Re: PIRLS and poverty

[aburke5054@aol.com]

All this is nice, except that I doubt that parents and children in 
America's poorest schools take great comfort in the fact that children 
in America's richest schools  "outscored the world" or that children in 
America's poorest schools  achieve just a tad below the "international 
average."  For that matter, neither should the rest of us.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: GERALD BRACEY <gbracey1@verizon.net>
To: LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com; arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 9:14 am
Subject: [arn-l] PIRLS and poverty


In the hand wringing over the lack of "progress" of American students 
on PIRLS,
no one that I read mentioned that while American scores were the same 
as in
previous PIRLS administrations, they were well above average, being 540 
compared
to the international average of 500 (previous administrations = 543 and 
547).

NCES' report initially listed the impact of poverty by a rather 
cumbersome
categorization of whether none, some, or all students in a school 
qualified for
free/reduced price lunches.  Mark Schneider of NCES just sent over the 
more
usual NCES listing showing scores by percent of kids eligible.

Percent of                Percent of
students                    students
in poverty    score    in population

0-10%        573        12
10-25          560        17
25-50        545        26
50-75        530        19
75-100        497        17

(percents don't sum to 100 because of rounding.  The figures also do 
not includ
standard errors).

So, once again, only those children in really high poverty schools 
score below
the international average.  This is not as cheery as it might be 
because the
highest scoring nation, Russia scored 65 points above average and the 
lowest,
South Africa, 198 points below, so the low outliers affect the average 
more than
the high outliers.

Still the 12% of children in the lowest poverty schools outscored the 
world, and
the 17 percent in the next category would have finished 3rd if they 
constituted
a nation.






________________________________________________________________________
More new features than ever.  Check out the new AOL Mail ! - 
http://webmail.aol.com