Richard Rothstein

Worth the Price? Weighing the Evidence on Charter School Achievement

In the summer of 2004, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) published data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showing that average fourth-grade achievement is higher in regular public schools than in charter schools, both for students overall and for low-income students. For black students, a group that many charter schools are designed to serve, the analysis showed that average achievement is no better in charter schools than in regular public schools. These conclusions were reported in a front-page article in the New York Times. Their accuracy has not subsequently been challenged.1

School Policy Is Housing Policy: Deconcentrating Disadvantage to Address the Achievement Gap

Social and economic disadvantage—not only poverty, but a host of associated conditions—depresses student performance. Concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogeneous schools depresses it further. Schools that the most disadvantaged black children attend are segregated because they are located in segregated high-poverty neighborhoods, far distant from truly middle-class neighborhoods. Living in such high-poverty neighborhoods for multiple generations adds an additional barrier to achievement, and multigenerational segregated poverty characterizes many African-American children today. Education policy is constrained by housing policy: it is not possible to desegregate schools without desegregating both low-income and affluent neighborhoods. However, the policy motivation to desegregate neighborhoods is hobbled by a growing ignorance of the nation’s racial history. It has become conventional for policymakers to assert that the residential isolation of low-income black children is now “de facto,” the accident of economic circumstance, demographic trends, personal preference, and private discrimination. But the historical record demonstrates that residential segregation is “de jure,” resulting from racially motivated and explicit public policy whose effects endure to the present. Without awareness of the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, policymakers are unlikely to take meaningful steps to understand or fulfill the constitutional mandate to remedy the racial isolation of neighborhoods, or the school segregation that flows from it.

Can International Test Score Comparisons Inform Educational Policy? A Closer Look at Student Performance in Russia and its Neighbors

Russian 8th graders score relatively high on the TIMSS mathematics test. But they perform poorly on the PISA mathematics test compared to students in Eastern and Central European countries that traditionally taught a math curriculum similar to Russia’s. In this paper, we push beneath the surface of this puzzle by focusing on how students from higher and lower social class background in Russia performed over a decade on the PISA and TIMSS tests compared to students of similar social class background in Eastern European countries and in some much higher income neighbors in Western Europe. We also compare Russian students in Russia with those in Russian language schools in Latvia. We conclude that the Russian PISA “problem” is located mainly in the relatively low performance of higher social class students and may be more related to the Russian math curriculum or the test itself than students’ math knowledge.