Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Most Students in Big Cities Lag Badly in Basic Science, and the reason seems largely based on economics and race:
while Atlanta was below the median in the ranking of urban performance, its white fourth graders not only did better on the exam than did 86 percent of fourth graders across the country but also outperformed the nation’s white fourth graders as a whole, who reached only the 62nd percentile. At the same time, the city’s black fourth graders were in the bottom 22 percent of fourth graders nationwide — two points below the national average for blacks.I've seen studies (and can't recall where now) that show parental income to be the best predictor of a child's academic achievement and of lifetime income. Racial disparities in income can make it difficult to parse out those differences in practice.
The finding that urban areas do worse than other areas is not novel. The assessment of Kansas educational costs last year found that getting comparable achievement from high-density urban areas would cost more than in less urban areas with comparable racial/ethnic and income levels.
Addressing that disparity ought to be a major focus of educational policy, followed by efforts to raise the overall quality of education. After all, education should raise all boats, and it won't do that until we understand why low-income, high-density areas underperform other areas.
Which is why I found it odd that the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest school districts, "call[ed] for national standards in science, and in reading and math as well."
Michael Casserly, the group’s executive director, acknowledged that political resistance to national standards was strong in a nation that generally considers education a prerogative of localities. But Mr. Casserly said such standards would lend clarity to efforts to improve achievement.What would really improve achievement would be better support and training for teachers. Recruiting the best teachers for urban schools is a perennial challenge, and it won't be solved by national science standards.
That said, I can't say I understand why the outline of school curricula is not standardized. Science, math, history and literature are all the same in Kansas as in New York, and there's no reason that someone moving from one state to another should have to worry about getting out of sequence as far as basic knowledge. The insistence that educational decisions be made as locally as possible seems anachronistic and counterproductive.
Comments
Posted by: RBH | November 16, 2006 2:03 PM
Good point. Programs like Teach for America help on the recruitment end, but don't do much to help keep good teachers in tough schools.
TFA is proud to note that 63% of people who finish their 2 years continue to teach somewhere, but only 34% remain in their same high-risk schools.
Posted by: Josh | November 16, 2006 2:24 PM
Is this discrepancy limited to science, or do all curriculum areas see this disparity?
Posted by: CSA | November 16, 2006 4:00 PM
I've poked around a little in the report on math and reading, and it does look like the trend holds for those subjects, in at least some form.
Posted by: Josh | November 16, 2006 5:07 PM
RBH: A 20% turnover rate for professionals is awful; a 50% rate is horrendous. Turnover in IT jobs is on the order of 8% to 15%, and employers offer recruitment and retention bonuses to lower it further. Since Bob Corkins took over at the KS state department of education, turnover has been running at about 21%.
Anyway, here's an interesting opinion regarding teachers who decide to remain in the inner-city schools: http://education.families.com/blog/my-inner-city-story-3-types-of-teachers .
Posted by: CSA | November 16, 2006 7:21 PM
"That said, I can't say I understand why the outline of school curricula is not standardized. Science, math, history and literature are all the same in Kansas as in New York, and there's no reason that someone moving from one state to another should have to worry about getting out of sequence as far as basic knowledge. The insistence that educational decisions be made as locally as possible seems anachronistic and counterproductive."
I think we know from the recent cases regarding the teaching of intelligent design and evolution in Kansas classrooms, that science education is most definitely not the same from one state to another, and it seems that the locals want to keep it that way.
Personally, I think the biggest problem is that schools are locally controlled and locally funded. If school funding was spread equally among all schools, rather than wealthy districts keeping all the property tax money for themselves, that would go a long way toward solving the education inequality problem.
I think the current practice of using property taxes to fund schools is really a way to perpetuate class and racial divisions in society.
Posted by: Jackie | November 30, 2006 1:01 AM