What has been missed in education

A good reflection as we end this presidential term (and as the former Secretary of Education visits town) on what's been missed:

One can argue that there are limits to what the federal government can do about states that inadequately fund education and that a Republican Congress would have blocked any attempt by the Obama administration to create more adequate and equitable education funding.
But the honest truth is Obama and his Education Secretary never made adequate and equitable funding a signature education policy imperative. It wasn’t in the incentives and punishments written into RTTT. It wasn’t in any of the demands for being granted a waiver to NCLB...
“We’ve stopped worrying about inputs,” Berliner is quoted, “yet, what’s coming out of schools is still a function of those inputs.”

DFER in Philly with their eyes on Massachusetts

So while the Democrats are having their national convention in Philadelphia, it might seem that attention has shifted off the other things on the fall ballot, like the four ballot questions.
Not at all!
In fact, those supporting the charter school ballot question are attempting to woo support for it among the Democrats who are in Philadelphia by sponsoring their breakfasts:

So one of the groups advocating to raise the cap on charter schools, Massachusetts Democrats for Education Reform, has sponsored two of the convention's breakfasts to help win over the party faithful.

My guess is that most of the elected officials probably already have an opinion on this question (I suspect most of the Legislature knows they can't afford it), but it's the rank and file Democrats who have no idea who DFER is that presumably are those they're hoping to convert. Also, this is a healthy reminder of who has money in this issue!

They also had a "Camp Philos" event, well covered by Molly Knefel in TruthOut, which is particularly interesting for several things. First, Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education House Chair Representative Alice Peisch was there and was quoted regarding the future of education reform:

Both Ruiz and Massachusetts State Representative Alice Peisch suggested that education reform had a PR problem. To fix that, they argued, reformers have to emphasize that they're not just about testing and closing schools, but about addressing educational inequality.

Second, when the discussion on school integration happened--specifically, if integration should be forced-- Peter Cunningham (who worked for Secretary Duncan in both Chicago and D.C.; he's now at Education Post) had a fairly dismissive perspective:

Maybe the fight's not worth it. It's a good thing; we all think integration is good. But it's been a long fight, we've had middling success. At the same time, we have lots and lots of schools filled with kids of one race, one background, that are doing great. It's a good question.

Also, the perspective of the person DFER had interacting with Knefel is weirdly hostile:

During the lunch break, interestingly enough, a DFER staffer asked me if I was with Ravitch or the unions. I don't believe Ravitch was at the gathering, so I have to assume that she meant "with" Ravitch in the ideological sense. I told her that I was attending the event as a member of the press. In addition to being an after-school teacher, I am a freelance journalist and regularly cover education. She suggested that I wasn't actually with the press, but there just to tweet. Just for the record, I had not tweeted or retweeted anything critical that day, and I said again that I was with the press. She replied that it was totally OK that I was there, but that I should just "be honest." The interaction betrayed the thinly veiled sentiment beneath the morning's oft-repeated message of harmony with unions. The assumption was that if I attended the event in a critical capacity it must be because of a secret union affiliation. I am definitely not a union member, but I was still unsure of how welcome I was at the proverbial table.

"...let's...embrace the fact that you showed up at all..."*

On Saturday, President Obama in a video message commented that we had too much testing in our schools, and that it needed to be limited. This was followed up by official guidance from the federal Department of Education.
And then the internet flipped out.
If you're a long-time reader, you know that I've been outraged by President Obama's education policy since before he took office (That link goes to December 2008). That it has doubled-down on much that was wrong with No Child Left Behind to begin with, while adding extra measures of things that are also awful, has been a frequent theme for me (and it's why I voted against Race to the Top).

But there's two things that bother me about the chorus of negativity that met the President's announcement.
First, most of the scoffing (shading to outrage) comes from educators, in one way or another; from teachers to education policy makers and think tanks, many people in education reacted negatively to this announcement. I thought, though, that we in education didn't give up on people. I thought we were about explaining it again, changing how we tackled a subject, coming back to what students don't get. I thought we were about getting everyone there, no matter how long it takes.
Does that not apply to adults or to presidents? Or did we really not mean that at all?

