My primary mentor, David Berliner (Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU)) wrote, yesterday, a blog post for the Equity Alliance Blog (also at ASU) on “The Purported Failure of America’s Schools, and Ways to Make Them Better” (click here to access the original blog post). See other posts about David’s scholarship on this blog here, here, and here. See also one of our best blog posts that David also wrote here, about “Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs).”

In sum, for many years David has been writing “about the lies told about the poor performance of our students and the failure of our schools and teachers.” For example, he wrote one of the education profession’s all time classics and best sellers: The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools (1995). If you have not read it, you should! All educators should read this book, on that note and in my opinion, but also in the opinion of many other iconic educational scholars throughout the U.S. (Paufler, Amrein-Beardsley, Hobson, under revision for publication).

While the title of this book accurately captures its contents, more specifically it “debunks the myths that test scores in America’s schools are falling, that illiteracy is rising, and that better funding has no benefit. It shares the good news about public education.” I’ve found the contents of this book to still be my best defense when others with whom I interact attack America’s public schools, as often misinformed and perpetuated by many American politicians and journalists.

In this blog post David, once again, debunks many of these myths surrounding America’s public schools using more up-to-date data from international tests, our country’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), state-level SAT and ACT scores, and the like. He reminds us of how student characteristics “strongly influence the [test] scores obtained by the students” at any school and, accordingly, “strongly influence” or bias these scores when used in any aggregate form (e.g., to hold teachers, schools, districts, and states accountable for their students’ performance).

He reminds us that “in the US, wealthy children attending public schools that serve the wealthy are competitive with any nation in the world…[but in]…schools in which low-income students do not achieve well, [that are not competitive with many nations in the world] we find the common correlates of poverty: low birth weight in the neighborhood, higher than average rates of teen and single parenthood, residential mobility, absenteeism, crime, and students in need of special education or English language instruction.” These societal factors explain poor performance much more (i.e., more variance explained) than any school-level, and as pertinent to this blog, teacher-level factor (e.g., teacher quality as measured by large-scale standardized test scores).

In this post David reminds us of much, much more, that we need to remember and also often recall in defense of our public schools and in support of our schools’ futures (e.g., research-based notes to help “fix” some of our public schools).

Again, please do visit the original blog post here to read more.