

If you listen to critics this is what you hear:  We have a “school crisis” on our hands. How do we know? We know because our students finished 25^th in math in 2006, when students from thirty nations were tested. Worse, we spend more on education than almost all the countries that beat us. See:  America’s teachers are lazy and overpaid.

Here were the bleak math results in 2006:

1. Finland
2. South Korea
3. Netherlands
4. Switzerland
5. Canada
6. Japan
7. New Zealand
8. Belgium
9. Australia
10. Denmark
11. Czech Republic
12. Iceland
13. Austria
14. Germany
15. Sweden
16. Ireland
17. France
18. United Kingdom
19. Poland
20. Slovak Republic
21. Hungary
22. Luxembourg
23. Norway
24. Spain 
25. UNITED STATES
26. Portugal
27. Italy
28. Greece
29. Turkey
30. Mexico

Study that list a bit and it can seem depressing. Our poor students were just baffled when it came to multiplying decimals and transforming common fractions into percentages. Who else could you blame? It had to be teachers.

In my case, I looked at that list for a long time and wondered. Was America going to math hell in a hand basket?

WHAT OTHER PROBLEMS WERE CRITICS MISSING? Was it just America’s teachers who were failing? Or was there a broader cultural failure to concern us?

What about doctors?

Time magazine provided the first hint of danger in a brief comparison (December 12, 2008) of health care systems round the world. After that, I was on the story like Woodward and Bernstein, or maybe just Woodward, since it’s just me.

Health care costs in the United States ate up 16% of GDP, the highest figure in the world, a per capita cost of $7,026. Life expectancy was 77.8 years.

Japan spent 7.9% of GDP, or $2,690 per capita. Yet the Japanese lived an average of 83 years.

Numbers don’t lie and the more numbers you study the more lying you don’t see. School reformers like Secretary Duncan assure us that if we collect enough data and tie test results to teacher pay we can save American education. Maybe we can collect enough data to save hospitals, too. In southern Minnesota people live into their 80’s. People in eastern Kentucky live a mere 72.6 years.

What’s needed, clearly, is a system to rate doctors and nurses in Minnesota “excellent” and medical people in Kentucky “failing” or under “academic watch” or some category of that nature. Or we could fire all the Kentucky medical people and get some real professionals in there to clean up the mess.

In fact, to get a picture of how our oncologists and proctologists are doing, let’s gather some data. Compare life expectancy in the same countries that beat out our brains in math.

Here were the dismal “health care” rankings for 2009:

1.    Japan                          

2.    Australia                     

3.    Canada                                   

4.    France                        

5.    Sweden                      

6.    Switzerland                

7.    Iceland                                   

8.    Israel                          

9.    New Zealand             

10.  Italy                            

11.  Norway                      

12.  Spain                          

13.  Austria                                   

14.  Greece                        

15.  Netherlands                

16.  Luxembourg               

17.  Germany                    

18.  Belgium                      

19.  Finland           

20.  United Kingdom        

21.  Denmark                    

22.  Ireland                        

23.  Portugal                      

24.  UNITED STATES    

25.  Czech Republic          

26.  Mexico                       

27.  South Korea               

28.  Poland                        

29.  Slovakia                     

30.  Turkey                     

So, what do simple lists prove? If America’s teachers are failing, a truth the media universally accept, then this chart proves that U. S. doctors are lazy and overpaid idiots—and they aren’t even unionized.

(Thank god they don't have tenure!!!)

So, Mr. Duncan, if you ever do get punched in the nose by an angry, retired teacher, head for Canada if you want good affordable health care.

And don’t mention our terrible doctors to Glenn Beck.

He’ll only start crying.

(For even MORE chilling statistical evidence go to:  “America's Teachers Stink Up the Place Again.”