Shanker Blog

The Educational Attainment Of Girls And Boys: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Last month, Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl, was shot in the head, in an attempted assassination by Taliban militants. Her “crime” was daring to advocate for girls’ education. In a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof observes that we in the West find it “easy to dismiss such incidents as distant barbarities," and uses the example of sex trafficking to illustrate that we “have a blind spot for our own injustices." I agree. However, I am not sure we need to go so far to find domestic injustices.

How about a close look within this very area: The education of girls (and boys) in the U.S.? Stories about how girls have surpassed boys in educational attainment have become common, and are often linked to statements about how boys are forgotten and/or lost. This rhetoric is troubling for several reasons. First, it can be read to imply a zero-sum equation; that is, that the educational advancement of girls is the cause of boys’ educational neglect. Second, stories about girls’ “successes” and boys’ “failures” may obscure more than they reveal.

There are the "lost boys" of higher education and the "missing girls" of STEM. We worry about boys and reading and girls and math. Recurring questions include where are the women in technology? Or, are there enough novels that cater to boys? Women have sailed past men in obtaining college degrees but, importantly, continue to concentrate in different fields and need Ph.D.s to match men with bachelor’s in the workplace.

When issues are addressed in this fragmented manner, it’s hard to tell if it’s girls or boys that we should be worrying about. Well, both and neither. What all these pieces of the puzzle really say is that – at least in this day, age, and nation – gender still matters.

New Books For The Youngest Victims Of Hurricane Sandy

Citizens across the United States have been deeply moved by the scenes of devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. At the Albert Shanker Institute, we offer our condolences to those who have lost loved ones, and to the thousands upon thousands who have lost their homes.

Educators and those who care about our public schools can make a special contribution to the recovery efforts. One of the great losses in the flooding that came with Hurricane Sandy was books. The Albert Shanker Institute is partnering with the organization First Book in a drive to replenish school, classroom, and home libraries that were destroyed. We are asking our friends and fellow educators to join in this campaign: your help will ensure that children in need will have new books -- stories at bedtime, the chance to be transported to another world, and the opportunity to return to normalcy.

As a result of contributions from the Albert Shanker Institute, the AFT, and other First Book partners, your contribution to this drive will be matched, dollar for dollar.

Annual Measurable Objections

As states’ continue to finalize their applications for ESEA/NCLB “flexibility” (or “waivers”), controversy has arisen in some places over how these plans set proficiency goals, both overall and for demographic subgroups (see our previous post about the situation in Virginia).

One of the underlying rationales for allowing states to establish new targets (called “annual measurable objectives," or AMOs) is that the “100 percent” proficiency goals of NCLB were unrealistic. Accordingly, some (but not all) of the new plans have set 2017-18 absolute proficiency goals that are considerably below 100 percent, and/or lower for some subgroups relative to others. This shift has generated pushback from advocates, most recently in Florida, who believe that lowering state targets is tantamount to encouraging or accepting failure.

I acknowledge the central role of goals in any accountability system, but I would like to humbly suggest that this controversy, over where and how states set proficiency targets for 2017-18, may be misguided. There are four reasons why I think this is the case (and one silver lining if it is).

The Structural Curve In Indiana's New School Grading System

The State of Indiana has received a great deal of attention for its education reform efforts, and they recently announced the details, as well as the first round of results, of their new "A-F" school grading system. As in many other states, for elementary and middle schools, the grades are based entirely on math and reading test scores.

It is probably the most rudimentary scoring system I've seen yet - almost painfully so. Such simplicity carries both potential advantages (easier for stakeholders to understand) and disadvantages (school performance is complex and not always amenable to rudimentary calculation).

In addition, unlike the other systems that I have reviewed here, this one does not rely on explicit “weights," (i.e., specific percentages are not assigned to each component). Rather, there’s a rubric that combines absolute performance (passage rates) and proportions drawn from growth models (a few other states use similar schemes, but I haven't reviewed any of them).

On the whole, though, it's a somewhat simplistic variation on the general approach most other states are taking -- but with a few twists.

Surveying The Teacher Opinion Landscape

I’m a big fan of surveys of teachers’ opinions of education policy, not only because of educators' valuable policy-relevant knowledge, but also because their views are sometimes misrepresented or disregarded in our public discourse.

For instance, the diverse set of ideas that might be loosely characterized as “market-based reform” faces a bit of tension when it comes to teacher support. Without question, some teachers support the more controversial market-based policy ideas, such as pay and evaluations based substantially on test scores, but most do not. The relatively low levels of teacher endorsement don’t necessarily mean these ideas are “bad," and much of the disagreement is less about the desirability of general policies (e.g., new teacher evaluations) than the specifics (e.g., the measures that comprise those evaluations). In any case, it's a somewhat awkward juxtaposition: A focus on “respecting and elevating the teaching profession” by means of policies that most teachers do not like.

