Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them

6. Further Oxidization

Just as the education iron triangle benefits from lack of transparency about school expenditures and teacher salaries, so too does it draw strength from the perception that local schools are performing at an acceptable level.1 Americans do not have a false sense of complacency about the educational performance of the nation as a whole. They know that as many as one student in four fails to graduate from high school on the expected schedule. They also know that the performance of American students in key subjects like mathematics lags behind that of their peers in many other countries. When we ask respondents to rank the United States against other countries, the average estimate puts the United States in 19th place, not much above the official estimate provided by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which puts the United States somewhere between 22nd and 28th place among the countries it surveyed. Yet we have also shown (in chapter 4) that Americans tend to assign far higher grades to the public schools in their own community than to those of the nation. One potential explanation for this paradox is that despite having a solid understanding of the overall level of performance in the nation as a whole, Americans are misinformed about where their local schools rank within the national performance distribution. They may simply be unwilling to admit that the schools in their own community do not prepare students adequately for college or a career. Or perhaps they lack access to sources of information that would allow them to make an informed judgment on the matter, allowing hope to triumph over reality. The latter possibility deserves to be taken seriously. CHAP TER SIX Further Oxidization 75 Across all 50 states, schools operate under accountability programs that require districts to provide information to the public about the share of students who achieve at proficient levels on standardized tests in the core academic subjects of reading and math. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, however, each state is free to set its own proficiency standards. Many have set relatively low standards; few have set the bar high. In 2011, for example, Alabama reported that 77 percent of its eighth-grade students were proficient in math based on their performance on its state test. The same year, just 20 percent of Alabama’s eighth-graders met the standard of math proficiency set by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In other words, Alabama deemed many more of its students to be proficient than did NAEP. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has gone so far as to accuse states like Alabama of “lying to children and parents” by setting low expectations for student performance.2 And it is easy to imagine how the lenient standards that many states have adopted could encourage citizens to evaluate their schools more generously—or at least allow such generous evaluations to persist unchecked. All of that could change with the advent of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), an initiative of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers through which forty-six states have committed to adopt a common and more demanding set of expectations for student performance. Some education observers believe that CCSS will finally clarify for students, parents, and educators what high school graduates need to learn if they are to be prepared for college or a career. Others believe that CCSS interferes with local control of schools, limits teacher creativity, and diverts classroom time and energy from instruction to test preparation. While the teacher unions have officially endorsed the initiative, rank-and-file members have increasingly expressed displeasure with the changes. But as pundits and practitioners thrust and parry over these issues, they may be overlooking CCSS’s potential impact on public perceptions of school quality and public support for school reforms. If CCSS is fully implemented as proposed by its most ardent adherents, it can be expected to alter the information that Americans have about student performance in their local schools. Currently, the public has no national metric to guide its assessment of local school performance. At best, they can find out the percentage of students who are proficient 76 Further Oxidization according to state tests, which are typically undemanding. Were a common metric used to assess...