ParisTampaBlog

EDDRA correspondents have been writing a lot lately about Jerry’s gate-keeping.* I’d like to move that conversation on a bit. Most everyone agrees that Jerry’s gate-keeping is just fine and in any case entirely up to Jerry. We all know the disasters that could happen otherwise, at worst various kinds of hate speech, but most often a great deal of nonsense, thoughtless stuff in our in-box that we could all do without. Jerry has kept that sort of thing from happening to EDDRA.

However, I would venture the opinion that the EDDRA correspondents by and large, and perhaps Jerry himself, do represent a fairly narrow slice of current thinking about education, in particular in regard to attitudes toward the pubic schools. I would say that EDDRA respondents are anti-reform, believing, I suppose, that the schools are not in great need of reform, or fixing. Am I right about that?

I’ll show you what’s on my mind by asking you to respond (Jerry willing, of course) to five questions. Now this is not a test of the sort that so many of you have been writing about recently. (It’s interesting that in regard to testing you are certainly not of one mind.)

For my questions there are no right answers, and hence no grades.

In each instance I’ll tell you how I’d answer the question. I think now that my answers will probably be different from yours as I’m sure I belong to a different slice of that thinking about the public schools that I refer to above.

Let me say I very much appreciate being an EDDRA correspondent because I encounter from you opinions widely different from my own. And that’s good.

So my five questions:

1)   Did the makers of NCLB have the undoing of the public schools in mind when they fashioned the law? (I don’t think they did.)

2)   Which group of schools, public charter schools or public exam and magnet schools, do the most harm to the non-selective public schools in the district by removing the particularly talented children, as well as those with motivated parents (the latter being the basis of a common criticism of charter schools), from the general admissions pool?
(Isn’t the answer obvious? It’s the highly selective Exam and magnet schools, yet these schools are never criticized in this regard, usually because they have important friends, both in the School Department and in City Hall.)

3)   Does poverty itself do most to explain the achievement gap?
(Here although I agree with David Berliner and Jonathan Kozol of the devastating effect of poverty on the lives of children, I don’t think it’s the principal cause of the gap.)

4)   Closely related to the previous question, do you think there is any sum of money sufficient to close the achievement gap? How much?   (I don’t think there is.)

5)   This last question concerns the recent op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray. My question, is Murray right?  (OK, that’s hard to answer in one word. But what he says does make me question, again, whether we’re right to push all kids onto college. Murray says we’re pushing them into failure, failure to do what they’re simply not able to do ….like pass a probability and statistics course, reach master play level in chess, dunk a basketball… whereas they might have known success in something else. I’ve been pushing myself all my life and have never been able to reach master play in chess or dunk a basketball. And as Murray himself says, he couldn’t understand all the steps making up a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. We have to take into  account our limitations, and are we doing that properly with our kids in the public schools?)

Finally, I read on EDDRA’s web site that “EDDRA is dedicated to analyzing reports, dispelling rumors, rebutting lies about public education in the United States. “

What I’ve said above is perhaps not exactly doing that, but high on my on list of priorities regarding public education is the importance of sharing my own ideas on the subject with others and that’s what I’ve tried to do above.

*Jerry Bracey has an EDDRA list-serv of which he is the sole gate-keeper. Everything that reaches the 2-3000 individuals on the list has to make it through his "gate." that is, gain his acceptance, if not approval. This was sent to the list. Don’t yet know if it made it through the gate.

Diane Ravitch has mostly joined the chorus of voices speaking out against Tough Choices or Tough Times. See my earlier posts on this same subject, Letter to Jerry Bracey, and More on Tough Choices or Tough Times. Is she right? We’re going to look at some of the things she says.

In any case she’s a highly respected writer on Education and anything she does say is obviously important, and will probably be highly influential. She is a historian of education, a research professor at New York
University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the
Brookings Institution. Her books include Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, The Language Police, and, most recently, The English Reader, which she edited with her son, Michael Ravitch.

Ravitch doesn’t dispute the Report’s criticism of our present educational system. Instead, she looks at the Report’s prescriptions for fixing it. A number of these prescriptions or recommendations are non controversial, although perhaps too costly and therefore probably ultimately unacceptable, such as the recruitment of teachers from the top third of high school graduates going on to college, or universal pre-school. Actually we learn from David Leonhardt’s article in the NYTimes that universal preschool would have an annual cost of some $35 billion, not a lot of money alongside of Joseph Stiglitz’s $2 trillion estimate for the total cost of the Iraq War.

