Still trailing

When I taught high school math, a student who received a D in my class asked me what grade I thought he would make in the next semester.

With a slight smile, I responded, “If you keep doing exactly what you did first semester, I believe you’ll make a D.”

On Tuesday, the triennial Program for International Student Assessment rankings will be released, comparing the competencies of high school students from 64 countries. Although I haven’t seen the results, I imagine that the United States will end up about where we did three years ago, when our students ranked behind nine other nations in literacy and 23 others in math.

The reason things 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.

Sixty years ago this month, Thurgood Marshall and other attorneys argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for an end to segregation in our public schools. The court’s landmark ruling, in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, found that the doctrine of “separate but equal” wasn’t really equal at all.

Six decades later, we still haven’t achieved equality in public education. The proof is in the PISA results.

Our students from well-to-do families did fine on the last PISA assessments. In U.S. schools with poverty rates below 10 percent, our students scored higher than those from any other nation — even Finland, which has almost no poverty and is always near the top of the overall PISA rankings.

For students who live in poverty, however, it’s a different story — and there are more of those students in the U.S. than any other country in the PISA rankings.

In 2009, about 22 percent of U.S. students lived in poverty; the figure is much higher in many school districts today. In fact, the Southern Education Foundation recently reported that more than half of all public school students in 17 states — all in the South and West — live in low-income households.

When I look at the PISA rankings, what jumps out at me is our failure to meet the needs of these children. It’s time for our nation to face up to that challenge, and we must start by acknowledging that the effects of poverty are pervasive. Children can’t learn in school if they lack good food, a safe place to sleep or access to health care, and our society must address those needs.

Beyond that, we should try to learn from nations that excel in the PISA rankings. One area in which they clearly have us beat is early childhood education.

New research from Stanford University showed a language gap between poor children and their counterparts as early as 18 months old, and the gap widened significantly by age 2. Yet according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, just 4 percent of our 3-year-olds attend state-funded preschool programs, and 8 percent are in Head Start. In Korea, by comparison, 82 percent of 3-year-olds attend preschool; in Hong Kong, the figure is 90 percent.

We know early childhood education works, and states made real progress in expanding access over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, however, total state funding for these programs declined by more than $500 million, and federal Head Start funding was slashed this year by the budget sequester. These cuts are the definition of “penny-wise and pound foolish.”

We must also address inequities in k-12 school funding. While the U.S. ranks near the top in expenditures per pupil, the distribution of those resources is grossly unequal. Because school funding relies heavily on local property taxes, the U.S. is one of the few advanced nations in which schools in prosperous areas have more resources than those in poorer districts. According to the Education Law Center, only 17 states provide more funding to high-poverty districts than to more affluent areas.

Finally, we must acknowledge that schools with high poverty can be difficult environments in which to work, and they often have trouble attracting and retaining experienced and effective teachers. The solution is recruitment of more quality candidates and better preparation of all teachers, so every classroom has a teacher who is well-prepared for the important job of educating our children.

Finland’s schools of education are highly selective, and a year-long residency is required before any candidate is assigned to teach a class. In the U.S., only 1 of 20 schools of education is at a highly selective institution, and teacher training programs require an average of 12 to 15 weeks of in-classroom training. The least-prepared teachers invariably wind up in the poorest schools.