The second thing that bothers me about the reaction is what's missed: we're in the middle of the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Congress has to pass it and the President has to sign it. Many in the Democratic party have been taking their signals from the President in education policy. That has meant that much of what we loathe--and much of that centered around testing--has been pretty non-negotiable. For him to say that there's too much testing and to lay out some clear parameters for testing opens the door for new levels of negotiation on what can be in ESEA (and get votes and gain his signature) than there were before. That absolutely matters.
And in the meantime, we're still living in the ESEA waiver universe, and the department handing out those waivers just changed the rules on how we're operating. I look forward to states submitting waiver applications publicly that take very, very seriously:

•  testing that is PART of classroom instruction
• testing and test prep that is NOT a separate item
• testing that is FULLY transparent to parents and to the public
• testing that is NOT the sole measure of anything

..and so forth (do please read the DoE fact sheet). I venture that very few, if any, current waivers include any of this. It's up to the states now to take DoE at their word and submit waivers--and be VERY public about them--that actually follow those rules.

And then we can see if the lesson has truly been learned. A test, if you will.
*Sam Seaborn to C.J. Cregg, "Mr. Willis of Ohio," The West Wing, Season 1, episode 6

Duncan is out. John King is in. This is not an improvement.

If you don't have time for anything else, let the title suffice.

First, in the spirit of full disclosure:

So I guess I can now say that I asked the Secretary of Education a question. He didn't give a satisfactory answer. pic.twitter.com/sQts0aCSWK

— Tracy Novick (@TracyNovick) October 2, 2015

That was at January's National School Board's Advocacy Institute. My question to him was (in brief) how he could advocate for the policies he did, when they were shown disproportionately to hurt my (that is, Worcester's, but more largely, urban) kids. He essentially took issue with my premise.

King's being bumped up from senior advisor in US DoE. Previously, he was the New York Commissioner of public schools. I've seen several descriptions of his time there; "rocky," and "turbulent" seem to be among the most kind. New York was of course among the states that adopted Race to the Top and its accompanying policies, so for my Massachusetts readers, that means they've had the same wave of more charters, new teacher evaluation, new student testing, move to Common Core, and new data analysis, all at the same time. Dare I say King handled it more poorly than Massachusetts did (and I say that as a fan of not much of it)? The second of the above links brings you to the Chalkface in summing up his time in New York.
If I could point at one thing that is an issue with King, it's that he doesn't seem to listen to much of anyone. Wikipedia's review of his history is instructive; he's just turned 40. He came out of Harvard with a degree in government, got a degree from Columbia and taught for three years. He was then among the founders of Roxbury Prep, which, per the last full records we have, has the second highest out-of-school suspension rate in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, at 44.6%. During his time as director there, he's the one who wrote their rules, including no talking in the hallways.  From there, he moved to Uncommon Schools, which runs 24 (similar) charter schools in New York.
Teachers, parents, and principals, all rebelled under his tenure as Commissioner in New York, and for various reasons: New York has seen a wave of parental opt-outs on standardized testing, as the switch to the new test happened with little preparation and with high cut scores (and thus low pass rates). Student test scores are now worth 50% of teacher and principal evaluations in New York, which we all know is just silly. It's also really concerning that he put this sort of school finance nonsense in front of New York's Board of Regents.
And he doesn't listen.

Who is doing the opting out?

The New York Times ran a story earlier this week about opting out of standardized testing, widely blaming/crediting (depends on your perspective) teachers' unions with fueling the trend:

After several years in which the teachers' unions have been hammered on the issue of tenure, have lost collective bargaining rights in some states and have seen their evaluations increasingly tied to student scores, they have begun, with some success, to reassert themselves using a bread-and-butter issue: the annual tests given to elementary and middle school students in every state.

I was amazed by the laziness of this reporting, honestly, right down to the pro-forma quote by Jonah Edelman from Stand for Children.  No mention of United Opt Out, not a single quote from a parent, no conversations with students...it really reads like phoning it in.
This did lead to some interesting responses, including Andy Smarick's about how ed reform responds to opting out; he urges his compatriots not to repeat their mistake of dismissing critics as they've done with the Common Core.
Secretary Duncan, at the Education Writers of America, commented that opting out may require federal action:

On Tuesday, when asked whether states with many test boycotters would face consequences, Duncan said he expected states to make sure districts get enough students take the tests.
“We think most states will do that,” Duncan said during a discussion at the Education Writers Association conference in Chicago. “If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in.” 