A number are probably too radical or simply by their very nature incapable of ever being realized, such as the recommendation that every school be operated by independent contractors instead of the local school board, or that testing be developed to measure creativity and innovation, teamwork, abstract thinking, self-discipline and other such qualities. Ravitch points out that the latter has never been done and won’t be done now.

So far Ravitch is probably right in her reservations regarding the Commission’s recommendations. Yet we know that a number of highly respected educators are behind this report, not simply the Report’s principal author, Marc Tucker, who by the way has his own parallel piece to that of Ravitch in the January 17th. Education Week. Among the Report’s authors are William Brock, David Driscoll, John Engler, Tom Payzant, and Richard Riley. These men represent vast working experience within or close to our public schools. Should we not listen to them?

Where might they be right, and Ravitch wrong? Or what recommendations contain reasonable measures that we might take to improve our schools? The Commission members are convinced that unless things change ("tough choices") our students won’t be able to compete with better schooled peers from other countries ("tough times"), and that not only our manufacturing but also our highly skilled or "knowledge" jobs will go away, and reappear in those countries where the pool of highly skilled labor is greater than ours.

This may or may not be true. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say. However, in regard to what I do know about the schools two of the Commission’s recommendations make perfect sense. One is that all students at the
end of 10th grade will take a board examination in the core subjects.
Those who score “well enough” will have the right to continue their schooling right then at age 16, at a community
college, these studies leading to either an associate’s degree and a job, or to further schooling at a four year state college.

Those whose exam scores are higher can elect to stay in high
school to order to prepare for a second set of exams of International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement difficulty. Doing well on
these exams will permit them to continue their education at a selective 4 year college.

It seems to me that this recommendation addresses the principal problem of our public schools, that of too many youngsters who, at age 16 and often earlier, lose all interest in school. The Commission’s recommendation by giving them something well within their reach has a good chance of restoring that interest.

On the other hand this recommendation has been subject to the harshest attacks by the Commission’s opponents. Why? Probably because it separates (tracks?) kids into "robins" and "starlings," into those who will take AP courses and those who won’t, into those who will need remedial work to gain admission to a community college, and those who will breeze through the SATS and go on to a four year college.

That which is politically correct today is that we keep the very best school outcomes open and available to all kids and for just as long as possible, regardless of their achievement in school. And  that if we do draw a line it be after high school. The Commission, on the other hand, would draw the line, say, between those who will take AP classes and those who won’t, at age 16. Shame on the Commission, many are saying, for suggesting that all our young people aren’t capable of doing Advanced Placement work.

But the line is being drawn, the separation is being made, and well before age 16, by the kids themselves. The result is that as kids move ahead in school the number of further schooling and job opportunities become less, not more. This is what is happening. The Commission didn’t make it happen, merely wants to deal with it.

Why do we insist on keeping up the fiction that this is not the case? Many young people, at age 16 or even before, would like to give up the fiction of college preparation and instead begin preparation for a job and a career. Instead of being given the opportunity to do this they are required or otherwise pressured into remaining in general college preparatory classes with the result that they either drop out of school altogether (about half of the Latino and Black youngsters attending inner city schools) or they remain in school doing little or no work for their classes and doing themselves no favor in regard to their futures.

The other Commission recommendation that makes a lot of sense is the following. Local funding of education would be replaced by state funding. Dollars would be matched to the needs of individual students. Thus schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students, whose individual needs are greater, would have more funding than schools that serve a more affluent community. Ravitch finds little or nothing wrong with this recommendation and expects that it will probably happen.

According to Marc Tucker writing in EDWeek, "Schools would no longer be financed by their
local communities, but, instead, directly by the state. The United
States, almost alone among advanced industrial countries in relying for
school funding on the wealth of local communities, would join the ranks
of nations in which school funding does not depend on local wealth.
Schools statewide would be funded on a formula, with each student worth
a certain base amount, with increments on top of that for students from
low-income families, students from families in which English is not
spoken at home, students with mild disabilities, students with severe
disabilities, and so on."

That, along with the restructuring of our high schools so that kids at age 16 are given some real choices, would do much to make what kids are doing in school, or out, correspond more closely to what they are able to do and to what they want to do. That is not the situation at present.

Our education problem, and we have a problem, probably follows directly from the two main characteristics of our educational system. One is that our best and brightest young men and women do not go into teaching but instead enter what were always more remunerative and are now more prestigious professions and occupations, including law, medicine, scientific research, and business, to name just a few that come immediately to mind. The achievement of our students in the schools has certainly suffered from their absence, although no less certainly has the active, entrepreneurial life of our country, benefited from their presence. (See Linda Darling-Hammond’s, A Marshall Plan for Teaching)

The other characteristic, no less destructive of learning and school success, is that we have continued to group children together by age and inexperience, with the result that they have little to learn from one another. And this situation is exacerbated 1000 times by the fact that the neighborhoods that feed the schools are themselves segregated by race, ethnic background, and socioeconomic class, meaning that the students from these neighborhoods who attend school together have even less to learn from one another when all together in the same classroom.

