It has been in vogue for at least a decade, maybe longer, to question American teacher’s abilities to educate its youth.  According to some politicians, America has had a series of Sputnik moments, starting in 1957 with the launch of the world’s first satellite, to most recently our annual penchant to ogle over the test score results that happen in Shanghai, Finland or Korea.  Think tank “scholars” use these test results to keep telling us that the sky is falling in the education of American youth.  Doomsday is straight ahead.

Many of these think tank’s believe that the American school system is broken and needs to be reformed.  The NCLB act, the signature education reform initiative of the Bush administration has created a system of education that pits teachers and unions against politicians, U.S. and state department’s of education, and well funded corporations and private foundations.  The deal is that if we could just get rid of the “bad” teachers, our students would learn so much more.  By using high-stakes tests in a few subject areas, and then statistically manipulating the achievement test data from one year to the next, we can determine the value-added affect of each teacher, and use this to weed out the “bad” teachers, and reward the good ones.

The problem is that the statistical use of the value added measure is unreliable, and very inconsistent even with the same teacher.  How could we possibly let the politicians, and bureaucrats get away with this when there is little to no research to support their reform efforts.  As I have written elsewhere, high-stakes test should be banned, and the decision making put back into the hands of those of who know students best: teachers and principals in the schools of America.

Now, back to the headline: Which system is broken: American public schools or the U.S. Congress.

I personally don’t think either is broken.  But, the American public school system has a lot more going for it than Congress.

For example, in a very recent Gallup survey of American citizen’s confidence in various entities in its country, 72% of American’s had either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in American public schools.

They had 12% confidence in the Congress.

If politicians and other bureaucrats think that the American system of education is broken, what do they think of the system they are working in?

Every time international test score from PISA or TIMSS are released, American students score near the middle, and politicians and think tank experts use this data to show how far behind the U.S. is compared to other countries, especially in mathematics and science.  I say this is preposterous, and so does Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, University of Oregon.  He analyzes American education in the context of comparing American education to the education in other countries, especially China in his book Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization.  He suggests that reform proponents, business executives and politicians have misjudged American education, and have convinced themselves that The Grass is Greener in other countries.

If science and mathematics teaching and learning is inferior to learning in so many other countries, how do we explain, as Dr. Zhao wrote, this from President Obama in a State of the Union speech:

America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers — no workers are more productive than ours.  No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs.  We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on Earth.

What do you think about American public school education compared to the work that is done in the U.S. Congress?  Do you have more confidence in teachers, or politicians?  What is the basis for your choice?  Tell us what you think.