Obama gets a lot of it wrong about public education

Yes, we can check our facts next time.

Boy, is President Obama confused. That was my reaction to his recent speech on education to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

It’s not just public-education advocates and “school reform” skeptics like me who had that reaction, either. I’m Facebook friends with Lisa Snell – a free-market, pro-privatization commentator with views pretty much polar opposite to mine – and on her Facebook page, she called his talk “a study in contradictions.”

The president’s muddlement on education issues seems out of character, and I guess there’s no point in speculating on what’s causing it. Education commentators are burning up the Internet with their responses.

The two points that most leap out are Obama’s exaggerated gloomy picture of our public schools -- he cited a string of “facts” that are actually questionable, wrong or even spun to make our schools look worse than they are – and his baseless praise of charter schools as a solution.

“Daily Howler”   blogger Bob Somerby, who is frequently bombastic but very often on target, wonders about the bleak picture Obama chooses to paint – and, presumably, believe.

Why do politicians paint this Gloomy Portrait of American schools? In some cases, they may not know what they’re talking about; everyone has heard these Standard Claims, and people tend to believe them. But yes, there can be political uses for such gloomy misstatements. As Bracey has noted, gloomy claims have long been used by educational “conservatives” to undermine faith in the public schools; vouchers and charters are more appealing if you believe that the public schools are a wreck. On the other hand, a president can set himself up to be a star if he overstates the mess which predates him.

Somerby doesn’t try to guess at Obama’s motives, and I can’t either.

And what’s with the praise of charter schools, President Obama? Charter schools have been around for 16 years now. Some are great, some are disasters and the rest are all along the range in between – just like traditional public schools. As has been amply documented, charter schools overall do not outperform traditional public schools, despite having numerous advantages over them (including massive financial bounty from billionaire private philanthropists and the avid support of a series of public-school-disparaging presidents).

More and more voices are talking about the way the charter school movement started as a “progressive” and “grassroots” way to allow parents a full voice in how their children are educated – and has now been largely hijacked by the pro-privatization, anti-public-education free-market right. You’d think those folks would be hiding in a corner right now, with their philosophy so obviously discredited -- I'm one of the millions of Americans suffering direct economic harm from their gleeful experiment with unregulated free markets – but they’re still out there waving the flag for charter schools. (A growing legion of resisters among real-life urban parents around the nation is rising up to decry the “stranglehold of the billionaire eduphilanthropreneurs,” as Oakland’s   Perimeter Primate   blog puts it.)

Education analyst/commentator Gerald Bracey responds on   The Huffington Post   to Obama’s admiration for charters:

After evaluating public schools on test scores, he then turns around and praises charters for creativity and innovation. But study after study of charters has come away saying they were surprised at how much the charter schools look like regular public schools. And charter schools don't score as well on tests as regular public schools ("NAEP gap continuing for charters," Eric Robelen, Education Week, May 21, 2008). You can't bash the public schools on test scores then praise the charters which have lower scores.
 

Bracey, who knows his way around achievement analysis, refutes a number of the bleak claims Obama’s speech made about U.S. public education. 

… a lot of the speech contained flat out errors. He said that graduation rates had fallen from 77% to 67%. Huh? Graduates are a contentious topic, but the U. S. Department of Education says the best method for estimating it puts it at 74.5% nationally (a short treatise of the topic can be found in Paul Barton's 2009 "Chasing the High School Graduation Rate." Free copies at www.ets.org/research/pic).

He said dropout rates have tripled over the past 30 years. Come again? A 10% decline in graduation rate = a 300% increase in dropout rate? Talk about fuzzy math.

He said, "In 8th grade math we've fallen to 9th place." Actually, we've come a long way, baby. The reference here has to be to the most recent TIMSS which tested in 45 nations. But in the original TIMSS from 1995, published in 1996, U S 8th graders ranked 23rd in math among 41 nations. If that's falling, let's go down some more, fast. [Caroline here: A reasonably competent newspaper copy editor, coming across that claim, would know to ask: What was the rank previously; from what starting point has the U.S. fallen? What’s with Obama’s research staff? Dudes!]

"Just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should." This is outright garbage. The reference here has to be to NAEP achievement levels which, as I have shown over and over again, as have others, are outrageously unrealistically high. Richard Rothstein and colleagues demonstrated that, were kids in other countries to sit for our NAEP exams, NO country would have a majority of students proficient in reading using NAEP achievement levels. Sweden, the top-scoring country, would be just ahead of the U. S.--with one third of its students proficient.

He raved about South Korean schools but neglected to say that thousands of South Korean families sell their children--yes, sell--to American families so their kids can a) learn English and b) avoid the horrible rigidity of Korean schools. And while the US trails Korea on average test scores, it has a higher proportion of students scoring at the highest level on the Program of International Student Achievement (PISA). Moreover, it has the highest number of high scorers (67,000) of any country. No one else even comes close. Top scoring Finland has a proportion that gives them about 2,000 warm bodies at PISA's Level 6 (Lowell & Salzman, "Making the Grade," Nature, May 1, 2009). It's the top performing students, not the average ones, who are going to lead the way in innovation.

And Obama makes a comment that is frequently parroted but very obviously doesn't hold up:

"We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation.”

One example that dispels this claim: I have good friends from the Netherlands who describe their school system to me this way: Students are tracked from middle school age into college-bound or vocational schools. In vocational school, they graduate at the end of the equivalent of our 10th grade – age 15 or 16 – with the equivalent of a high school diploma.

How can you compare our “graduation rate,” which requires a full 13 years in school, ending at age 17-18, with the graduation rate of a system that requires two fewer years in school? It’s a  bogus, unsound comparison.

And that’s just one country’s system – I haven’t studied this, but I’m told that European school systems vary all over the place in the number of years in school required to graduate from the equivalent of high school. This claim just doesn’t hold up in any way. President Obama!

Here’s what Bracey wrote about that claim on the Huffington Post:

Because test scores no longer work to prove American school failure, the statistic of choice to prove what a lousy job we're doing is the graduation rate. How dare those European and Asian nations have the audacity to recover from World War II!

The dropout rates across nations are, so far as I can tell, incomparable, since secondary school programs in other nations range from two to five years. In other nations, once students finish the equivalent of 8th grade, they are tracked into vocational, technical or precollege programs whereas American students go to comprehensive high schools ...

Bracey is a little flip in response to Obama's comment that "half of our students who begin college never finish." Our basic copy editor would, again, request that the writer provide a comparison to the equivalent information about other nations, but that was missing from the speech. Bracey's response:

I also don't know much about college completion rates in Europe, but do know that you can hang around as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris forever. Incidentally, you want a riot in Europe? Try imposing college tuition.

  And here’s another scary comment by Obama:

"Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education.”
 

Bracey explains  here  why the situation isn’t nearly as scary as Obama paints it.

I am not saying that our nation's school system isn't troubled and in need of plenty of improvement -- and neither are the commentators I'm quoting. But exaggerating the problems to the point of attacking our schools is not helpful. It distorts the picture and gives impetus to those who (despite the collapse of the right-wing free-market dream everywhere else) still aim to privatize American education. 

Needless to say, there are lots of rebuttals like Bracey’s, Somerby’s and this one hitting the Internet. Are any of these viewpoints (at least the solid rebuttals to bogus claims he presented as facts) reaching the President?