Affluent suburban districts may be outperforming their large urban neighbors, but they fail to achieve near the top of international comparisons…. White Plains, New York, in suburban Westchester County, is only at the 39th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group. Grosse Point, Michigan, outside of Detroit, is at the 56th percentile. Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University outside of Chicago, is at the 48th percentile in math. The average student in Montgomery County, Maryland, where many of the national government leaders send their children to school, is at the 50th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries….

It goes on, but you get the flavor. If you’re wondering about your own school district, you can check out the handy new web tool Greene and company created called The Global Report Card. All in all, it’s an interesting tool that may be worth further exploring. The findings reported by Greene and McGee do raise some cause for concern:

In four states, there is not a single traditional district with average student achievement above the 50th percentile in math. In 17 states, there is not a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group. And apart from charter school districts, in over half of the states, there are no more than three traditional districts in which the average achievement would be in the upper third.

One of my Education Policy Center friends decided to check out the 10 largest school districts in Colorado, to see at which percentile average students rank among their international peers. Here’s what he found:

1. Jefferson County (48%)
2. Denver (unclear, data presented separately for “Denver” and “District 1″)
3. Douglas County (60%)
4. Cherry Creek (52%)
5. Adams 12 [listed as "Adams"] (38%)
6. Aurora [listed as "Aurora County"] (22%)
7. Boulder Valley (58%)
8. Colorado Springs 11 [listed as "Colorado Springs"] (44%)
9. St. Vrain Valley (48%)
10. Poudre (55%)

Looks like Colorado might be one of the 17 states identified as not having “a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group.” If somebody can find a Colorado district at or above the 67th percentile, please let me know. Looked at this way, the state’s K-12 performance still doesn’t show terrible results, but we can certainly do better.

While we certainly shouldn’t abandon less privileged students in the quest to raise their academic performance, it is important to recognize that we need to raise the bar for middle class, suburban students, too — a point more ably made by Greg Forster on Jay Greene’s blog, of all places.

We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

We find no evidence of any adverse consequences as a result of the incentive programs. Incentive schools do significantly better on both mechanical components of the test (designed to reflect rote learning) and conceptual components of the test (designed to capture deeper understanding of the material),suggesting that the gains in test scores represent an actual increase in learning outcomes. Students in incentive schools do significantly better not only in math and language (for which there were incentives), but also in science and social studies (for which there were no incentives), suggesting positive spillover effects….

School-level group incentives and teacher-level individual incentives perform equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools significantly outperformed the group incentive schools in the second year….

More research-based evidence that merit pay works! How much it transfers from the land of curry, na’an, and basmati rice to our own USA is up for debate. But it’s not like we haven’t seen similar results from studies in our own country.

Denver’s ProComp (PDF) was just a start. While merit pay should apply to school leaders as well as principals, and compensation reform isn’t the only promising strategy to improve education out comes, it certainly is an important approach to adopt. So let’s get to it!

But there’s another Olympics taking place, as well. The Thomas Fordham Foundation has created the Education Olympics website, as a way to measure America’s education performance versus other nations, according to a series of different measures. After two events, Finland and Norway have taken home the gold, while the United States has been shut out of the medal count so far.

You can stay tuned with video clips that provide “coverage” of the “events”. Here’s hoping – and all but expecting – that the United States will perform better in the real Summer Olympics in Beijing than in the Education Olympics.

This clip from the 1980s British sitcom Yes Prime Minister should be required viewing for education policy makers. It may come from overseas, and it may be 20 years old, but the brilliant common sense that flows through the satire in this piece feels like a breath of fresh air for Colorado. Of course – for the choices already available to them, Colorado families have a great resource in the School Choice for Kids website.

(H/T Jay Greene, via What’s Wrong With the World?)

As the Heartland Institute points out, the British High Court ruled that due to at least 11 scientific errors contained in Al Gore’s feature-length movie An Inconvenient Truth, schools who show the movie to students in class must balance the presentation with contradictory evidence.

In Colorado, our Governor Bill Ritter has made it clear he wants all K-12 students “to understand the science of climate change.” Yet as more students are exposed to this topic, it is important they receive a balanced presentation and not an uncritical indoctrination from Al Gore’s movie.

The British approach is to make a universal mandate for all their classrooms. But in Colorado, we value local control. One way then to ensure your public school student is not being indoctrinated in climate change hysteria or anything else is to petition the local school board or your school principal. Of course, school leaders are more likely to listen to the concerns of students and parents where they have the power of choice and can use their feet to find someplace that doesn’t indoctrinate.

An important tool helping parents to become good education consumers is our School Choice for Kids website – search to find the right school near you! As for me, I’ve still got a lot of time before school begins again. I’m going to go enjoy it.

Well, anyway, a couple months ago, the Education Policy Center (the whole Independence Institute really) made a new friend in Ethiopian journalist Habtamu Dugo, who fled his homeland to avoid persecution from the government. Here’s a 5-minute video in which Habtamu tells his own story:

Now living in the United States, Habtamu recently wrote about the problems with his nation’s education system, particularly how the government’s repressive segregationist policy is so harmful to the ethnic groups not represented by those in power. It’s a long article, so you should really read the whole thing. But here’s a key passage:

The unwritten policy, however, is that students in Tigray region and Addis Ababa (Finfinnee) region as opposed to other regions study all subjects in English, starting at their seventh grade. This gives Tigray and Addis Ababa students better performance because they have two years advantage over students from other regions as they study all subjects in the English language. In high schools and universities the medium of instruction is English in Ethiopia. Students from the 7 other regional states also want to start their education in English as early as grade 7, but the government has systematically denied them this opportunity.

At their tenth grade, students from other regions and Tigray and Addis Ababa sit for the same national examination that is set in English in order to pass to preparatory and vocational streams. This is where the policy of segregations inflicts failures upon thousands of poorly prepared children, both in terms of their verbal and mathematical skills.

A solid background in English is critical in secondary and university education as textbooks are generally available only in English, which is the official medium of instruction. That is the reason students who are deficient in English skills will not be able to keep up. Besides, the major advantage of speaking English is to use it as a neutral lingua franca to do business and to create wealth across state lines and internationally. However, from the view point of the extremist dictatorship economic growth is not as much a benefit as keeping the population from communicating with one another for political reasons. Also, only the ruling tribes will be able to communicate effectively on a global level.

We have a lot to fight for in this country in terms of educational freedom. But reading Habtamu’s account of education in Ethiopia – Africa’s 2nd most populous nation, with 77 million people – puts our situation into better perspective.

Peace and best wishes to the Oromo and other repressed peoples of Ethiopia, for whom unequal access to English language education is but one part of the abusive treatment they face at the hands of their own government.