The education reform movement has long painted a gloomy picture of how American kids perform on international tests and on our own “gold standard” of testing, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The standard story is this: we once ruled the world in education, but we’ve been in decline and we’re falling further behind. At best, our test scores have been flat for decades while the rest of the world is catching up fast.

The degree to which these tests actually measure learning, or are at least based on a theory of learning, is very much open to debate.  But if we’re going to use these tests, let’s report what the data actually say. Kids are doing extraordinarily better on these tests, especially in math, than they did in decades past. I said so in this story for the Akron Beacon Journal.  The NAEP scores of all students have improved dramatically, but the scores for black and Hispanic students are still too low. Usually we hear about the low scores without hearing about the improvement. We need to hold both things in mind at the same time, especially when so-called reformers are eager to privatize education in order to save it.

Bob Somerby, author of The Daily Howler, blogs with mordant humor bordering on despair about the mainstream press corps’ failure to inform our national political discussion. I started reading Somerby, who once taught in the Baltimore schools,  a few years ago because I liked his analysis of education coverage. He’s been especially critical of how test scores get reported.

Bob’s post today at the Howler has the relevant data from international tests. You may be surprised to learn that on the 2009 PISA, U.S. kids on average scored higher in reading than the U.K., France and Germany (though yes, Korea, Finland and Canada scored higher). If you disaggregate those scores by race, American white students are third behind Korea and Finland, slightly better than Canada. However,  U.S. Hispanic students score a little higher than Turkey and U.S. black students are closer to Mexico at the bottom of the list.

Read the whole thing. Somerby paints a complicated picture that shows that we have an astonishing degree of variability in our schools, which appears to be driven by race and class.  That variability gets lost in an average score. He raises a good question about the Common Core, which imposes new, tougher uniform standards in 45 states that have signed on to get federal money through President Obama’s Race to the Top competition. If students can’t meet the standards we have now, will they meet the higher standards because we all will have higher expectations for them? Doesn’t that sound like magical thinking?

Congratulations to Gigi Luk of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is among the new class of postdoctoral fellows recently selected by the National Academy of Education. She will receive $55,000 for an academic year of research. Luk studies how speaking more than one language improves brain function in other areas such as attention and executive control in typically developing children. She is now interested in how billingualism affects children with learning disabilities. Here’s the National Academy of Education’s description of her research goals:

Bilingualism and Reading Difficulty: An Interaction Between Life Experience and Reading Development
Being bilingual may confer cognitive advantages beyond communicative purposes. Research has shown bilinguals outperform monolingual peers on tasks assessing executive functions, a set of skills critical for efficient goal-oriented control of attention and other cognitive resources. Simultaneously, bilingual toddlers and elementary school children’s single language proficiency is often found to be inferior to their monolingual peers. These seemingly contradictory consequences of bilingual experience have been studied extensively in typically developing children. However, it is unclear whether the cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism also apply to atypically developing populations, particularly those who have reading difficulty. If the experience of managing two languages enhances executive functions skills, then bilinguals with reading difficulty may enjoy compensatory cognitive benefits in processes relating to reading from their bilingual experience. Alternatively, bilingualism may be a cognitive burden and further hinder reading development for struggling readers.

Previous research has examined the roles of Spanish and English representations in short-term memory, visual-spatial and language memory in English Language Learners who speak Spanish as the first language and are learning English as a second language. However, little education research has been conducted on bilingual children who are functional bilinguals and speak a non-Spanish language in addition to English. To complement prior research focusing on English Language Learners, this project will involve bilingual children who are fluent in two alphabetic languages and report using both languages on a daily basis, similar to those who have been reported to show cognitive advantages in previous research.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has an interesting post about a study showing that middle school students remembered the information in a text about Galileo or Marie Curie significantly better if the information was presented in the form of a personal story about the scientist’s struggles rather than the typical textbook expository style. We professional storytellers, especially science journalists, have long believed that was the case.

You don’t have to think of narrative just as the story of an individual or group of people; you can think more abstractly conflict, complications, and the eventual resolution of conflict as the core of narrative structure.
I prefer to think of narrative in this broader sense because it is more flexible, and gives teachers more options, and also better captures the aspects of narrative structure that I suspect are behind the advantage conferred.