Run Over by the Globe: Overcoming the Flat World and Reinventing the Educational Wheel in U.S. Urban Schools

Shortcomings of U.S. Education, Particularly U.S. Urban Education

The American education system has a superiority complex. From its inception as a nation, educators in the United States have focused on “the uniqueness of the American educational experience” because of their view of American autonomy, isolationism, and “sense of providential mission” (Gutek, 1993, p. 38). In addition to these views of superiority, the United States also has a false sense of satisfaction with its schools. U.S. parents “give higher ratings in all categories than does the general public” and “award better grades to local schools than to public schools in general and higher marks still to the schools their own youngsters attend” (McAdams, 1993, p. 38). Likewise, McAdams (1993) provides survey data which show that 92% of American teachers believe that their schools are providing good or excellent education and that 91% of school administrators thought the American schools were doing a good, very good, or excellent job educating the American public. Unfortunately, these assessments of the U.S. schooling process are far too optimistic. A report summarizing 20 years of American students’ performance on the very credible National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests concluded that “the result is a bleak portrait of the status of student achievement in the United States. Large proportions, perhaps more than half, of our elementary, middle school, and high school students are unable to demonstrate competence in challenging subject matter in English, mathematics, science, history, and geography” and that “fewer than 10 percent appear to have both an understanding of the specialized material and ideas comprising that curriculum area and the ability to work with these data to interpret, integrate, infer, draw generalizations, and conclusions” (Mullis, Owen, & Phillips, 1990, p. 29).

Multiple recent assessments have shown that U.S. academic achievement has been declining. For example, the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)—a fourth-grade reading test demonstrated that U.S. students’ performance has declined in both absolute and relative terms (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). American fourth-graders have shown a decrease in reading skills compared with 5 years earlier and also saw a decline internationally, slipping from sixth to 15th place in the international comparative ranking of reading comprehension skills. Moreover, the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; 2017) showed that students had lower scores on both the reading and math sections relative to the last administration. While these results are concerning overall, when broken down by student background, it is evident that the decline is driven by students from poor districts. While NAEP achievement has not changed significantly overall in either reading or mathematics when assessed over 15 years, there has been a trend in which the high performing (upper quartile) students have seen score increases while lower achieving (lowest quartile) students have seen significant decreases in achievement (NAEP, 2017).

Some authors might argue that these data are encouraging in that there are not major overall student test score declines such as those seen in prior decades and that the nation’s best students continue to show improvement. However, in the setting of an increasingly competitive global education and economic market, these data suggest that an increasing proportion of U.S. students, particularly those at a social or economic disadvantage, are being left behind and that U.S. schools are not helping them to prosper in the modern world. Considering that an increasing percentage of U.S. students are comprised of minority populations, this trend is increasingly concerning.

Furthermore, just as Payne (2008) notes many of America’s schools are entrenched in a culture of failure and Darling-Hammond (2010) points out U.S. schools’ inability to provide enough skilled workers for the changing and increasingly information-driven economy, this report concluded, “the current levels of student achievement are unacceptably low for our country’s need and aspirations and for the personal goals of its citizens” (Mullis et al., 1990, p. 29). Worse than our low levels of achievement, Payne (2008) argues that reform efforts consistently fail because school leaders do not understand the causes of failure, particularly in poor and urban schools.

Assessments of U.S. academic achievement in comparison with other nations tell a similar story. Baker and LeTendre (2005) used data from schools in 48 nations in Grades 4, 8, and 12 participating in the Third TIMSS tests in the 1990s to compare the mathematics and science performance of U.S. students in comparison with international students. The 1995 TIMSS tests revealed that U.S. fourth-graders performed slightly above average in both mathematics and science in comparison with students across all other nations, U.S. eighth-graders performed near the international average in both mathematics and science, and U.S. 12th-graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of the TIMSS nations in mathematics and science general knowledge, as well as in physics and advanced mathematics. On repeat testing in 2007, only 10% of U.S. fourth-graders and 6% of U.S. eighth-graders scored at or above the advanced international benchmark in mathematics. The most recent PISA results (2015)showed another decrease in 15-year-olds’ math performance (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2015).

