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"As I've pointed out over, and over and over again on this blog, NY State maintains one of the least equitable educational systems in the nation."

"The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being made responsible for a school's low academic performance is a recent phenomenon. Historically, policy elites and educators explained poor academic performance of groups and individual students by pointing to ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, immigrants' cultures, family deficits, and students' lack of effort. School leaders would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Until the past quarter-century, demography as destiny was the dominant explanation for unequal school outcomes. Things began to change by the mid-1970s."

"Once upon a time, our society decided that all children should be educated through 12th grade at public expense. But completion of 12th grade does not mean what it once did. If that is so, does our society not need to adjust its ambitions and make college as accessible an element of public education as completion of high school used to be? We need to attend not only to post-12th grade educational opportunities, but also to preschool programs of the kind that President Obama endorsed in his inaugural address in January. This is the only way we can begin to move toward genuine equality of opportunity. Without that emphasis, K-3 students from low-income families start their education with an often crippling educational deficit. This is not fanciful rhetoric; it is well-established fact: Know how to read by the end of third grade, and your prospects are bright; don't know, and you are doomed."

"Okay, it's not entirely surprising to find mind-boggling ignorance conveyed in the editorial pages of the New York Post. Today's example comes to us in an Op-Ed written in response to a report released by the Alliance for Quality Education. Usually, I'd just let it pass. It's the Post after all. But, for two important reasons I just had to address this one.  First, the editorial was written by a member of the Governor's Education Reform Commission.  Second, the editorial made use of our School Funding Fairness report to make its most absurd claim. "

"Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer. What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."

The results of the Gifted and Talented exams are in, and according to the NY Times, more than half of the children tested in wealthier districts like District 2 and District 3 were found to be "gifted", while only six children made the grade in District 7 in the South Bronx.  Why the disparity? Are these tests merely a way of sorting children by race and class, as Debbie Meier pointed out in 2007, when Klein first proposed to base all admissions to gifted programs on the basis of high stakes exams, or do the results really reflect children's inherent abilities?  And does the proliferation of G and T programs across the city help or hinder the goal of equity and systemic reform?

There is much handwringing about low educational attainment in the United States these days. We hear constantly about U.S. rankings on assessments like the international PISA tests: The United States was 14th in reading, 21st in science, 25th in math in 2009, for example. We hear about how young children in high-poverty areas are entering kindergarten unprepared and far behind many of their classmates. Middle school students from low-income families are scoring, on average, far below the proficient levels that would enable them to graduate high school, go to college, and get good jobs. Fewer than half of high school students manage to graduate from some urban schools. And too many poor and minority students who do go on to college require substantial remediation and drop out before gaining a degree. There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns.

A new report by the Schott Foundation documents policies and practices of the New York City Department of Education that create and reinforce unequal opportunities to learn ("A Rotting Apple"). It maintains that what is taking place in the nation's largest school district amounts to no less than education redlining because the census tract in which students live determines the quality of education they receive. It's a provocative argument. But there's another side of the story that needs to be told. In an ideal world, there would be equal opportunities to learn by all students regardless of the location of their residence. The only country that has come close to that educational Eden is Finland. That's because differences in income are modest. The U.S. is the antithesis. The yawning gap between family incomes explains why.

A review by William J. Mathis of Something in Common: The Common Core State Standards by Robert Rothman.

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

This was written by John Kuhn, the superintendent of a small public school district in Texas.

I think it's bad for society for such disparities, although they are hardly new. But they were always bad for the general welfare and health of the rest of the people. But, offended as I am, I'm more concerned about the fact that it makes democracy, in any serious sense, virtually impossible. Because money comes with power-the more money, the more power. A society ruled by laws is a farce when some must defend themselves with a court-appointed attorney and others ... .

As discussed in a previous post, roughly half of Americans believe that government should take some active role in reducing income differences between rich and poor, though, as one would expect, this view is less prevalent among Republicans, more educated and higher earning survey respondents. These data, however, lack a frame of reference. That is, they don't tell us whether American support for government redistribution is "high" or "low" compared with that in other nations. The conventional wisdom in this area is that Americans generally prefer a more limited government, especially when it comes to things like income redistribution. It might therefore be interesting to take a quick look at how the U.S. stacks up against other nations in terms of these redistributive preferences.

As states revamp their early childhood education to grab a slice of federal education dollars, some education experts are urging policymakers to look outside the classroom to improve educational opportunites for the country's youngsters. Just as Obama awarded over $500 million in state grants to improve pre-K, the Brookings Institution released a report arguing more attention paid to family background factors such as poverty and maternal education would help improve educational outcomes for our littlest learners. The report argued that gaps in children's ability to learn begin long before they enter the classroom -- and that those gaps can have lasting effects on class mobility.

The battle line over causality, like all battle lines, is defined by two sides. One side shouts, "It's poverty, stupid," and the other shouts, "Quit making excuses and get results." Who to side with? There are two main reasons I side with the poverty faction (not including the fact that I am a teacher and tend to hate it on principle when non-teachers tell me I am terrible at what I do.)

An article in yesterday's New York Times covered some recent research on the increasing education achievement gap between rich and poor. It's worth a read, but it misses a couple of important points.

While the heightened attention paid to education policy, exemplified by federal policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is a positive signal that the public and policymakers are eager to address the problems at hand, many of the "reforms" miss the mark. Yes, education is a way out of poverty -- but poverty is also a hindrance to education. As such, addressing in-school factors in a vacuum -- with no consideration of the problems facing the wider community -- cannot do enough to improve educational outcomes or to narrow the achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier peers.

"This is the third and final post about Education in Chile by Professor Mario Waissbluth, which he wrote for this blog to help us understand a system that took Milton Friedman's advice and relied heavily on testing and choice."

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.