Sometimes (albeit too infrequently) this tension is discussed meaningfully, other times it is obscured - e.g., by attempts to portray teachers' disagreement as "union opposition." But, as mentioned above, teachers are not a monolith and their opinions can and do change (see here). This is, in my view, a situation always worth monitoring, so I thought I’d take a look at a recent report from the organization Teach Plus, which presents data from a survey that they collected themselves.

Voter Suppression: An American Political Tradition

In her new book, The Politics of Voter Suppression Defending and Expanding Americans' Right to Vote, Tova Andrea Wang tells readers that voter suppression is one of our nation’s political “traditions," arguing that the U.S. has “an election system that’s exquisitely designed for low rates of participation."

And Wang has reason to know – a fellow at Demos and The Century Foundation, she worked as a consultant to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission established by Congress in the aftermath of the “2000 Florida election debacle”. Mandated “by law to study voter fraud and intimidation," the commission hired bipartisan consultants and charged them with investigating both and writing a draft report. According to this 2007 article by Wang, little evidence of fraud was found, but there was lots of evidence of persistent intimidation – findings that were later turned on their head by the political interplay of Congress and George Bush’s Justice Department.

So, it’s not really a huge surprise to find that a big story in the 2012 election cycle is “voter suppression” – meaning attempts to intimidate and deny the franchise to citizens who are legally eligible to vote – presented under the guise of a defense against virtually nonexistent incidents of voter fraud.

Who Has Confidence In U.S. Schools?

For many years, national survey and polling data have shown that Americans tend to like their own local schools, but are considerably less sanguine about the nation’s education system as a whole. This somewhat paradoxical finding – in which most people seem to think the problem is with “other people’s schools” – is difficult to interpret, especially since it seems to vary a bit when people are given basic information about schools, such as funding levels.

In any case, I couldn’t resist taking a very quick, superficial look at how people’s views of education vary by important characteristics, such as age and education. I used the General Social Survey (pooled 2006-2010), which queries respondents about their confidence in education, asking them to specify whether they have “hardly any," “only some” or “a great deal” of confidence in the system.*

This question doesn’t differentiate explicitly between respondents’ local schools and the system as a whole, and respondents may consider different factors when assessing their confidence, but I think it’s a decent measure of their disposition toward the education system.

The Data-Driven Education Movement

** Also reprinted here in the Washington Post

In the education community, many proclaim themselves to be "completely data-driven." Data Driven Decision Making (DDDM) has been a buzz phrase for a while now, and continues to be a badge many wear with pride. And yet, every time I hear it, I cringe.

Let me explain. During my first year in graduate school, I was taught that excessive attention to quantitative data impedes – rather than aids – in-depth understanding of social phenomena. In other words, explanations cannot simply be cranked out of statistical analyses, without the need for a precursor theory of some kind – a.k.a. “variable sociology” – and the attempt to do so constitutes a major obstacle to the advancement of knowledge.

I am no longer in graduate school, so part of me says: Okay, I know what data-driven means in education. But then, at times, I still think: No, really, what does “data-driven” mean even in this context?

Which State Has "The Best Schools?"

** Reprinted here in the Washington Post

I’ve written many times about how absolute performance levels – how highly students score – are not by themselves valid indicators of school quality, since, most basically, they don’t account for the fact that students enter the schooling system at different levels. One of the most blatant (and common) manifestations of this mistake is when people use NAEP results to determine the quality of a state's schools.

For instance, you’ll often hear that Massachusetts has the “best” schools in the U.S. and Mississippi the “worst," with both claims based solely on average scores on the NAEP (though, technically, Massachusetts public school students' scores are statistically tied with at least one other state on two of the four main NAEP exams, while Mississippi's rankings vary a bit by grade/subject, and its scores are also not statistically different from several other states').

But we all know that these two states are very different in terms of basic characteristics such as income, parental education, etc. Any assessment of educational quality, whether at the state or local level, is necessarily complicated, and ignoring differences between students precludes any meaningful comparisons of school effectiveness. Schooling quality is important, but it cannot be assessed by sorting and ranking raw test scores in a spreadsheet.

College Attainment In The U.S. And Around The World

A common talking point in circles in that college attainment in the U.S. used to be among the highest in the world, but is now ranked middling-to-low (the ranking cited is typically around 15th) among OECD nations. As is the case when people cite rankings on the PISA assessment, this is often meant to imply that the U.S. education system is failing and getting worse.*

The latter arguments are of course oversimplifications, given that college attendance and completion are complex phenomena that entail many factors, school and non-school. A full discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this post - obviously, the causes and “value” of a postsecondary education vary within and between nations, and are subject to all the usual limitations inherent in international comparisons.

That said, let's just take a very quick. surface-level look at the latest OECD figures for college attainment (“tertiary education," meaning associate-level, bachelor's or advanced degree), which have recently been released for 2010.