Children Aren't Learning

My pal Roland was back at school last week. He seemed really happy with his students this year, at least in terms of behavior. As far as their ability to learn the basic stuff from the syllabus... he usually says the kids in his inner city elementary school don't learn because of their situations at home. My parents encouraged me to do my homework and status was awarded in my house based, at least to some extent, on achievement in school. Many of his kids' have very different situations at home, including parents on drugs or in prison. according to a Businessweek report last week, a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Education Reform and National Security led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, former head of New York City public schools, concluded that the country’s “educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”

The U.S. isn't near the top of any international rankings for anything-- and the U.S. "produces some of the biggest gaps in test scores between stronger and weaker students," which, I suspect, means between students who come from wealthier households and students who come from poor households. If public education was supposed to be the great equalizer... well, that hasn't worked out.

So, where’s the group in the U.S. that could try harder? Is it the teachers, more concerned with their tenure and pension rights than actually teaching kids? Is it miserly federal and state lawmakers, starving their educators of resources? Or maybe it is the lackadaisical students, too addicted to questing with their avatar through World of Warcraft to think about algebra?

The answer, it turns out, is none of the above. If there’s a crisis in U.S. education, the fault lies with a group more accustomed to leveling blame than receiving it: parents.

...Around the world, the catch-all measure used to proxy for parental commitment to education is the number of books in a child‘s household. This measure predicts student educational outcomes better than class sizes, or expenditures per student, the length of the school day or better class monitoring. Hanushek and Woessman have found that among 27 rich countries, the United States sees one of the strongest relationships between parental book ownership and child learning outcomes. In the U.S., kids from homes where there are more than two full bookcases score two and a half grade levels higher than kids from homes with very few books..

You may have read this week that all 25,000 applicants to the University of Liberia failed the entrance exam. A 100% failure rate is pretty steep. But it isn't at odds with how badly education is failing in developing countries. Across the "third world," school enrollment is up-- but education is not.

There’s no single cause behind the learning crisis in developing-country schools. Students who are poorly nourished and come from homes without books or literate parents have a tougher time learning. Teachers who don’t turn up, don’t care to teach, or don’t understand the material are all too common. The lack of books and supplies makes the job of teaching a lot harder. But it isn’t just an issue of resources: From 2007 to 2011, India increased its per-student expenditure on elementary education by 80 percent while student learning outcomes were declining.

The author blames a lack of testing. Parents, he reasons, are not aware of how badly their children are doing, which makes it harder to improve the system. On the other hand, in the U.S., an overemphasis on testing makes it impossible to improve the system.