Separate But Un-Equal 15-Year-Olds

 

AN OP-ED PIECE ON 2001 RESULTS
OF THE
PROGRAM ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ASSESSMENT

 

By
David C. Berliner

 

Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU)
Education Policy Studies Laboratory
College of Education
Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Box 872411
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2411

 

December 2001

 

 

EPSL-0112-104-EPRU

OP Ed written 12/4/2001
Updated 12/10/2001
David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor
College of Education
Arizona State University

Separateand unequal 15-year-olds

A new look at the literacyof teens living in the industrialized world shows that American students areabout average.  “Average is not good enough for American kids,” warnsEducation Secretary Rod Paige.  True enough – but Paige and the BushAdministration miss the point. Hidden in those results is yet one more piece ofevidence that American youngsters attend schools that are separate and markedlyunequal.

The Program onInternational Student Assessment (PISA) seeks to understand what 15-year-oldsin 27 industrialized nations learned in reading, mathematics, and science fromschool and non-school sources. PISA’s goal is to assess how well we teach themto think and solve common, everyday problems in those three disciplines. With85 percent of a student’s waking hours up to graduation from high school spentoutside of school, this is really a study of how well our society educates ouryoung.

The answer depends onwhether they are white, African-American or Hispanic. Overall, American15-year-olds were close to the international averages in all three areas ofliteracy; about 10 percent scored in the top 10 percent worldwide on all threescales.  The three tests correlated so highly that national scores on anyone measure of literacy were almost a perfect proxy for scores on any othermeasure.

In reading, our strongestarea, teens in only three nations—Finland, Canada and New Zealand—scoredsignificantly higher than ours; in fact, 81 percent of US teens scored atlevels two and above on a five-level reading literacy scale (with Level Fivebeing the top).

This is noteworthy becauseof what PISA says a “Level Two” teen can do: make a comparison or severalconnections between the text and outside knowledge, draw on personal experienceand attitudes to explain the text, recognize the main idea when the informationis not prominent, understand relationships or construe meaning within aselected part of the text, and locate one or more pieces of information, whichmay require inferences to meet several conditions.  Only 12 percent of ourteens, those classified in Level One, cannot reach this remarkably high standard. Even among the least literate teens classified as at Level One, almost halfwere able to successfully respond to the more difficult items in Level Two.

On all three tests, ouryouth didn’t do badly overall – but we didn’t shine, either.  Why? Theanswer becomes clear when the scores of different 15-year-olds are viewedseparately.

PISA clearly shows we havesome ill- educated 15-year-olds, and most of those are poor and minoritychildren.  On the reading literacy scale white students in the US aresecond in the world, but African American and Hispanic students rank 25th;in mathematics white students are seventh, African American students are 26th;in science, white students are fourth, African American and Hispanic studentsare 26th. 

The unpleasant reality isthat the United States runs separate and unequal schools andneighborhoods.  The conditions of the schools and neighborhoods for ourpoor, African American, and Hispanic youth are not designed for high levels ofliteracy in reading, mathematics and science.  We accept poverty,violence, drugs, unequal school funding, uncertified teachers, andinstitutionalized racism in the schools that serve these children and in theneighborhoods in which they live.  These unequal conditions appear to bethe major reason we fall short in international comparisons. We combine thescores of these ill-educated children with those of children who enjoy betterresources.  As long as these differences are allowed to exist we will rankabout average in international comparisons.

As PISA makes clear,accepting deficient schools and troubled neighborhoods for our poor andminority students diminishes our international competitiveness. In ignoringthese data about who does well and who does not, we diminish our moral authorityin the world as well.

PISA exposes what we haveknown for too long: that we have social problems to which we pay scantattention. In every international comparison of industrialized nations the USis the leader in rate of childhood poverty. African American and Hispanicstudents attend public schools as segregated as they have ever been.  Ourpoor and minority children are not getting the opportunities they need for thenation to thrive.

Politicians who spend theirenergy condemning the public schools for their supposed failure to educateAmerican youth are ignoring what PISA tells the world: that we failselectively, having organized our society to provide poor and minority15-year-olds less opportunity to achieve.  Shame on us.