Reading Diane Schemo’s inaugural education column in today’s New York Times, (“It Takes More Than Schools to Close the Achievement Gap”) provoked uncomfortable feelings. She talked about the importance of children’s personal and family lives to their academic success. There is no argument there–who could dispute that children need decent housing and medical care as well as decent education? But in citing the Coleman report from the 1960s she recalled a time, before NCLB, where Coleman’s findings were used to defend a widespread view that “there’s nothing schools can do” for impoverished children. Schemo re-opened that can of worms just a tiny bit, but it set off alarms.
NCLB explicitly rejected the “nothing schools can do” argument, and extensive research demonstrates that there is plenty schools can do to close the achievement gap.
Which brings up Charles Murray and his very troubling column on NCLB in the Wall St. Journal July 25. Leo Casey has already taken him on with his usual insightfulness, but just to go back over it once more:
Murray says that NCLB is fatally flawed because “proficiency,” the standard which NCLB upholds for every child, has “no objective meaning that lends itself to a cutoff.” What’s more, he says, the achievement gap has not really closed at all. It’s simply that most white students are already over the “proficiency” threshhold where doing better doesn’t really count, while more children of color and poor children are making it over the bar. Murray is wrong about proficiency, and Murray is a big lightning rod for conservatives. His thinking has to be challenged and countered. And it was–by other conservatives.
I don’t often talk nicely about the viewpoints in Fordham Foundation’s “Education Gadfly” (in fact, I usually don’t even talk civilly about them) but in the July 27 issue is a clear and compelling answer to Murray by Michael Petrilli that is worth reading.
Proficiency absolutely means something, he says, and NCLB, despite its shortcomings, has succeeded in getting more children over that basic proficiency bar. The work has not been easy; state standards are still too low; the achievement gap is still wide; curricula is weak. But that does not mean the basic aims and means of NCLB should be abandoned.
Petrilli writes about the effects of NCLB so far:
“So is this progress or not? If your goal is to arrive at a utopian future wherein all 18-year-olds possess the exact same knowledge and skills, group differences disappear, and the bell curve is flattened, the answer is no. But if you believe that “proficiency” has some meaning, that there is a certain level of literacy and numeracy required for meaningful participation in our economy and democracy, and that we are making gains in getting more students of all racial groups to this proficient level, then the answer is undeniably yes.”
OK, NCLB testing is very crude (as is almost all standardized testing) and states’ and school district reactions to the federal law have been anything but enlightened. But NCLB’s pivotal message–that schools can and should do something about the achievement gap and that everyone from state governors on down must be accountable for it–that must not be lost. Yes, there will always be an achievement curve; no, schools can’t do it all. But let’s not switch to reverse when we only just got into 1st gear.
1 Comment:
1 Math_Teacher
· Aug 15, 2006 at 10:24 am
To say “schools don’t matter” is blatantly false (as Senator Moynihan said, “kids don’t invent algebra on their own”). But to say that is — in any way — what Schemo is saying is also blatantly false. I’m glad you’re troubled by this — a good journalist afflicts the comfortable, and I hope this column will do so, and ultimately help us comfort the afflicted as well.
Why must the problem — or its solution — be *either* schools *or* outside factors? Clearly, this is a complex problem, likely to have complex causes and complex solutions. Taking a reductive approach is unlikely to work.
Leo Casey has already (in his subsequent post) brought up the validity of the mountain of research Rothstein has assembled. Clearly, both home and school influences matter — and it’s our duty as teachers to make this clear. We must keep teaching in effective and innovative ways, and *at the same time* agitate for different treatment at a systemic level. When a ship is leaking, you can (and should) bail it out *while* you try to fix the leak.
Finally, I wonder if the *exams we have* assess important skills and knowledge, and if the levels of proficiency defined are legitimate.
If you head on over to the NYSMathAB email list at MathForum, you will see tens (surely, cumulatively, hundreds) of messages from math teachers who recount students who “passed” the Math A exam (roughly, algebra I and some geometry content) but are woefully unprepared to even begin Math B (which continues with geometry through some functions and trig content). So does a 65 on the Math A exam (which converts to a “3 – Meets Standards” in the land of NCLB) signify any sort of “proficiency” with school mathematics? Does it signify any sort of useful learning?
I firmly believe that assessments can be created that reflect genuine proficiency at a level appropriate to the grade level and subject. But I really doubt that these are the assessments we have; that the people of this state are sufficiently aware of the issue that they’ll pay for making and administering them; or that those assessments will look much like the existing paper-and-pencil tests that esteem procedural and application-level knowledge over deeper understanding.
We should not throw out the focus on the achievement gap. But let’s not allow people to declare “Mission Accomplished” when the reality is that the situation remains quite dire.