A Quick Peek at How Chicago Students are Performing

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Joe Nocera comments today on the teacher strike in Chicago:

There really isn’t much evidence that introducing choice and competition — an important rationale for charter schools — has forced the big-city public schools to improve. Until somebody figures out how to create reforms that work for all, and not just the lucky few, American public education will continue to suffer….Students in other countries now regularly outperform American students. We are truly in the midst of an education crisis — one that won’t be solved until we completely rethink the way we offer public education.

Is it true that big-city schools have failed to improve? There’s plenty of evidence that American students in general are doing better today than they did 30 years ago — you can see my brief overview of the raw NAEP data here — but as it happens, there’s also evidence specific to big-city schools. It’s called the Trial Urban District Assessment and it hasn’t been running as long as the main NAEP. However, it’s been running for about a decade and has now collected enough data to show us some trends. Here’s the data for Chicago in reading and math:

As you can see, test scores both in Chicago and in urban schools generally have risen over the past ten years. Scores for fourth graders have increased even more dramatically. More here.

As for whether we’re falling behind the rest of the world, I don’t know. The data is frustratingly mixed on this subject, and long-term data barely exists. My best take, however, is that nothing much has changed. The United States has always performed above average (compared to other industrialized countries) but only by a little bit, and that still seems to be true. I don’t think there’s been much upward or downward movement over the past few decades.

As usual, I don’t have any special comment to make about this. Maybe this improvement is a statistical mirage. Maybe it’s real but we should be doing even better. But whatever you think, it should be based on the best data we have. And this is it.

For more on the Chicago teacher strike itself, check out Dana Liebelson’s explainer here. It will answer most of your basic questions.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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