While one would expect disadvantaged U.S. students to perform even less well than the average American student, the TIMSS data suggest that the degree to which disadvantaged students in the United States fail is even more profound as “the most disadvantaged students in the United States are not just affected at one level of the school system; they fail to achieve across the span of compulsory education” (Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 74). Race plays an important role, as well, as a recent analysis of PISA data showed that

White and Asian students in the United States generally perform well; the rate of low achievement for each subgroup is comparable to the rates of low achievement among the top-performing countries internationally. On the other hand, black and Hispanic students in the U.S. have staggering rates of low achievement when compared internationally. Only Mexican students fare worse than U.S. black students in both math and reading. (Petrilli & Skull, 2011, p. 12)

As Darling-Hammond (2010) notes, this starts with economics, with the wealthiest school districts spending as much as 10 times more than the poorest. There are also a number of important factors that contribute to educational inequality in the United States. However, the so-called achievement gap is reinforced by disadvantaged students’ limited opportunities for learning as young children, a shortage of qualified teachers in economically disadvantaged areas, a culture that accepts poor classroom behavior, and a lack of access to high-quality curricula (Darling-Hammond, 2010).

While these barriers to success of poorer schools seem that they could be overcome by resource reallocation, multiple other barriers make them harder to deal with. Educational reforms, while implemented widely, have had limited impact because they have addressed the wrong issues. As McAdams (1993) acknowledges,

America is a society that does not take education very seriously. There are no external standards of achievement which students must reach to graduate. There are no negative consequences for students who perform at only the minimal level necessary to graduate from high school. Acceptance at some colleges or universities is virtually assured for anyone with a high school diploma. The prevailing youth subculture stigmatizes studious young people as nerds. The distractions of part-time jobs, cars, teenage romance, and similar factors all conspire to downgrade the importance of sound education. (p. 62)

Yet instead of teachers being given resources to help alleviate their students’ downtrodden position in society or to fight these social problems, “American schools have been held to the almost impossible standard of being pivotal to the solution of a myriad of social ills” (Kubow & Fossum, 2003, p. 186). Low-achieving schools are unable to effectively recruit and retain teachers, and teachers are hamstrung by politics and bureaucracy that looks “for leadership anyplace but among the educators” (Payne, 2008, p. 146) despite the fact that

teachers strongly affect students’ educational opportunities. A key role of school leadership is to staff the school with strong teachers and they can do this through differential retention of good teachers, through recruitment and hiring, and through providing supports for teacher improvement. (Bateille, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2009, pp. 18-19)

In thinking about reform, urban schools must be a prime focus as the largest 100 districts in the nation contain 17% of all public schools, employ 21% of all public school teachers, serve 30% of the nation’s disadvantaged students, and 40% of its minority students (Snipes & Casserly, 2004). As Payne (2008) notes in So Much Reform, So Little Change, urban schools are often steeped in a culture of institutional failure in addition to these general societal problems. In bottom-tier schools in which Payne (2008) says “low expectations are part of the culture” (p. 74), individual failures are emphasized rather than “the over determined nature of failure in the inner city” (p. 45). These schools, he argues, tend to focus on individual characteristics, such as tests and accountability, teacher training, teacher pay, school choice, technology in the classroom, and other details, which, while important, do not address the major problems underlying the system. Changes made to affect teaching strategies, while well meaning, often fail due “lack of time, the hurried pace of change, the absence of assessment, false buy-in or no buy-in, and . . . ambiguity” and these school’s fundamental “inability to follow through” (Payne, 2008, p. 177). Furthermore, because “the long-run survival of democracy depends not so much on how the top fares as bridging the gap between top and bottom” (Benjamin, 1981, p. 7), it is truly sad that “most discussion of educational policy and practice is dangerously disconnected from the day to day realities of urban schools” (Payne, 2008, p. 5). While U.S. policy makers certainly “embrace an image of international competitiveness” as a rationale for curricular reform, “if there had been more thorough appreciation of how complicated the empirical relationship is between quality of curricula in nations and level of achievement of students, a more balanced set of reforms might have been developed” (Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 151). Furthermore, if they looked at education from an economic perspective and realized that “the international achievement gap is imposing on the United States economy an invisible yet recurring economic loss that is greater than the output shortfall in what has been called the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” and that “a modest goal of having the United States boost its average PISA scores by 25 points over the next 20 years—which corresponds to the performance gains that some countries achieved between 2000 and 2009 alone—could imply a gain of USD 41 trillion for the United States economy over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010” then, they might work much harder to make effective school reforms (OECD, 2010, p. 38).

