Poverty and PISA

So it's the first Saturday morning that I've had off in more than a month, and, like Mr. Scott in The Trouble With Tribbles (about 6:15 minutes in), I'm relaxing by catching up on my journal reading. Education Week had a link to Diane Ravitch's blog post about the US's apparently slipping standings in the global education pennant race, and it stirred up memories of how the German press reacted to PISA results when I lived there.

The mainstream media coverage of the Program for International Student Assessment, as I experienced it in Berlin in the 1990s and Bavaria in the early 2000's, makes more of the fact that there's a gulf between rich and poor German students. But it does so with twists that reflect the centuries of cultural development dividing modern Germany's "states," or Laender (plural of Land). For instance, in Berlin - by far Germany's most diverse city, and a Land in and of itself - public officials were whipping up hysteria about Germany's educational future just as they are here in the USA, in my humble opinion with the same underlying goal of alarming and thus appealing to voters at higher middle income levels.

 But the PISA results in the early 2000's, after I had moved to Bavaria (Germany's least diverse, most conservative, biggest geographically and wealthiest Land), elicited a kind of smugness that I found typical of many people there: "If Bavaria was a European nation, and not just a Land in Germany, we'd be in the top five among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) states."

Ravitch makes the point that US schools with a low proportion of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch rank first in the world in Science and Reading and fifth in Math (well ahead of Finland on all counts, to the possible chagrin of Monty Python music fans). Schools with higher proportions of poor students skew the overall average, just as they do here in Ohio and back in Germany: Berlin schools are dealing with the same kinds of challenges as the school at which I am now teaching (27% lower income students), while Bavaria is more like where I student taught (11% lower income students). No place in Germany, as far as I know, is anything like the Cleveland municipal school where I did my first field experience (97% free or reduced price lunch).

The class I'm teaching now, which is an enhanced study hall for students with GPA's of 2.0 or lower (I'm working with an elective curriculum of study skills, time management, executive functioning, etc.), is incredibly well-supported by my school's administration. My only job is to help these kids bring up their achievement in all their subjects, and I have received everything I need to help me do my job. The students are homeless, have dying parents, are new to the district, variously diagnosed, and overwhelmingly African American; they need tutors, conferences with teachers, therapy, and Internet access - and they get it all. But what they really need, in order to do well in this fairly middle-class school, is a thoroughly middle class past.

Yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my classroom about whether or not one of my students has to pay for lunch. With slightly widened eyes and an air of barely stiffened nonchalance, she shrugged, "No." The millions of American students like her are what make the American education system seem second- or even third-rate by global standards. But in my eyes, she is the reason why public education is now seen as a global good - and she proves that a US public education can still be considered among the greatest in the world: as the "scissor opens wider" (the idiom Germans use to denote the growing gap between income haves and have-nots) here in the US, our ability as educators to keep pace with countries that have much more economically homogeneous student bodies is still cause for celebration.