Everyone knows that the U.S. spends more per student on public education than nearly any other country on the planet (see page 205 of this OECD analysis, for example) but that the measured learning outcomes are mediocre. But how exactly is this mediocrity produced? I went to a “forum with the principal” event in a rich white suburban school district to find out (as noted in The Smartest Kids in the World, while Americans love to blame non-white and/or low-income for our poor performance, even rich white public schools and private schools in the U.S. underperform public schools in the successful countries, such as Finland). This was in Massachusetts, which, as noted recently in the New York Times, has some of the nation’s more effective schools (along with New Jersey, Texas, and Florida). This town’s school system is ranked as one of the better ones in Massachusetts so its performance is “elite” by American standards if not by international ones.

Based on what people said at the forum, the core driver of mediocrity seems to be the dual function of the American school. A home-schooled child studies for three hours per day. A Russian child studies for about four hours, from just after breakfast until just before lunch (with 10-minute breaks, but no recess). Children are parked at an American school for 6-7 hours per day and thus necessarily much of the time is spent on stuff other than learning. This leads to the school becoming a place for “social/emotional development” during 2-3 hours per day. The “social/emotional” aspects were the foremost concerns of the parents at the forum. One mother described how the first 20 minutes out of a 25-minute parent/teacher conference were spent discussing a child’s social life during recess. This was not a complaint, just a response to the question of how such conferences were going. When asked what was on their mind, nearly every other parent led with “social/emotional.” It makes sense if you step back from the situation and ask “What is urgent for a parent?” Of course we would all like our children to be well-educated at age 25 (or 30?) when they are done with the master’s degree that is now our entry-level credential. But the immediate (and therefore urgent) goal is to see one’s child smiling. If a child comes home in tears because of something that happened at recess it would be a rare parent who would say “let’s talk about how what you learned writing this history essay is going to affect your performance in college.”

As this was a new principal and the forum was a place for open discussion, I asked if anyone had read The Smartest Kids in the World, which was a New York Times bestseller and recommended heavily by Amazon, The Economist, and various newspapers. Everyone in the room was either employed by a school or interested enough to take time to show up at this forum, but nobody had read the book. So I mentioned that the Russian system (not much better results than ours, but absurdly cheap to run by comparison) and the Finnish system had schools and teachers concentrate on the single mission of academics. Day care, sports, and social/emotional were handled by people other than teachers in venues other than school. Then I asked if there were state regulations that would prevent the town from setting up a Russian-style system in which teachers taught until lunch and then a separate set of employees took over for the lunch+afternoon social/emotional/daycare shift. That way parents could concentrate on academics when talking with teachers. The principal responded that “children aren’t built that way” (i.e., the American way of alternating academic and daycare activities for 6-7 hours is the only possible way to run a school).

Despite the epic length of the school day, the elementary school kids are assigned homework and one parent asked what was the point of additional drill pages that were similar to ones previously done in class. The principal responded only that there were various theories as to the value of homework, the implication being that nobody knew whether or not assigning homework improved academic outcomes.

The previous forum had concerned math instruction within this school system. There is a single set of standards for all students in any given grade (i.e., everyone in 4th grade gets more or less the same assignments). A person with a basic knowledge of probability or statistics would assume a Gaussian distribution of mathematics knowledge among children within a grade. If the assignments are aimed at the average student, the mathematically competent person would therefore expect three groups of parents showing up: parents of children at the lower end of the math competence distribution complaining “too hard”; parents of children in the middle saying “just right”; parents of children at the high end objecting “too easy”.

This was apparently not what happened, however. The principal said that there were essentially two groups of parents: (a) those who felt that the math assignments were appropriate for their children, (b) those who felt the math assignments were too easy. From the absence of the “too hard” group, the person with an intro probability background would infer either that (1) a non-representative sample of parents had turned out, or (2) math in this school system is targeted at roughly the 30th percentile child. The principal, however, threw up her hands, implying that there is no way to please everyone and that any differences in opinion regarding the math challenge were likely due to personality differences among the parents.

I asked “Suppose that a child comes to the first day of 4th grade and knows everything that would be expected of a graduate of 4th grade. Will that child be given 5th grade problems to work on?” The answer was “no” and a denial of the possibility that a child at the beginning of 4th grade could have a true understanding of all of 4th grade math, even if tests showed an ability to do all of the required calculations. “We try to keep all of the children at the same level,” was the principal’s summary.

The principal described having recently completed an every-five-years certification process for kindergarten. She profusely thanked her bureaucratic predecessor for having teed up the paperwork in binders and said it was stressful for the teachers to be observed by the accreditation folks (unclear why this should be; after three years in this district it is effectively impossible for a teacher to be fired for poor performance (previous posting)). The principal said that it was possible to get certified in older grades but the only reason to do that would be to use the accreditation organization’s report identifying deficiencies to seek more taxpayer funding for a school (i.e., the purpose of certification was not primarily to increase performance).

The room was full of smart well-meaning people with, by global standards, near-infinite cash to be spent. Everyone was working effectively toward achieving the same kinds of results that better American schools were able to achieve in the 1950s or 1970s. Nobody seemed concerned about the possibility that other countries have gone above and beyond that standard.

Related:

my review of The Smartest Kids in the World

Nutella incident (same school system)

recent Facebook status from a parent of a 4th grader in the same school system: