Here’s news of another report on student achievement that shows that, when you consider demographic factors, schools are not as bad as many want you to think.

This has direct application in Little Rock, as Superintendent Baker Kurrus made clear in a speech yesterday in Little Rock. When 20 percent of your student body is a special ed student or speaking English as a second language and 70 percent come from families poor enough to qualify for federal nutrition assistance, it is no wonder that they don’t perform on a par with schools stuffed with more advantaged students. Never mind homelessness, family dysfunctions and other very real factors in an urban school setting. From the New York Times:

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Americans scored more than halfway down from the top in the last round of the so-called PISA standardized tests in math, administered in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 15-year-olds in about 60 countries. They scored about a third of the way down in reading and almost halfway down in science.

The lackluster performance has reinforced a belief that American public education — the principals and teachers, the methods and procedures — is just not up to scratch. There must be something wrong when the system in the United States falls short where many others succeed.

But is the criticism fair? Are American schools failing because they are not good at their job? Perhaps their job is simply tougher.

In a report released last week, Martin Carnoy from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, Emma García from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and Tatiana Khavenson from the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools.

“Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,” Professor Carnoy told me. “We underrate our progress.”

Country to country, the U.S. doesn’t do so well. But:

Then the researchers divided students into groups depending on the number of books in their homes, a measure of the academic resources at families’ disposal. This adjustment significantly reduced the American deficit, especially among students on the bottom rungs of the resource ladder.

American students from families with the least educational resources, as it turned out, scored better on the PISA math test than similar children in France and about the same as Britons, Germans and Irish.

Encouragingly, disadvantaged American students have made more progress over recent years than those in even some of the highest-ranked countries.

 
This precisely the same finding I noted recently in another study of student test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard test given randomly across the country.

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When you adjust for poverty, race, native languge, special ed and other factors, states perceived as doing poorly leap up in the ranks. Arkansas was listed among the states doing better than understood. This is what is so dishonest about the Walton-paid lobbyist who holds up scores at all-black, all-poor Little Rock middle schools as a mark of failure (even when barely off sufficiency standards) against his majority white, majority middle class charter school.

I noticed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page sneered today at former Judge Marion Humphrey’s defense of Little Rock schools. How publisher Walter Hussman would have a clue — other than from sweeping generalizations about test scores undifferentiated for family circumstances — is anybody’s guess.

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The poorest kids desperately need the exposure to others. It’s a proven path to improvement. The Waltons prefer a path that walls off the presume deserving. If they succeed, we will, as Kurrus said, look around Little Rock and see Detroit. It will not be pretty.

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