 I will leave it to others to debate the relative constitutionality of that. I will, however, point out that pulling federal funds, which is about the only consequence open to the federal government, will only continue to widen the rich/poor divide, as it is poorer districts that receive the majority of federal funds.
Possibly related, Senator Tester of Montana filed an amendment to the ESEA renewal that would strike the requirement for grade testing.
Finally, Bruce Baker points out that massive opt out has already happened by parents who don't send their kids to public school, thus all comparisons are moot already.

Preparing for Capitol Hill Meetings

Zola, Gettsman, Rigsby all doing federal legislation and advocacy
Zola: "a little bit of a different time and place"
"Washington is Washington...one party running the Congress...they want to move ESEA to the floor either in February or early March"

Mary Matalin and James Carville!

James Carville and Mary Matalin
Yes, I am a political geek.
"proof that opposite attract...she speaks English; he does not"
proof "can in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation produce two lovely daughters"

Federal hearing on overtesting on January 20

It was a bit buried in some of the coverage of Secretary Duncan's doubling-down on testing yesterday, but Senator Lamar Alexander who now chairs the Senate education committee is holding a public hearing on overtesting on January 20. He plans, it seems, to use this as a launch for a renewal of ESEA without the annual testing provision.

Massachusetts has a renewed NCLB waiver, BUT

...it appears that the fed is less than pleased with our year of "you pick" for standardized testing:

 ...in the case of the Bay State, that approval came with an important caveat: The U.S. Department of Education would not approve an amendment that would have allowed Massachusetts to give its districts the choice this spring of using the state's current test, the MCAS, or using the PARCC assessments. 

While the department refused to approve Massachusetts' testing-choice amendment, it did approve the main waiver request. State officials said they do not risk losing their waiver by going ahead with the two-test-choice plan this spring, since they will be "in compliance" with the federal law requiring one test for all students in 2015-16, as Assistant Secretary Deborah S. Delisle specified in her letter. 

U.S. DoE is concerned that it might create a two-tiered system, but, because Massachusetts has said that we'll be doing all one (of something) for 2015-16, they aren't going to pursue it further at this time. They'll potentially pull the waiver* if we don't, though.

You can read Commissioner Chester's letter to the state Board of Ed here. There's some interesting reasoning, including the politicizing of the Common Core debate in some states (does he think that hasn't happened here?), and feedback from local officials on the difficulty of implementating an online assessment. He closes with this:

We value our partnership with the federal government, but there are times when partners will disagree, and when that happens, our first and foremost obligation is to do what is right for Massachusetts.

I will not be the first or the last to comment that our obligation, likewise, is to do what's right for our districts.

*This would put us back under the No Child Left Behind requirement of every child proficient by 2014, or, now. Like Washington state, that would mean that just about every school would be declared federally failing. You can read about the rest of the waivers that came through yesterday here.

NCLB comes home to roost

The talk about complying with NCLB waivers from Secretary Duncan may have caused us to forget: there are states that don't have waivers. Because it is now that magic year in which no child is to be left behind--2014--states that do not have waivers, and are thus still under the law, must have every child testing up to standards or have the schools declared underperforming.
No surprise: nearly all schools are getting that tag.
States and schools aren't simply taking this, though. Vermont's Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe fulfilled the requirement that parents be informed of their schools "low performing" label with this thoughtful letter, disagreeing with this label and discussing what makes for a quality education.
Washington state, which recently lost its waiver due to disagreements over teacher evaluation, likewise has more clear information coming out to parents along with the required notification: 28 superintendents have signed a letter to parents disagreeing with the label.
A number of the states without a waiver are finding that, labels or not, they are freer and more able to move ahead, as they don't have to negotiate with the Department of Education when making decisions.
I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere. 

Here's the new NEA president

...interviewed by Salon. Sounds like she's telling it as she sees it.
Now, this could be fun! 

AFT calls for Secretary Duncan to be put on a improvement plan

Adding to the calls for a different federal direction, the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution calling for Secretary Duncan to be put on an improvement plan:

The “improvement plan” would include the requirement that Duncan enact the funding and equity recommendations of the Equity Commission’s “Each and Every Child” report; change the No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top “test-and-punish” accountability system to a “support-and-improve” model; and “promote rather than question” teachers and school staff...AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement sent to POLITICO that the amendment “is basically saying, ‘Enough is enough.’ Teachers are evaluated and their future livelihoods are linked to that. And when they fall short, they should have a chance to improve. And that’s what this special order represents.”

