Some teachers are blaming the lackluster economy for stalling educational progress, but the economy is not to blame, argue Michael Petrilli and Brandon Wright in a new Education Next feature.
“Where reform critics get it wrong is when they claim that America’s average scores are dragged down by the particularly poor performance of low-income students, or that the advantaged kids are doing just fine,” Petrilli and Wright write. “That is objectively untrue. And its scores are not dragged down by an unusually high proportion of poor students, as measures of absolute poverty find the U.S. not to be an outlier at all.”
Petrilli is president of the conservative Fordham Institute. Wright also works at the Fordham Institute, as managing editor.
American students are regressing in math and reading, according to data released last week on the Nation’s Report Card. Only four in 10 fourth graders, and three in 10 eighth graders, are proficient in math. In reading, about one in three students are proficient in both the fourth and eighth grade.
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Petrilli and Wright acknowledge that students living in poverty have a more difficult time learning. Some of this is caused by attending worse schools, but home-life is also an important factor. “Poverty is also associated with higher rates of alcoholism and other substance abuse in the home; greater incidence of child abuse and neglect; and heightened family involvement in the criminal justice system,” say Petrilli and Wright.
Still, poverty alone doesn’t explain the nation’s stalling educational progress. “There is no evidence that disadvantaged students in the United States are underperforming other countries’ disadvantaged students,” Petrilli and Wright say. “If anything, it is the ‘advantaged’ U.S. students (those whose parents have a high level of education) who are falling short in international comparisons.”
That argument, combined with data that show the United States has a relatively normal level of absolute poverty, means that poverty alone doesn’t explain stalling educational progress. “Using absolute poverty rates — which are related to student achievement within the U.S. — we see that the proportion of Americans who are poor is quite typical by international standards,” Petrilli and Wright say.
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Fixing the economy is important for plenty of reasons, but it doesn’t appear it can fix America’s education problems too.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
