Education Bloggers, Stop Hiding the Truth (and other abuses of data)

Education Bloggers, Stop Hiding the Truth

Before you start reading, I want to make it very clear that I am not necessarily advocating large classes, 14-hour school days, over-testing, or a reduction in school funding.  I’m advocating for ethics and honesty in the reporting of educational research.

I normally don’t blog about topics like this, but I just can’t stand it anymore.  I’m sick of hearing “researchers” abusing data to bias readers like this.  What I’m talking about is people who write about education in other countries, typically Finland, Korea, and Poland.  They cherry pick the countries that follow their pet project and ignore the many examples of countries that do not.  Generally, these researchers use PISA scores.  They look at countries that performed better than the US on this test.  Then they find the ones that make their point for them and ignore the dozens of others that do not.

This recent example is what finally broke the camel’s back and got me to write about this.  Christine Gross-Loh wrote on the Huffington Post blog entitled Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?: “Children should spend less time in school. . . The Finnish model of education includes a late start to academics (children do not begin any formal academics until they are 7 years old), frequent breaks for outdoor time, shorter school hours and more variety of classes than in the US. . . American school children score in the middle of the heap on international measures of achievement, especially in science and mathematics. Finnish children, with their truncated time in school, frequently rank among the best in the world.” 

The big problem with this statement is that Korea is also near the top of the list every year (in fact, much higher than Finland in math and reading in the most recent rankings) and here is how the BBC summarizes the school day of a Korean student, “She rises at 6.30am, is at school by 8am, finishes at 4pm, (or 5pm if she has a club), then pops back home to eat. She then takes a bus to her second school shift of the day, at a private crammer or hagwon, where she has lessons from 6pm until 9pm. She spends another two hours in what she calls self-study back at school, before arriving home after 11pm.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25187993

Shanghai, China ranked first place in all 3 categories of the PISA test (math, reading, and science).  Here is how Emma Vanbergen, a Shanghai-based study abroad director describes education in Shanghai, “They spend all their time on nothing but study, revision, homework, ‘pre-study’, learning test techniques, and taking practice papers. Evenings, weekends, and even holidays are jam-packed with one activity after another with this sole aim in mind.”

It was very convenient of Gross-Loh to ignore these two examples, including the #1 country in the world in PISA scores to support her personal belief that we spend too much time in school. 

But, she’s not the only one.  Here, The Daily Riff (and many, many others) use Finland data to try to make the point that the US relies too heavily on standardized tests, “The Finns seem to do exactly opposite the growing U.S. education agenda: Finland does not give their kids standardized tests.”  But The Daily Riff completely ignores Poland who scored far higher than the United States on all the tests (22 places higher in math (out of 34 countries), 8 places higher in reading, and 13 places higher in science).  Poland relies heavily on annual standardized tests as well as graduation exams.  In fact, in the book, “The Smartest Kids in the World and How they Got That Way,” the director of education in Poland says that standardized tests helped them close the gaps between poor students and affluent students.  “The Poles couldn’t know it yet, but this kind of targeted standardized testing would prove to be critical in any country with significant poverty, according to a PISA analysis that would come out years later. Around the world, school systems that used regular standardized tests tended to be fairer places, with smaller gaps between what rich and poor kids knew. Even in the United States, where tests have historically lacked rigor and purpose, African-American and Hispanic students’ reading and math scores have gone up during the era of widespread standardized testing.”  How convenient that The Daily Riff chose to ignore Poland in their analysis. 

Diane Ravitch loves to blame our educational problems on poverty.  Here, she publishes the writing of Daniel Wydo who decided to compare the results of US schools with less than 10% poverty to average scores from other countries.  http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/05/daniel-wydo-disaggregates-pisa-scores-by-income/  What???  Why would he compare our affluent schools to average schools in other countries . . . to support his bias (and Ravitch’s as well) that poverty is what determines a students’ fate despite millions of examples to the contrary.  In Poland, 1 in 6 students lives in poverty whereas in the U.S. the number is 1 in 5.  And as you saw, Poland outperforms us in every PISA category.  How convenient of Diane Ravitch to ignore Poland. 

A better way to make the comparison would be to compare students of poverty in the US to students of poverty in other countries.  Here’s a summary of those results, “Our poorest kids did even worse, relatively speaking, coming in twenty-seventh compared to the poorest kids in other developed countries, far below the most disadvantaged kids in Estonia, Finland, Korea, Canada, and Poland, among many other nations.”  We did EVEN WORSE when comparing our poor kids to the poor kids in other countries!  Hmm . . . Diane???   Whether you look at a country with a similar poverty rate or compare poor students directly, Poland outperforms us.

Others like to blame our low test scores on our large class sizes.  First of all, our average class sizes are below the OECD average and so is our performance.  China’s average elementary class size is over 50!  But Finland’s class sizes are below 20.  Of course those who are promoting a reduction in class size point to Finland and not China, both of whom score far higher than the U.S. on international exams. (http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-does-class-size-vary-around-world.html)

Here’s what classsizematters.org (obvious which side of the issue they fall on) has to say about class size, “Finland is consistently among the developed nations’ achievers on the international assessments called the PISAs. In 2009, the nation scored 3^rd in reading, 6th in math and 2^nd in science. Finland also has some of the smallest class sizes among the OECD nations, averaging 21 or less in all grades.”   Hmm . . . no mention of China.  How convenient!

Another similar argument is to increase spending on education.  When OECD plotted per pupil spending versus PISA scores, there are 18 countries who spend less per student than the U.S. but score higher than we do.  There are only 6 who spend less than us and score lower than us.  Nobody spends more than us.  http://www.supportingevidence.com/Education/PISA_Test_scores_vs_cum_edu_spend_by_country.html  There is no evidence that per pupil spending is related to PISA test scores. 

Educational bloggers, this message is straight out to you.  Stop twisting the data to support your pre-determined conclusions.  Do the work, do the research, be honest, and be fair.  If we are going to improve anything, first we have to be honest with the data.