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Careful examination discloses that disadvantaged students have made spectacular progress in the last generation, in regular public schools, with ordinary teachers. Not only have regular public schools not been "the great discriminator" - they continue to make remarkable gains for minority children at a time when our increasingly unequal social and economic systems seem determined to abandon them.

"A few days ago, CNN interviewed former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee about American education. Rhee, predictably, said that American education is terrible, that test scores are flat, and that we are way behind other nations on international tests. I disagree with Rhee. She constantly bashes American education, which is one of the pillars of our democratic society. Our public schools educate 90% of the population, and we should give the public schools some of the credit for our nation's accomplishments as the largest economy and the greatest engine of technological innovation in the world. It's time to set the record straight."

Gene Lyons wrote a recent column noting that students have been making steady progress on standardized tests over the past few decades

The United States has 50 distinct states, which means there are 50 distinct definitions of "proficient" on standardized tests for students.

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In the 2010 PEPG report, "U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective," the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics. The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself. This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement. That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that could be repeated.

If you follow education research - or quantitative work in any field - you'll often hear the term "significant effect." For example, you will frequently read research papers saying that a given intervention, such as charter school attendance or participation in a tutoring program, had "significant effects," positive or negative, on achievement outcomes. This term by itself is usually sufficient to get people who support the policy in question extremely excited, and to compel them to announce boldly that their policy "works." They're often overinterpreting the results, but there's a good reason for this. The problem is that "significant effect" is a statistical term, and it doesn't always mean what it appears to mean. As most people understand the words, "significant effects" are often neither significant nor necessarily effects. Let's very quickly clear this up, one word at a time, working backwards.