#robert bruno

Some Cap practice 🎨🖌️ following Robert Bruno's perfect art as guide for, well, everything.

Across the nation [in the 2010s] school districts were organizing and closing schools.  The upheaval of school reform may have been necessary collateral damage if indeed there had been a crisis that needed fixing, but just as there had been questionable evidence in 1983, there was little to be found twenty years later, after the latest ‘education president’ had left office.  According to long-term trend results, reading and math scores had improved.  Additionally, based on national comparisons, US students were scoring above the international average  Graduation rates mirrored testing results. Taken cumulatively, since the 1970s, student standardized test scores did not reveal evidence of anything approaching a national crisis in public education.  Undeniably, since 1992, at least for elementary students, modest improvements in math and reading test scores have occurred.  But the growth was actually faster in the decade before NCLB was authorized than since the law went into effect.  Additionally, even these small gains cannot be strongly correlated with any reform measures.  Instead, numerous studies have documented that test score and graduation rates are much more strongly predicted by the socioeconomic status of students’ parents than any other particular variable.  In other words, when you take into consideration a student’s family economic status, little improvement is seen for low-income children.  The wealth effect holds for international comparisons.  For example, based on test results from at least 1999, when socioeconomic characteristics are controlled for, the discrepancy between US test scores and those in other wealthy nations disappears.  Comparing a middle-class suburban US school with its counterpart in Europe reveals no differences in test scores. The strength of the relationship between students’ socioeconomic class status and school success has not only effectively explained achievement disparities, but it reveals a growing problem that reformers have been hesitant to acknowledge.  Beginning in the late 1970s, economic policy in the United States had the effect of concentrating wealth at levels not seen since the Great Depression and overturning three decades of a roughly shared prosperity.  As economic inequality between the late 1970s and the second decade of the twenty-first century reached historic highs, the achievement gap between the wealthiest and poorest students nearly doubled.