Glimpses Into an Urban Education: Success Stories From the Rebuilding of America’s Schools

Unfortunately, overall, there is a lack of successful urban education programs. As Benjamin (1981) describes, “some schools are thriving in bold contrast to the educational and emotional malaise evident in most schools in low-income areas. Educational researchers . . . have come to call them “maverick schools” or “outliers”—for they are statistical standouts. Given the overwhelmingly dismal achievement pattern of low-income students across the country, these maverick schools are appallingly rare” (Benjamin, 1981, p. 6).

Whitman (2008) argues that exceptional schools are not as rare today as they were decades ago and states that rather than trying to find maverick schools, today’s challenge is to try and replicate them.

There are many different ways to achieve educational excellence and equity. First, student participation and accountability has worked in some schools. For example, the Atlanta Public Schools of the 1980s, a very large urban district with 117 schools and 90% African Americans, serves as a good example of a large district that was able to make substantial inroads toward this goal. During this period, the Atlanta schools were headed by Superintendent Alonzo Crim who sought to close what he saw as the achievement and ambition gaps by improving student achievement, assisting students with jobs placement, fairly allocating resources, and improving school communication (Fantini, 1986). Personalized assessments were implemented under the title of the “Pupil Progress Policy,” teachers were kept involved and updated, students were required to participate in community service activities, and as Crim put it “we also turned to our students themselves for contributions to creating this condition” (Fantini, 1986, pp. 154-155). This program worked very well and the Atlanta schools and its students, despite their economic disadvantage, exceeded the national norm in reading and math on standardized tests after increasing their scores by 8% and 19%, respectively, in just 2 years. Another school, the Inquiry Charter School and part of the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative, has used an unusual structure to make an urban high school into a beacon of urban academic success (Fine, 1994). With 90-min classes, the school is “writing intensive” and “project oriented,” using a yearly interdisciplinary “essential question” for students to explore “a range of curricular requirements” while engaging in “provocative, substantial inquiry” (Fine, 1994, pp. 99-100). The result of this school’s focus on critical reflection has been noticeable. In addition to academic success, it has also engendered “student activism . . . a welcome sign of critical democracy” (Fine, 1994, p. 103) such that “students learn to make themselves heard—to occupy speaking and acting roles in their educations, to co-construct with teachers what knowledge, whose knowledge, and how knowledge is produced in school” (Fine, 1994, p. 110).

