In advance of the Tuesday release of PISA, an international benchmark test, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel offered a confident explanation of the anticipated results. “The reason [scores] probably won’t change much is that we haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance: poverty and its effects on students,” he wrote in an op-ed.
In part, Van Roekel was right. Scores did not change much and America’s standing declined slightly as other countries continue to improve. Moreover, child poverty remains a significant problem for American schools. President Obama mentioned it in a speech on inequality earlier this week and a recent report from the Children’s Defense Fund describes the effects of poverty on children in much greater detail.
But is child poverty the full explanation of our mediocre standing on most international comparisons?
What Van Roekel and many others who make this argument fail to address is that American schools—when compared to their international peers—do a pretty mediocre job at buffering the effects of income differences. More so than in the average OECD country, a rich child is more likely to excel and a poor child is more likely to struggle if they attend a school in the United States. The cause of our mediocre performance is not just that poverty affects the performance of the U.S. school system; it is also that our schools are especially sensitive to its presence.
Indeed, an American student’s socio-economic status—which the OECD measures through a metric known as the ESCS index—accounts for about 15 percent of the variance in performance on the PISA math assessment, 13 percent of the reading assessment and 14 percent of the science assessment. When this percentage decreases, the impact of a given student’s family income has on his or her achievement declines. When it increases, the influence that family income has on student performance grows. Consider the following graphs, which chart the percentage of math achievement explained by ESCS.
I’ll note here that factors contributing to this relationship operate both inside and outside the classroom. For instance, I was surprised to see the comparatively narrow influence of family income in South Korea, given the enthusiasm there for private after-school tutors, which presumably would lead to a tighter relationship between parent income and student achievement.
Of course, child poverty in a country like South Korea is qualitatively different from child poverty in the United States. Because South Korea and most other high-achieving countries do not face child poverty as severe as that in the United States, a better comparison may be between the United States and countries with similarly severe poverty.
This gets at the crux of the difference between reformers who acknowledge the challenges poverty poses but believe its consequences can be buffered through education reform and other social policy changes and those opposed to reform who generally argue that school change is only possible if poverty is addressed first. The central question dividing the two is: can improvement in U.S. schools be attained, even with the existence of child poverty? The PISA data suggest there’s certainly a distance that we can travel to reduce the influence of poverty on student achievement.
For all the blame directed towards the existence of poverty by defenders of today’s school system, our school system could do more to reduce the influence of income on student outcomes. Van Roekel did not acknowledge this, but then again, he hadn’t yet read the report.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became interested in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.