The plan was laid out in an amendment tacked onto a resolution codifying AFT’s “Commitment to Fighting Back and Fighting Forward” on labor and education issues.

 Last week the National Education Association called for his resignation. 

Speaking of declarations...

The National Education Association (the nation's largest teachers' union) is holding their annual convention in Denver this weekend. Two things from today:

NEA RA. The largest union in the United States has elected three women of color to lead it. http://t.co/eNT6qh8OMc #NEARA14
— fklonsky (@fklonsky) July 4, 2014

You can read more about the election here; for those from Massachusetts following this, outgoing MTA president Paul Toner did not win a seat on the NEA executive board.

While there were several resolutions passed, I suspect this one is going to get all the press:

speaking of declarations, the nation's largest teachers' union passed a resolution calling for the resignation of the Sec'ty of Education.
— Tracy Novick (@TracyNovick) July 4, 2014

Happy Independence Day!

A little help here, Arne!

Looks as though Congressional members of the education committee would really appreciate it if the Obama administration might take an interested in ESEA renewal. They didn't give the Secretary a very easy time when he was before them today.

Waivers falling apart?

In the past two days we've had some waivers on No Child Left Behind coming apart at the seams:

• It looks as though Washington state is going to find out what happens when you get your waiver from the federal government revoked. D.C doesn't like Washington's proposed teacher evaluation system, as districts can use either state or district tests for teacher evaluation; D.C. of course wants it to be the state test. As the state legislature adjourned without changing the law, it looks as though the ball is back in the DOE's court.
• Sacramento announced yesterday that it is leaving the group of California districts that have their own No Child Left Behind waiver. California as a state does not have a waiver, but a group of districts went over the state's head directly to the fed and got one; now that is falling apart, and it's also over teacher evaluation systems.

I should note that this attempt to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores is the part of the waiver that has been postponed in Massachusetts, as well, 'though so far the DOE seems satisfied. 

Another round of national coverage for Worcester

Ravitch mentioned EduShyster's extensive post on Duncan's visit to Massachusetts.
She appears to be catching up on her Worcester reading, though, as she posted this today, linking not only to the T&G's editorial, but calling out the Mayor.

We are having a lively time lately, aren't we?

It's Twitter official: Arne Duncan is coming to Worcester Tech

As had been rumored, Worcester is having a visitor Wednesday:

U.S. Sec. of Ed. @arneduncan will visit #Worcester Technical High School Wednesday.
— Jackie Reis (@JackieReisTG) March 7, 2014

Apparently, it's a nine am town hall meeting on career and technical education.
I hear the protest is at Belmont and Skyline Drive and starts at 8:30.

State of the Union 2014

While I did not watch last night, I did follow the conversation on Twitter (try #SOTU and #SOTUedu). The White House posted the full text here. 
The big questions beforehand were: would he mention Race to the Top? would he mention Common Core?
He started (to much reaction from teachers on the web) with a shout out to teachers:

Today in America, a teacher spent extra time with a student who needed it, and did her part to lift America’s graduation rate to its highest level in more than three decades.

Okay, list of Americans; you get a pass from me on rhetorical flourishes. The bulk of the education section--after economy and the environment--starts here:

 Five years ago, we set out to change the odds for all our kids...

Then he talks about college loans, which is generally beyond the scope of this blog, but I agree with those who think this could have been a great chance to talk about loan forgiveness (and if you haven't read this piece about how we could make public college free for everyone, you should).
Here's where some people lost their bets on if he'd mention Race to the Top (smart money was that he would, as he has every year):

 Race to the Top, with the help of governors from both parties, has helped states raise expectations and performance.  Teachers and principals in schools from Tennessee to Washington, D.C. are making big strides in preparing students with skills for the new economy – problem solving, critical thinking, science, technology, engineering, and math.

Oh, dear...no, Mr. President, it didn't. Even setting aside the debate over what exactly RTTT did to expectations (always a dicey thing to prove), you're way too early to talk about RTTT doing anything about performance. The Common Core just got implemented. Most of the tests haven't been used yet. It's simple cause and effect: changes take time. About all that's happened is a whole lot of money has been spent. And you should really read Bruce Baker  and Tom Loveless on what you can tell from NAEP results (surely we've got someone in the Department of Education doing that?).
And you caught that STEM mention, right?