Schultz (2008) describes how transformative this type of student-driven education that thrives on creativity and self-transformation can be. In Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way, Schultz (2008) describes how he created an atmosphere for his urban students to “embark on an experience in learning how the government works” with the hope and plan that students “might become actively involved in bringing about social change” (p. 9). His classroom was completely transformed into an office setting in which students shared roles and responsibilities; they were in charge of identifying problems, figuring out the steps needed to achieve their goals, and then finding solutions and even dealing with bureaucracies so as to actually implement their plans. The dominant aspect of such a unique curriculum, Schultz (2008) argues, must be “rooted in and relevant to the lives of students” (p. 127). Even though there is no protection that such a real-world curriculum will lead students to the changes that they seek, the process has immense value. By making education something the students have a vested interest in, this method brings enthusiasm, uses the Socratic method “a pedagogical approach that gives students questions to ponder rather than providing answers in a lecture-style format” to stimulate learning, promotes care and ownership of the curriculum, and promotes real-world knowledge. Such an innovative curriculum allowed “students to glean the meanings out of text at multiple levels” and therefore students were able to improve their standardized test scores despite the fact that they were not learning the tested material in a traditional way (Schultz, 2008, p. 87). Schultz believes in progressive teaching and education. Much like the benefits seen with the Eight-Year-Study (1930-1942) in which innovative curricula were shown to be as effective as traditional ones, this work shows that nontraditional and engaging curricula can effectively promote learning in today’s urban classroom. Schultz (2008) is an effective advocate for this type of education in which “students become constructors of meaning, vis-à-vis questions they sought to answer” and the teacher supports them by providing assistance in problem-posing and meaning making (p. 135).

In his book Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, David Whitman (2008) argues that a different strategy is effective in modern successful urban school: paternalism. He states that effective urban schools today need to

teach character and middle-class virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift because they believe that adolescents learn best in schools that minimize disorder and that students who are diligent and polite are more likely to succeed later in life” and do not “place the high premium on parental involvement. (Whitman, 2008, p. 20)

Rather, he argues, these schools

create a culture of achievement within the school that is at odds with the culture of adolescents’ peers and high-poverty neighborhoods. Such a school culture can also sometimes be at odds with a student’s home environment, particularly in families where no adult speaks English or has graduated from high school, much less attended college. Thus, by their very nature, the new paternalistic schools for teens tend to displace a piece of parents’ traditional role in transmitting values, serving at times in loco parentis. (Whitman, 2008, p. 20)

One example of such a paternalistic school is the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools which are grounded on the five core values of high expectations, choice and commitment by families, more time to learn, power to lead, and focus on results. This philosophy is “operationalized through an emphasis on (a) graduating from both high school and college; (b) spending more time in the classroom through extended day, extended year, and Saturday classes; (c) assignment of 2-3 hours of homework each night; (d) after-school access to teachers via cell phones; and (e) extensive professional development for school leaders” (McDonald, Ross, Abney, & Zoblotsky, 2008). These strategies work and the KIPP schools target low-income minority students who despite their demographic disadvantage are “consistently earning above-average scores on state tests” (Tough 7). Specifically, the KIPP academy in the Bronx has, for example,

for nine years in a row . . . had the highest math, reading scores, and attendance of any nonselective middle school in the Bronx. It ranks in the top 10 percent of all New York City public schools—and by the time eighth graders graduate, they have eliminated the achievement gap separating white and minority students. (Whitman, 2008, p. 174)

Paul Tough (2008) describes Geoffrey Canada’s attempt to create schools and programs in Harlem to not only accomplish the type of academic success seen by programs such as KIPP, but also to socially transform the neighborhood to create a place where school success would be possible for all. The idea seems simple, that “each child would do better if all the children around him were doing better,” but to the Harlem Children’s Zone, Geoffrey Canada, and the 3,000 children within the neighborhood this was not the initial reality. To accomplish his noble goal, Canada initiated a method he called “contamination,” whereby students within the neighborhood became involved in high-quality programs that began to “to change the cultural context of that neighborhood” so that students would talk about college and a brighter future, and other would hear them so that “you can’t help but get contaminated by that idea. It just seeps into your pores, and you don’t even know that you’ve caught the virus” (Tough, 2008, p. 125). Canada envisioned that by graduation, the youth that would return to Harlem would “become a part of the ‘contamination’ of the neighborhood” and that since the “adolescents do well, they’ll prepare your community” for a brighter future of young men and women who will be motivated to continue improving their community (Tough, 2008, p. 264).