The new meaning of the common school, which originally meant that widely different children, including the children of immigrants, would come together and learn much in classrooms in common, now means that the kids with the most in common now attend school together and learn little from one another.

Helas! that our best and brightest are not the teachers of our young, and helas! that our young are placed together in groups, the make-up of which is probably detrimental to any real learning that ought to be going on.

I have written in earlier posts that grouping of students mostly by age for learning purposes is a terribly destructive compromise with learning itself. In my own life, and I suspect this to be true for most, real learning is pretty much a solitary experience. Even when we seem to be sharing work with others, such as finding by an apparent group effort the solution to a problem, each member’s understanding is probably his or her own individual understanding, not the same as that of anyone else.

This is why there should always be as many lessons as there are students in the class. The good teacher has to have each of her students in mind, both when crafting and presenting the lesson. Yes, it does seem like an impossible task, teaching the whole group when each one in the group has unique needs and unique responses to what one says and does. This is why teaching is such a demanding profession, probably much more demanding that that of the doctor who only exceptionally faces a difficult medical problem.

Every student is a daunting challenge for the teacher if she would have the student acquire some new understanding, and not just coast by, as in our large classrooms so many do, on previously acquired knowledge. Transmitting knowledge should never be the first order of business for the teacher, although this is probably what mostly goes on in class or in other large group situations in school.

Most of what the medical doctor does is routine, such as transmitting knowledge of his illness to the patient, and this is good given the nature of medical practice, which is just that, the knowledgeable expert enlightening the relatively ignorant patient. What a good teacher does should rarely be this, rarely be the routine transmission of knowledge, if she would truly bring about her student’s learning, which is best described as acquiring mostly by his or her own efforts new skills and new understandings.

The educator, Ted Sizer, knew these sorts of things about teaching and learning. He was not, however, able to bring it about that the best and brightest of our young people enter the teaching profession nationwide. Who might have done so?

Our president might have chosen to single out the volunteer teaching profession for planned action on his part but within our own country, rather than settling as he has on the volunteer army and marine corps for planned action in Iraq. But he didn’t, and although he now wants to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act he probably won’t by doing this lead the best and brightest into teaching, let alone leave by the law’s reauthorization no child behind.

Ted Sizer did lead a good number of our best and brightest into the many Essential Schools that he founded or helped create throughout the country. And, although he wasn’t able to change the way we group children by age, nor change the way our neighborhoods are segregated by race, ethnic background and socioeconomic class, he was able to bring it about that individual highschool teachers saw fewer students on a daily basis, that which enabled them to provide their now 80 rather than 125 students with a bit more individual attention. Not enough, but some movement if only a tiny step in the right direction. 

In May of last year the US House of Representatives began hearings on the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by George Bush on January 8, 2002, and now up for reauthorization. The law has many opponents, both on the right and the left. The central question that the Representatives must confront is still before us, no less today than 5 years ago. The question, how can the Federal government best support the efforts by the States to make all children, poor and wealthy, black and white, immigrant and native, proficient in both reading and math in a reasonable length of time.

No Child Left Behind is the Federal government’s attenpt to do so. I believe it was an honest attempt to resolve the problem of the achievement gap. The gap is there and doesn’t sit well with those of us who still believe in equality of opportunity if not of results. At the present time poor children living in poor neighborhoods attend schools where the majority of the students are like themselves, poor, and as a result their learning opportunities are severely curtailed. And so far, anyway, the achievement of these children lags well behind that of their middle class peers living and attending school in the more affluent suburbs.

We have tried forever to fix the problem of achievement gaps by improving the teaching as well as the conditions of learning within our schools, and so far all our attempts have been without measurable success. Nor so far has the No Child Left Behind Act been anymore successful in raising the achievement of underachieving poor children.

Many have written about the problem. It’s real. It’s real in spite of those who see both diagnosis and remedy, in this case NCLB, a conspiracy to undermine if not destroy the public schools.

