David Safier

by David Safier Dr. Randall Friese, a surgeon at the UAMC Trauma Center and one of the doctors who treated victims of the January 8, 2011, shooting at Gabby Giffords' Congress on Your Corner event, has officially announced as a Democratic candidate for the AZ House in LD-9, which is one of Arizona's few split … Read more

by David Safier

The concern over the average U.S. scores on the latest international PISA test has been far more muted this time out than usual. I'm hopeful that the viewpoints of progressive educators have finally made their way inside the mainstream vision of education, which has been dominated by the "failing schools" story coming from the conservative "education reform" movement. The fact is, a more nuanced look at this most recent set of scores as well as U.S. scores on other international exams indicates that our schools are not failing. True, they can and should do better. But failing? Far from it.

For a moment, though, let's assume our scores on the PISA test mean we're falling behind the rest of the world educationally. Instead of allowing the corporate reform/school choice/vouchers/testing crowd to interpret the reasons for our possibly poor showing, let's look at some other ways of viewing our performance.

• Our PISA scores have remained stagnant throughout the No Child Left Behind decade. The Bush era's testing and shaming has done nothing to improve our international scores.

• If you just look at U.S. schools with less than 10% of their children on free or reduced lunch, our scores would be number one in the world in science and reading and number five in mathematics. The large number of U.S. students living in poverty brings our average scores way down.

by David Safier Talking Points Memo's regular Book Club feature has a piece by Diane Ravitch: Stop Doing The Wrong Things In Education. It's a short adaptation of the basic concepts in her new book, Reign of Error. She begins by discussing the conservative "education reform" narrative which has been taken up by most of … Read more

by David Safier Who said this? "The biggest criticism is that China's education has sacrificed everything else for test scores, such as life skills, character building, mental health, and physical health." It wasn't some anti-test radical educator in the U.S. The speaker was Xiong Bingqi, a Shanghai-based scholar on education. Shanghai's students got the highest … Read more

by David Safier

On Friday, Ann-Eve Pedersen and I recorded a story about the latest charter school funding controversy for our cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story. It hasn't aired yet, but in the meanwhile, Tim Steller has done a first rate job of covering similar material. He's got most of the information — and got it right — in his Sunday column, More money for charter schools should mean higher expectations.

Steller isn't a charter school basher. He has kids in a charter, a choice I respect. When parents find schools they believe are best suited for their children, that's where they should send their children. But Steller is clear-eyed about the funding issue, offering a lucid discussion of most of the important issues.

I've tried my damndest to understand the issue of equitable funding of charters and school district schools, and I've never come up with a go-to-the-bank answer. For me, the best question to ask if you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison is, how much money goes to educate the child without special needs sitting in a classroom? If the figures are similar for charters and district schools, then the system is reasonably equitable.

Interestingly, the best answer I've received is from Chris Ackerley, a physics teacher at Amphi High and a Republican who ran for state legislature. Chris and I disagree on lots of issues, but he's a smart guy who's better with numbers than I am, and he took an objective look at school funding. His takeaway was, when looking at the money that goes for students' educations — the money that goes to that median student sitting in a classroom — some schools get a bit more, some a bit less, but it doesn't break down into a charter/district school dichotomy. On the whole, they receive similar funding.