it’s not the teachers’ fault

K-12 education in the U.S. is struggling. A recent article in The Atlantic Magazine summarized the record of US schools. Compared to OECD countries “the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.”

No, the problem isn’t that we spend too little. Money isn’t the issue. From the same article in The Atlantic: “The U.S. ranks fifth in spending per student. Only Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. To put this in context: the Slovak Republic, which scores similarly to the U.S., spends $53,000 per student. The U.S. spends $115,000.”

Some say it’s the teachers’ fault. Maybe. We know that schools have plenty of money. Are teachers today as good as they were a couple generations in the past? There’s no way to know. So what’s left? Wait…the students! Maybe today’s students aren’t as bright, or eager, or prepared. Maybe kids don’t have the same parental and cultural support as in the past. That’s a good guess.

Educational failures combine with social decline
I don’t see much, or anything in the direction of US society that says parents on the whole are more concerned, or working harder at, or more successful in supporting their kids at school. It’s common to link the decline of various social indicators to problems with schools. Pat Buchanan writes:

Where out-of-wedlock births in the 1950s were rare, today, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent; among blacks, 71 percent. And the correlation between the illegitimacy rate, the drug rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate is absolute…This helps to explain the four decades of plunging test scores of American children and the quadrupling of the prison population.

Parents
The importance of parents seems accepted and well understood. The NEA says

students with involved parents are more likely to:
o Earn higher grades and test scores, and enroll in higher-level programs
o Be promoted, pass their classes, and earn credits
o Attend school regularly
o Have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school
o Graduate and go on to postsecondary education

…When parents talk to their children about school, expect them to do well, make sure that out-of-school activities are constructive, and help them plan for college, their children perform better in school.

Where are the numbers?
So what’s happening with parental support? If it’s a problem, the first thing you need to do is measure it. Educators have developed a term: readiness to learn. When I hear ‘readiness to learn’, that says ‘parental involvement’ to me.

There are metrics for this, but it seems there’s more than one metric, and adoption is spotty.

• Brookings Institute created a task force, reporting in September 2013 that “the task force calls for new global indicators to include ‘readiness to learn’ in early childhood.”
• A non-profit in Ohio is tracking and reporting a readiness to learn metric for sixteen school districts in Montgomery County, starting with the 2009-10 school year.
• In my own city, Seattle I see no sign that the school district is measuring or tracking school readiness. Their web site offers readiness guidelines for parents of different ethnic backgrounds (Spanish, Chinese, Amharic and so on) but no sign of any effort to move the ball, or even find out where the ball is.

What to do?
I assume that school readiness overall today is not as high as it was forty or fifty years ago. If true, what’s the fix?
One path might be to identify family attributes that correlate with high readiness for school, and support those attributes. Just guessing…but I expect this will draw some attention to welfare programs that encourage single-parent families.
How clear are public schools about parent responsibilities? I’ve never heard a parent complaint that a school required too much hands-on involvement. That tells me that either expectations need to be higher, or they need to be clearer.

The bottom line
Social indicators in the US seem to trend downhill. Apparently there’s a feedback loop with public education, where despite increasing budgets, school results do not improve. Are teachers in the US struggling uphill against a tide of ill-prepared students without support and motivation from parents?
Schools should establish metrics for readiness to learn. These numbers should become part of the debate on public education.
Society as a whole should be accountable for teachers having the resources to succeed. They have the money. Let’s give them good students.
Do more to increase parent accountability.