While Tough (2008) describes many difficulties of trying to change school culture and achieve success in an urban area, Whitman (2008) goes on to describe a number of additional paternalistic schools that succeed in their attempt to transform their students. The American Indian Public Charter Schools in Oakland, California, for example, uses very strict discipline, requires all students to take challenging classes, and uses incentives including paying children for perfect attendance. In addition to boasting a 99.5% attendance rate, the school that has a population that is 70% Latino, American Indian, or Black and over 80% qualifying for the federal subsidized lunch program, “on the California Standards Test (CST), American Indian Public High School was arguably the top performing high school in 2007 in the entire Bay Area” including a number of affluent public and private high schools (Whitman, 2008, p. 88). Likewise, Whitman goes on to describe successes at Amistad Academy in New Haven, CT, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, the SEED school in Washington, D.C., and University Park Campus School in Worcester, all of which use “a culture of kindness, decency, integrity and hard work” so that they can

translate abstract goals into concrete benchmarks and rules, check constantly to see how everyone is measuring up—and intervene whenever necessary. . . . Students are shown exactly how they are expected to behave—how to sit in a chair without slumping, how to track the teacher with their eyes, how to walk silently down the hall, how to greet visitors with a firm handshake, and how to keep track of daily assignments. Their behavior is closely monitored at all times and the schools mete out real rewards for excellence and real punishments for rule-breaking. This close supervision might sound like a teenager’s worst nightmare, but it is an atmosphere in which students thrive and that many come to appreciate. The orderly environment makes learning easier. Youngsters feel valued and respected by their teachers; many report that their school is a second home. They learn new habits and develop new attitudes that pay off in small and large ways: they earn special privileges at school as they prepare to take their place in college and the world beyond. (C. Finn & Kanstoroom, 2008, pp. x-xi)

There are many additional types of urban success stories. The KIPP schools Payne refers to are relatively small, but many larger districts in poor and urban areas have had meaningful successes. Kirp (2013) notes that the model of Union City, NJ, schools should serve as a model for the types of slow but sure educational strategies that can lead a poor urban district to transform itself from low performance to high academic achievement. Specifically, notes Kirp, principles including full-day preschool, a “word soaked curricula,” an immigrant population that is fluent in its first language before learning English, a challenging, consistent, and integrated curriculum, high expectations integrated with a culture of caring, utilization of reforms driven by analysis of test scores, hands-on help for teachers and students, and incorporation of parents as partners in childrens’ education are common features of successful urban schools. Indeed, Kirp (2013) notes that a variety of schools from across the country have employed these same principles in different circumstances and that they are effective although they need to tailor to the specific district and circumstances.

Haberman (2017) creates a very similar list of priorities that he states set successful urban schools apart from their failing counterparts: an educational leader as principal, star teachers, a system of accountability, commitment to high standards, sufficient resources, parent engagement, and a network of human service providers. Haberman makes the bold assertion that these tenets are frequently present in one or two schools in a failing district but are not replicated because stakeholders in these failing districts benefit from the current system, and blocking their implementation rather than replicating it serves the interest of school boards, superintendents, and others who benefit from the financial structures, power, status, and privileges of the status quo. While this certainly is not the case in all districts, changing this attitude and challenging struggling schools to try to replicate their more successful counterparts is certainly an attitude shift which is needed.

Successful International Programs

Unlike the stories of success from America’s urban schools, which are few and far between, success is far more evident in other countries’ educational systems not only in individual schools but across nations. In addition to achieving more on standardized tests, these countries have made strides for equal and fair distribution of resources so that disadvantaged students do not suffer disproportionately to others. Finland, Singapore, and Japan serve as three examples of countries that have been able to achieve this level of success and balance in education.