Some of this change is hard.  It requires everything from more challenging curriculums and more demanding parents to better support for teachers and new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test.  But it’s worth it – and it’s working. 

Ah, "more challenging curriculums". Sorry, if you bet that he would say "Common Core," you lost. That's as close as he gets. Notice that it's plural, because it's not a national curriculum; as we keep being told, it's a set of national standards.
Regarding the "curriculums" versus "curricula" debate, please see Kory Stamper on "octopi." 
"(M)ore demanding parents" is echoing his Secretary of Education who earlier this month essentially went after parental expectations of education as the new shadow enemy keeping our children from international excellence. That was in the same speech where Duncan derided the number of teachers who come from particular parts of the college graduating class, though, so the parental piece didn't get much coverage.
On bubble tests, we've been hearing for years that President Obama doesn't like them, and yet:

Must work on the disconnect between Pres Obama's thoughts on bubble tests and fact that they've increased five fold under Secy Duncan.@tcbgp
— Rita Solnet (@ritacolleen) January 29, 2014

Not sure where the fivefold is; suffice to say it's getting worse rather than better.
On "worth it and working" please see above regarding Race to the Top. Also note the large number of demoralized teachers, the crisis in local education funding, and the one in four children in the U.S. living in poverty--all, I would argue, of significant import in talking about education and if and where it's working.

The problem is we’re still not reaching enough kids, and we’re not reaching them in time.  That has to change. 

Yes! Absolutely!

Research shows that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.  Last year, I asked this Congress to help states make high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old.  As a parent as well as a President, I repeat that request tonight. But in the meantime, thirty states have raised pre-k funding on their own.  They know we can’t wait.  

Okay, no argument there, EXCEPT that starting with three year olds is already granting a major gap among kids. We've got to go earlier and work with families. However:

 So just as we worked with states to reform our schools, this year, we’ll invest in new partnerships with states and communities across the country in a race to the top for our youngest children.  And as Congress decides what it’s going to do, I’m going to pull together a coalition of elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists willing to help more kids access the high-quality pre-K they need.

Not. Another. Race to the Top.
We're talking about three and four year olds. We are having absurd conversations about "performance" about TODDLERS. Have any of the people making these decisions talked to a four or a three year old lately?
We're going to have another competition for funding? Are we not sick--and I mean that literally--of this pitting of children and their educations against each other yet?
And, oh, look who we're going to ask to help: elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists. Three groups--and I say this as part of one of them--that have demonstrated that they know a ridiculously small amount about what education needs, whilst having a ridiculous inflated sense of how much they know. WRONG CHOICE, Mr. President. It won't get you bold-faced names, but how about asking some preschool teachers? some parents of preschoolers? some child development specialists? some pediatricians?
You know, people who know about kids?

Last year, I also pledged to connect 99 percent of our students to high-speed broadband over the next four years.  Tonight, I can announce that with the support of the FCC and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon, we’ve got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and twenty million students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit. 

Great, super, but the cynic in me points out that Verizon, Sprint and others are part of the reason that this has been hard and wonders what exactly they all want in exchange. And there are some things that government should pay for.
Then back to higher ed again--with an encouraging note about keeping young men of color on track (we'll have to see what that looks like)--before:

The bottom line is, Michelle and I want every child to have the same chance this country gave us. 

It's pretty clear that the President and Mrs. Obama had a lot going for them in terms of family support as they were growing up. It's not at all clear to me that he or his administration realize what a difference this makes in what happens to kids, or that he or they wish to do what they can for kids who don't have that.
Not to mention that the education that they are choosing for their daughters in no way reflects the education that he is moving the rest of the country towards.

New Orleans teachers win in appeals court

I retweeted this decision today, but I'm concerned at how little attention I'm seeing it get in the news. Big deal, folks! 
In a decision that may well bankrupt the school district (once they sort out who's going to pay for it), 7000 former New Orleans teachers won in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals today.

...an appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion.