Joseph P. Viteritti in chapter 14 of his book, Making Good Citizens, has this to say about the problem:

“Even though the black-white test-score gap that had reached its peak in 1971 seemed to be narrowing in the 1980s, the gulf remained dangerously wide at the end of the twentieth century. When Steven and Abigail Thernstrom completed their cyclopedic study in 1997 reconsidering the racial dilemma that Gunnar Myrdal* had brought to the attention of the nation fifty-odd years earlier their report on education was especially discouraging. They found that the average black twelfth-grader in the United States reads with the same proficiency as the average white eighth-grader. A study released a year later by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that the educational status of Hispanic Americans was even worse: the high school dropout rate among Hispanics was twice that of blacks and more than three times that of whites.”

For many years both David Berliner at Arizona State University and Richard Kahlenberg, a senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, have been addressing the problem. During the past year they have both weighed in with their own diagnoses and remedies about how we might best solve the problem of large numbers of poor children not progressing satisfactorily in our public schools, schools that still serve over 90% of all our children.

Here’s what David Berliner says, his solution being to renew the unfinished war on poverty:

“Our analysis is about the role of poverty in school reform. Data from a number of sources are used to make five points. First, that poverty in the United States is greater and of longer duration than in other rich nations. Second, that poverty, particularly among urban minorities, is associated with academic performance that is well below international means on a number of different international assessments. Scores of poor students are also considerably below the scores achieved by white middle-class American students. Third, that poverty restricts the expression of genetic talent at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Among the lowest social classes environmental factors, particularly family and neighborhood influences, not genetics, is strongly associated with academic performance. Among middle-class students it is genetic factors, not family and neighborhood factors, that most influences academic performance. Fourth, compared to middle-class children, severe medical problems affect impoverished youth. This limits their school achievement as well as their life chances. Data on the negative effect of impoverished neighborhoods on the youth who reside there is also presented. Fifth, and of greatest interest, is that small reductions in family poverty lead to increases in positive school behavior and better academic performance. It is argued that poverty places severe limits on what can be accomplished through school reform efforts, particularly those associated with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The data presented in this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations’ school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty.”

and, then Richard Kahlenberg, whose solution is to allow poor kids to attend schools outside of their own district:

“At the end of the day, separate but equal schools for rich and poor have never worked well. If the twin goals of the No Child Left Behind Act are to be taken seriously—to raise overall achievement and narrow the achievement gaps between groups—the law should be amended to encourage what research has long found to be the single most promising step for raising the achievement of low-income students: allowing them to attend high-quality, middle-class public schools. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings for this policy are already in place under the federal law. Now it is time to move from theory to practice."

So as of this time we have three tentative solutions to the problem of the achievement gap:

The No Child Left Behind Law, that would make the schools accountable for failure, requiring those schools designated as failing to initiate certain prescribed procedures intended to raise their students’ achievement up to the proficient level.

David Berliner’s war on poverty, which would provide considerable additional funding to address the full gamut of the needs of poor children, without as well as within school, for only when the conditions of their lives improve will they begin to work well and succeed in school.

And finally, Richard Kahlenberg’s plan that would permit poor inner city school children to enroll in more affluent middle class mostly suburban schools. And also, as the inner city schools improved, would his plan allow middle class suburban kids to enroll in what would become sought after inner city magnet schools.

As of this time we have invested, probably insufficiently, in just the first of the three solutions, simply because solutions two and three would demand more of us than we are ready and willing to give. David Berliner would have us give more of our tax dollars to the poorest school communities as well as the schools themselves. Richard Kahlenberg’s proposal would require that middle class families open their own schools and more important their own children’s lives to the lives of disadvantaged kids, most often minorities and immigrants, coming from impoverished inner city neighborhoods. Not much chance of either one happening on a wide scale, although there are a few school districts—Wake County, N.C., San
Francisco, and La Crosse, Wis., among them—that are consciously seeking to
integrate students by socioeconomic status. 

I would say that we’re now at an impasse. We’re apparently not willing to do what we would have to do in order to solve our problem. Not an unusual situation for our country to be in. So we ask Shto delat, or What is to be done?

*("Gunnar Myrdal called it the “Great American Dilemma.” He described the dilemma as a moral one, manifested by the nation’s failure to reconcile the democratic “American creed” of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity with what was referred to in 1944 as “the Negro problem.” Although the term is no longer in fashion, the problem is still very much with us. Racial inequality remains the most glaring blemish on the face of American democracy. At its core is an inequality in education defined by race, an inequality that persists in both opportunity and achievement. Not only is education the most crucial social variable for promoting meaningful citizenship in a modern age; all the others that matter—wealth, occupation, social standing, and skill—are to some degree a function of education." Cited by Joseph Viteritti in Making Good Citizens, Chapter 14)