Finland, whose students achieve at the top of international tests such as PISA has invested in teacher education so that highly qualified teachers can autonomously design curricula that focus on higher order thinking (Darling-Hammond, 2010). In addition, the Finns have invested heavily in early childhood education requiring all elementary students to learn three languages “because nowhere else in the world do they Speak Finnish!” and are provided with free day care in centers that are innovatively designed for the purpose of child care (Swiniarski & Breitborde, 1999, p. 51). Finland has been successful in achieving increases in academic achievement despite that fact that it is becoming more diverse with an increasing immigrant population and has avoided the inequities of the achievement gap (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Even ethnic minority groups, such as the northern indigenous groups, the Sami, Kven, and Tornedalians who were formerly “ridiculed and marginalized because of language and culture” have undergone a cultural revitalization within the schools whereby “the children’s background and previous knowledge is taken as a basis for further education” and “a cooperation between the school and the home and community is created” (Huss, 2001, pp. 154-155).

In Singapore, reform has been focused to “develop a creative and critical thinking culture within schools, by explicitly teaching and assessing these skills for students—and creating an inquiry culture for teachers as well” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 182). All students have an equal opportunity to attend all schools and financial barriers are nearly eliminated. Furthermore, Singapore’s status as the top scoring country on the TIMSS test comes despite being a multiethnic and multicultural nation. They even have an official policy of multiculturalism in the form of “a bilingual policy with English as the ‘commoner’ language and the ethnic languages—Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin—as second languages” to “help both to increase employment opportunities and to reduce communication and racial barriers, thus contributing to a more harmonious and better-integrated society” (Horsky & Chew, 2004, p. 253). Furthermore, “Singapore has demonstrated an unfailing commitment to equity and meritocracy,” by taking steps to “reduce the achievement gap (that) has been both social and educational” (OECD, 2010, p. 167). The government in Singapore looks to fix social ill because it believes that the causes of school failure lie in social situations such as single-parent families and has therefore developed a system of local councils that identify families in need and can provide financial and other kinds of support to struggling families.

One country with a history of isolationism such as the United States, which is also doing well in terms of achievement is Japan. With a highly centralized educational program, the Japanese system is intensive with a 240-day school year and “students, teachers, and parents [who] are extremely dedicated to the level necessary to achieve academic excellence” (McAdams, 1993, p. 225). Darling-Hammond (2010) points out that one of the efficiencies that allow Japanese schools to do this is that they have a much higher proportion of teachers and a lower proportion of administrators. Japanese teachers are taught to be very empathetic and the Japanese system as a whole tends to teach students to work well in groups, to care for each other, and their community (Tsuneyoshi, 2001). Even though Japan is more homogeneous, it is becoming increasingly diverse with immigrants from a number of Asian countries and it initially struggled to accept this ever-growing number of foreigners (Tsuneyoshi, 2001). However, as the government has accepted this influx of people, its education system has worked hard to “ensure equitable educational opportunities are available to virtually every Japanese student, regardless of the wealth of his/her parents” (McAdams, 1993, p. 225).

A number of other nations have excellent educational systems that produce better results and more equity than does the U.S. system. Students from poorer countries, such as Estonia, China, and Poland, outperform U.S. students on standardized achievement tests (C. E. Finn, 1997). The United States is not the only country with a long history of injustice and inequality and can learn from some of the measures that countries, such as South Africa and Brazil, are taking to try and address their problems, although certainly both countries are still struggling with this matter (Kubow & Fossum, 2003). However, the U.S. system is definitely unique in representing a wealthy country with high overall educational expenditures per capita (McAdams, 1993), a large achievement gap, and poor measures of academic achievement both internally and internationally. There are definitely lessons to be learned from abroad.

Bringing International Successes Home

The systemic successes from abroad that both achieve academic success and fairness are heartening in comparison with the American system as a whole. What do these countries have that we do not? While there are certainly political and systemic differences, none are insurmountable if we change the culture of educational reform. Darling-Hammond (2010) argues that we need “a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful education system” (p. 278) and that such a system must “guarantee all of the elements of educational investment routinely to all children” (p. 279). She goes on to make the case that structuring reforms to focus on learning goals, accountability systems, fair resource distribution, professional standards and supports for teachers, and reorganizing schools to promote learning will be tantamount to achieving this goal (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Certainly, these are all laudable goals and are all things from which we can take lessons from abroad.