The teachers were laid off after Hurricane Katrina as part of the massive reorganization of the school district, that resulted in a district today in which nearly all children attend charter schools. The court decision awards the teachers two to three years of back pay, an amount that lawyers said during the appeal could total $1.5 billion.
If you can listen, NPR's coverage is excellent, as they've interviewed Sarah Carr, who has been following New Orleans since Katrina (and wrote the book).

I think it's also important to remember that Secretary Duncan in 2010 commented that the hurricane was "the best thing to happen to the education system in New Orleans."

"picture of educational stagnation"

Oh, Arne...
If you're anywhere in the education universe today, there's a good chance you may hear some mention of the PISA results. These are the Program of International Assessment results from last year's test, released last night. PISA was taken by 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science in 65 countries, including the US; three US states received their own results: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida.
If you look at the above summary (that's Valerie Strauss, reprinting the basic rundown from PISA) you can sum up the local angle this way:

the US is doing about the same as it has been, and Massachusetts is continuing to rock the curve.
Enter the spin machines.

I'd say that Motoko Rich, from the New York Times, probably summed it up the best:

In the midst of increasingly polarized discussions about public education, the scores set off a familiar round of hand-wringing, blaming and credit-taking.

If you follow education at all, you can probably take it from there, which gives us the quote in the title from our U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I think it's fair here to point out that he became Secretary of Education in 2009, which is when the test was last taken, so if we're looking for top-down accountability, we can start there. We've got hand-wringing from business groups about global competition (at least this time I'm not seeing any read "Shanghai" as "all of China," so at least we've gotten that far).  We've got teachers groups pointing out that we've still done basically nothing on child poverty. And we'll have some complaints about the lack of standardized testing to measure what really matters.
I'm not giving links to all of the above; you can find it all in that NY Times article.
 
The Massachusetts results, of course, leave our educational leaders in a bit of a bind. They've been busily assuring us that everything's not been great, and so we must abandon the Mass state standards and the MCAS for the Common Core and the PARCC. You'd think that might put them in a tough spot going forward.
But bless our Commissioner; he never lets me down.
Here he is in the Globe this morning:

“We have a lot to be proud of in Massachusetts,” said Mitchell Chester, state commissioner for elementary and secondary education. “We have another marker showing our students perform better than most others in the world. But we still have room for improvement, particularly in math and science.”

...cue the comparison with Shanghai.
I'll leave it to others more knowledgeable about I than Shanghai to fill you in. Yong Zhao points out that the East Asian countries that have had rising PISA scores in recent years aren't satisfied with their educational systems' focus on testing. And Tom Loveless gives us this on Shanghai:

Shanghai’s population of 23-24 million people makes it about 1.7 percent of China’s estimated 1.35 billion people.  Shanghai is a Province-level municipality and has historically attracted the nation’s elites.  About 84 percent of Shanghai high school graduates go to college, compared to 24 percent nationally. Shanghai’s per capita GDP is more than twice that of China as a whole.  And Shanghai’s parents invest heavily in their children’s education outside of school.  According to deputy principal and director of the International Division at Peking University High School, Jiang Xuegin:

 Shanghai parents will annually spend on average of 6,000 yuan on English and math tutors and 9,600 yuan on weekend activities, such as tennis and piano. During the high school years, annual tutoring costs shoot up to 30,000 yuan and the cost of activities doubles to 19,200 yuan.

The typical Chinese worker cannot afford such vast sums.  Consider this: at the high school level, the total expenses for tutoring and weekend activities in Shanghai exceed what the average Chinese worker makes in a year (about 42,000 yuan or $6,861).

Anyone want to place a bet on Commissioner Chester advocating that we increase our educational spending in Massachusetts accordingly?
In addition, I have a real issue with this gamesmanship. The U.S. has not "dropped;" it's doing about the same. We've dropped in the rankings because other countries are improving their educational systems.
Isn't that good?
Do we really want to live in a world where we're doing better than everyone else because they're failing to education their children? More and more countries are spending more on education, educating more of their children,  educating their children for more of their lives.
This is a good thing!
I really, sincerely, do not care if we beat Shanghai. Or Finland or Poland or South Korea.
I do care that all children in rural China and Somalia and Afghanistan get a good education, regardless of how much education their parents have, where they live, if they're girls, or if they're wealthy.
 
That's the sort of world I want to live in, even if it means we fall in the PISA rankings.