NYTimes Looks at the Problem of Education

Paul Tough, writing in the NYTimes, has an excellent long article about the challenges in teaching underprivileged and minority children.

I was talking to my parents about this issue over break. I am from Denver -- though I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb. In the Denver schools, the majority of students are not doing particularly well. Denver schools have an unenviable drop out rate of about 53%. The people responsible for these sorry numbers suggest that this is because they have been presented with an insoluble situation. Most of the students are minority (a great many the children of illegal Latino immigrants), many do not speak English, and a great deal are poor. The idea that "people like me don't finish high school" is pervasive. On the other hand, it could also be because the Denver schools are poorly organized following curricula that have demonstrably failed to work.

This is the fundamental question of school reform: to what degree are the schools culpable for the failure of their students to succeed? Is the problem poor teaching, or is the problem that students -- for reasons cultural or otherwise -- do not possess sufficient motivation to succeed? (This is not to suggest that in most cases they would need motivation far superior to average.)

Partially the problem may be parenting as Paul Tough discusses:

Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children's development -- piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose -- playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends -- but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.

In her book "Unequal Childhoods," published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, "places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents' incompetence and disparage parents' decisions." Working-class and poor children, by contrast, "learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize." But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of "natural growth" disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.

Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling. Their work seems to reduce a child's upbringing, which to a parent can feel something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren't primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents -- and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite -- but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

Partially this may be the result of the failure to adopt effective teaching measures. Tough discusses one system of charters schools that appear to be working, the Knowledge is Power Program, in detail:

KIPP is part of a loose coalition with two other networks of charter schools based in and around New York City. One is Achievement First, which grew out of the success of Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven that was founded in 1999. Achievement First now runs six schools in New Haven and Brooklyn. The other network is Uncommon Schools, which was started by a founder of North Star Academy in Newark along with principals from three acclaimed charter schools in Massachusetts; it now includes seven schools in Rochester, Newark and Brooklyn. The connections among the three networks are mostly informal, based on the friendships that bind Levin to Norman Atkins, the former journalist who founded North Star, and to Dacia Toll, the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who started Amistad with Doug McCurry, a former teacher. Toll and Atkins visited Levin at the Bronx KIPP Academy when they were setting up their original schools and studied the methods he was using; they later sent their principals to the leadership academy that Levin and Feinberg opened in 2000, and they have continued to model many of their practices on KIPP's. Now the schools are beginning to formalize their ties. As they each expand their charters to include high schools, Levin, Toll and Atkins are working on a plan to bring students from all three networks together under one roof.

...

The schools that Toll, Atkins, Levin and Feinberg run are not racially integrated. Most of the 70 or so schools that make up their three networks have only one or two white children enrolled, or none at all. Although as charter schools, their admission is open through a lottery to any student in the cities they serve, their clear purpose is to educate poor black and Hispanic children. The guiding principle for the four school leaders, all of whom are white, is an unexpected twist on the "separate but equal" standard: they assert that for these students, an "equal" education is not good enough. Students who enter middle school significantly behind grade level don't need the same good education that most American middle-class students receive; they need a better education, because they need to catch up. Toll, especially, is preoccupied with the achievement gap: her schools' stated mission is to close the gap entirely. "The promise in America is that if you work hard, if you make good decisions, that you'll be able to be successful," Toll explained to me. "And given the current state of public education in a lot of our communities, that promise is just not true. There's not a level playing field." In Toll's own career, in fact, the goal of achieving equality came first, and the tool of education came later. When she was at Yale Law School, her plan was to become a civil rights lawyer, but she concluded that she could have more of an impact on the nation's inequities by founding a charter school.

The methods these educators use seem to work: students at their schools consistently score well on statewide standardized tests. At North Star this year, 93 percent of eighth-grade students were proficient in language arts, compared with 83 percent of students in New Jersey as a whole; in math, 77 percent were proficient, compared with 71 percent of students in the state as a whole. At Amistad, proficiency scores for the sixth grade over the last few years range between the mid-30s and mid-40s, only a bit better than the averages for New Haven; by the eighth grade, they are in the 60s, 70s and 80s -- in every case exceeding Connecticut's average (itself one of the highest in the country). At KIPP's Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year's statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located -- in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx -- it isn't even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.

However, he goes on to show how some people have criticized KIPP for taking the students who were already motivated -- the highest achievers of the underachievers.

Disentangling the issue of parental motivation and poverty from the problems of education is probably not possible. It is unreasonable to expect a school to work like a laundromat; you can't just drop off the kid at 6 and pick them up at 18 perfectly educated. In the absence of an environment outside school that stresses and supports education, education will not take place. However, it is likewise unreasonable to expect the deeply impoverished to provide such an environment -- an environment that these parents in most cases did not benefit from themselves.

It seems to be like all of these problems need to be taken together, but it also seems like we need to be more realistic about what can be done. We might need to begin to accept a degree to which this problem is in fact insoluble -- too complicated and entangled to be solved in any places other than tiny islands of success. It may be that success in charter schools will really fail to generalize to the rest of the school system.

One more point. When a situation is as complicated as this one, the imposition of standards is not sufficient to fix it. This is my primary criticism of the No Child Left Behind Act -- and it would appear Tough's. It is not that I disagree with the core premise that different strategies in education need to be tried, that a broader market for education needs to be created, and that all of these diverse strategies need to be subjected to a common benchmark to determine success. I agree with all of that. What I don't agree with is that I feel like the No Child Left Behind Act put the cart before the horse. It established standards while ignoring the structural changes -- school choice, more funding for underfunded school, etc. -- that would be necessary to reach those standards.

Definitely read the whole thing. It is a long article but worth it.

P.S. I think this was on the whole a fair article. However, does anyone else find this statement disturbing?

Right now, of course, they are not getting more than middle-class students; they are getting less. For instance, nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor -- where excellent teachers are needed the most -- just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.

Is he implying that we should not allow teachers to choose where they teach?