With regard to investing in and developing teachers, Japan serves as an effective example. In Japan, education is highly valued and teaching jobs are sought after not only because teachers are relatively well compensated but also because they are highly respected as “agents of character development and nation-building” (Kubow & Fossum, 2003, p. 186). Despite class sizes that are on average over 40, Japanese teachers seek to develop their students’ growth and learning as ningen (human beings), and this involves an active focus on “balance of social, emotional, ethical, physical, aesthetic, and intellectual development” known as whole person education (Kubow & Fossum, 2003, p. 198). This comes with a great deal of responsibility, but Japanese teachers are up for the challenge: they are true professionals who “possess a specialized body of knowledge, [are] respected for that knowledge and skill by the larger society, [have] autonomy in performing his or her work, and [are] subject to peer review and sanctions” (McAdams, 1993, p. 207). They are able to do this in part because there are more teachers and they spend half as much time as their American counterparts in front of the classroom. While this whole child approach seems that it would greatly benefit the child suffering from “fragmentation, individualization, and competition that pervades life outside of school” similar to many low-income American students, Tsuneyoshi (2001) notes that in America, a focus on communal issues may be seen as “unduly restricting the freedom of its members” (p. 180). Therefore, while “it would be foolhardy to attempt to graft the Japanese educational system onto an American culture that is fundamentally different from that of Japan, many of the practices in Japanese education could be profitably adapted to our American system” (McAdams, 1993, p. 225). Indeed, Bateille et al. (2009) were able to use a quantitative approach that reinforces the importance of high-quality teachers and supports the idea that the Japanese ideas of making teacher certification academically rigorous, increasing teacher salaries and paying additional salaries to teachers in low-income areas, decreasing teacher workloads, and involving teachers in school policy making would all help improve the American educational system.

With regard to learning goals and accountability systems, the implementation of a standards-based curriculum instead of America’s patchwork system is likely to benefit all. Several countries, such as England, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Denmark, all use a common curriculum to ensure educational equity as

our penchant for ability grouping students . . . . creates a wide disparity in the instructional content offered to American students. The curriculum for many students consigned to lower academic groups is the equivalent of academic junk food. The students may possibly enjoy it, but it contains no educational nourishment. In other countries, virtually all elementary and lower secondary school students are exposed to the same academically challenging curriculum. (McAdams, 1993)

This is important and Schmidt, Houang, and Shakrani (2009) use their study of 10 countries to describe how national standards need not destroy local control of education and furthermore show that “the curricular standards in the top achieving countries were focused, rigorous, and coherent” (p. 24) compared with the diversified American curriculum that tries to cover too many topics superficially.

The goals that we set, must, however, be meaningful, as Darling-Hammond (2010) points out, and this means that they must speak not only to rote memorization skills and test-taking skills but rather focus on higher order thinking skills and problem solving. In urban and low-income classrooms, current education standards are used to promote “test-like teaching” and “low-level learning,” and this puts these students at a disadvantage. The corollary to having standards is that they also need to be enforced. This will mean that tests will need to be generated, which will assess student knowledge and be used to determine whether students are learning. We will need to become more similar to “European and Asian nations that have steeply improved student learning” by creating assessments that focus “higher-order skills” including organization, analysis, application of concepts, synthesis of ideas, communication, and teamwork (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 286). Whether this means creating high-stakes testing, such as the British GCE A-level exams and Japanese university entrance exams, is dubious as “if such a system were initiated tomorrow, only about 25 percent of current high school seniors could meet the criterion” (McAdams, 1993, p. 304). However, as experience abroad shows, it might serve as motivation and incentive for our students to live up to a higher standard. On the contrary, if it could doom schools in Harlem and the south side of Chicago, would such a system really be equitable?

Some scholars have argued that the differences between U.S. and foreign schools are too great to overcome and that the intrinsic differences in diversity and other societal structures make translating success from abroad difficult. However, many lines of evidence suggest the contrary and that it is an issue of priority and resource utilization rather than a matter of society and culture that leads to international differences and that modeling foreign nations’ equitable education systems is quite reasonable.

