New Report Says America’s Lack of Attention to International Education Studies Has Impeded Student Improvement
While other developed nations benefit by regularly comparing, or “benchmarking,” their educational performance and practices against each other, the United States largely ignores the world’s useful lessons in improving education, according to a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, DC nonprofit policy organization advocating high school reform. The report also provides recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education for immediately increasing participation in international comparisons that could boost student performance.
Short Sighted: How America’s Lack of Attention to International Education Studies Impedes Improvement notes that overall U.S. student performance on international comparisons is poor and continues to decline, emphasizing the urgency for the United States to examine what it could learn from other countries. For example, in the 1960s, the United States produced the highest high school completion rates among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member nations, but by 2005, it slipped to eighteenth out of twenty-three OECD member nations with available data. And in college graduation rates, America has fallen from second to fifteenth since 1995.
“U.S. Olympic teams don’t ignore the gains made by their competitors;” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, “nor can the United States ignore international education gains. In a world where our nation’s ability to continue winning the global economic competition is so closely tied to the educational preparation of our citizens, the United States cannot afford to bury its head in the sand and ignore the innovations in education that occur outside of its borders.
“The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), developed by the world’s thirty most developed countries, is a respected tool for policymakers at all levels to learn from the highest-performing nations,” Wise continued. “For the last several years, the United States’ failure to take full advantage of PISA’s many lessons may well result in lost opportunities to improve student performance.”
In 2003, American fifteen-year-olds ranked nineteenth out of twenty-nine OECD member nations in science. On the most recent test, in 2006, Americans dropped to twenty-first. A similar trend is evident in mathematics, where fifteen-year-olds in the United States ranked twenty-third in 2003 but slipped to twenty-fifth out of thirty OECD member nations by 2006.
“Americans have a right to know how U.S. students stack up compared to their international peers and must demand that their political leaders take immediate action,” Wise said. “But the American public has been largely left in the dark about lackluster American performance on PISA and other international comparisons over the last few years. Now that President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have called for higher educational standards that reflect international demands, there is a wonderful opportunity to shine a spotlight on this issue and bring it to the forefront of the educational debate.”
The brief offers six recommendations for how the U.S. Department of Education (ED) can boost the nation’s involvement in international benchmarking and increase the visibility of American students’ performance. Specifically, ED should:
• immediately undertake a comprehensive analysis that (a) reviews its current policies and participation in international comparisons, (b) lists the ongoing international educational studies that have numerous nations’ involvement, (c) evaluates the possible benefits of participating for each study, and (d) prepares recommendations for Secretary Arne Duncan about what changes should be made;
• immediately create an advisory group that reviews current participation in international comparisons and submit recommendations to Secretary Duncan and the Institute for Education Sciences about future participation;
• commit to full U.S. participation in all major international benchmarking opportunities, including the OECD’s future education studies;
• consult with the OECD, the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers on how best to provide opportunities for states to participate in future OECD studies;
• work with the OECD to ensure that administrative errors do not compromise the release of future PISA results; and
• consult with organizations in fields such as education and business to create an ongoing public awareness and interest in the importance of international education comparisons.
• The brief also envisions a larger role for the U.S. Congress in the international benchmarking process and the performance of American students. It calls on Congress to:
• appropriate the full amounts necessary to participate fully in the PISA benchmarking and evaluation process as well as other relevant international benchmarking studies; and
• conduct periodic oversight hearings regarding the nation’s international education performance, efforts underway to learn from other nations’ success, and actual application of international practices that could benefit education in the United States.
Short Sighted: How America’s Lack of Attention to International Education Studies Impedes Improvement is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/shortsighted.pdf.
New Brief On Federal High School Graduation Rate Policy
The Alliance for Excellent Education has released a new brief that describes how federal policy has progressed from early attempts to simply calculate an agreed-upon high school graduation rate to present-day efforts aimed at using commonly defined rates as part of a refined accountability system to drive school improvement. The brief, Every Student Counts: The Role of Federal Policy in Improving Graduation Rate Accountability, also includes a national and state-by-state analysis of the impact of the graduation rate regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Education in October 2008.
“Because more states are doing a better job of measuring high school graduation rates, they’re beginning to discover that not as many students are receiving their diploma as they originally thought,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “But simply identifying the problem isn’t enough. If I go to the doctor and leave with a diagnosis but no medicine, I’m not going to see any improvement. Today, the medicine that states and high schools need is to be held accountable for improving graduation rates. And if more states make graduation rates an essential component of their accountability systems, it will trigger attention and resources to low-performing high schools and lead to improved outcomes for students.”
To help make graduation rates more useful in identifying and intervening in low-performing high schools, the brief, which was made possible through the support of the AT&T Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, makes the following recommendations to the federal government:
• Require consistent and accurate calculations of graduation rates based on data that can follow students through their high school career to ensure comparability;
• Include aggressive, attainable, and uniform requirements on how much schools, districts, and states should improve their graduation rates each year as part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) determinations to ensure a minimum, consistent increase in graduation rates, as is currently required for test scores;
• As opposed to current law, which holds schools accountable for test scores but not graduation rates, give equal weight to graduation rates and test scores in AYP determinations so that schools have balanced incentives, both to ensure that their students graduate and to raise test scores, instead of doing one at the expense of the other;
• Require graduation rates to be broken down by student subgroups (race, ethnicity, income, etc.) for reporting and accountability purposes to ensure that school improvement activities focus on all students and close achievement gaps.
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The Every Student Counts Act (ESCA), which was introduced on March 17 in the U.S. Senate by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), would create a graduation rate calculation that is consistent across states, require reporting of subgroup graduation rates, set meaningful graduation rate goals and targets, and remove incentives for schools to push out low-performing and at-risk students. (More information on ESCA is available at http://www.all4ed.org/federal_policy/legislative_updates/ESCA).
“Great progress has been made in the last few years as researchers, advocates, and state leaders have worked to improve the way graduation rates are calculated,” Wise said. “And although the recent regulations from the U.S. Department of Education are a good next step, it is important to ensure that high school accountability includes high school graduation rates. Doing so is necessary to move beyond merely calculating and reporting graduation rates to improving them and ensuring that all students graduate with an education that prepares them for life after high school. I commend Senator Harkin and Representative Scott for introducing the Every Student Counts Act, which, if enacted, would bring this goal closer to a reality.
The state briefs that accompany the national brief examine the impact that the new graduation rate regulations will have on each individual state while also highlighting the policy concerns and hurdles that are unique to that state and must still be addressed.
Every Student Counts: The Role of Federal Policy in Improving Graduation Rate Accountability can be found at http://www.all4ed.org/files/ESC_FedPolicyGRA.pdf.
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