Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, wrote the following, which was posted on the Schools Matter blog.
The results of the 2009 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, were released this week, and showed American 15-year-olds doing generally average in reading, science and math as compared to 65 other countries [including members and non-members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which puts out PISA] and other education systems. There was angst in education circles, with calls for even more of the same kind of reforms that we've been implementing for nearly a decade (which haven't done anything to help U.S. PISA scores). Krashen takes a different look at the numbers.
By Stephen Krashen
"Two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results," Ángel Gurría, the O.E.C.D. secretary general, said in a statement on Tuesday. "This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated countries is now out of date." (The New York Times, "Western Nations React to Poor Education Results," Dec. 8).
I have not yet seen an analysis of the impact of poverty on overall PISA scores (I have sent for the full set of data; they tell me it will come in 10 days or so). But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country. Those in schools with 10% to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.
In contrast, American students in schools with 75% or more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.
This makes sense. Among other things, high poverty means less access to books at school, at home and in the community (e.g Krashen, 2004, The Power of Reading). Less access means less reading, and less reading means lower performance on tests such as the PISA.
The PISA data can be found on page 15 (table 6) of Highlights From
PISA 2009, available on the Internet.
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