Despite the fact that economic disparities are widespread in the United States, they actually less prominent than those seen in multiple other developed nations (Darling-Hammond, 2010-2011). The OECD (2010) countries compared with the United States by the PISA tests actually have comparable socioeconomic student populations as those seen in the United States and the United States demonstrates a lower degree of economic inequality than 25 of the 34 nations in the PISA (Paine & Schleicher, 2011). Furthermore, the United States is one of only four nations that spend more money on economically privileged students and less on socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Comparatively, nations, such as Singapore and New Zealand, spend less money per pupil but staff their poorest schools with more teachers per student and often with their best teachers. As OECD reports point out, a number of other nations with fewer economic resources than schools in the United States produce better academic results and provide more equity for the students, in schools comparable to those evaluated in the United States.

There are multiple factors that are cited as to why U.S. students do not fare well when compared with their international competitors. While issues of culture, funding, teacher training, and curriculum design are commonly cited as major barriers to the success of U.S. students, comparisons such as TIMSS do not clearly demonstrate that any one factor is most important (Baker & Letendre, 2005). Instead, argue scholars such as Darling-Hammond (2010), the United States does not have a cultural issue but a resource allocation issue. Investment in urban schools and utilization of the educational principles cited by scholars, such as Kirp (2013) and Haberman (2017), can help U.S. urban schools rival and even surpass our foreign educational counterparts.

Conclusion

While the United States remains a dominant economic and political power in the modern world, its schools are lagging behind other nations. U.S. students’ academic achievement is lagging behind other nations as evidenced by the results of international tests and there is a persistent achievement gap between privileged students and those who are economically disadvantaged or who come from minority backgrounds. The U.S. curriculum is less rigorous than that of other countries, and the curricula in underprivileged and urban schools are even worse. While there are an increasing number of success stories from U.S. schools and even urban schools, they still remain the exception rather than the rule. Economic and cultural factors make it so that it is still very challenging to achieve academic success in inner-city and poor communities.

Another change that is needed is a change in attitude toward urban education. As Dell’Angelo and Mawhinney (2017) note, a fundamental shift in how we view urban schools may be a first step:

Creating a paradigm shift that prompts visions of strength and hope when we hear “urban education” could be a step in the right direction. A focus on what is working and continued efforts to find ways to mediate the stressors that so many of our children, families, school staff, and faculty live with every day can be part of that shift. A big part of the transition must come from those of us who have the power to create change. Our work must serve and build bridges. We must ask ourselves how we can be useful and work in collaboration and consultation with communities instead of perpetuating a parasitic presence that results in published papers found in big fat programs but not in real results for those whom we claim to serve. (pp. 358-359)

While overcoming the barriers faced by U.S. urban schools is immensely challenging and requires not just changes in policy but a change in culture, changing the educational culture starts one school at a time and can be done. As Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone and Brian Schultz’s class at Carr elementary as well as the charter schools described by Fine and the so-called paternalistic schools cited by Whitman show, poor urban students can succeed and should be given every opportunity to do so. Communities can be rebuilt and children whose socioeconomic status might normally doom them to failure can succeed academically. While it is unlikely that a sweeping set of reforms from abroad can be swiftly and effectively brought to this country to fix the problems of our urban schools, some of the techniques seen both from U.S. maverick schools and successful systems abroad can be implemented and can make more schools beacons of U.S. academic achievement and equity. Even though Payne (2008) speaks about the harsh reality of failures of inner city schools, he very poignantly notes that “one success . . . tells us more than a thousand failures: one success tells us what is possible” (Payne, 2008, p. 7). When we see that entire nations that have less economic resources than the United States have been able to adopt educational policies that have succeeded, we should therefore be able to use their examples as well those from within to transform and reinvent our educational system from one that is overrun by the globe into one that can will achieve academic success equitably.