By Steve Peha
I’ve lived in Carrboro for six years now and each year there’s been discussion of the achievement gap issue in our local schools. But this year, the gap has reached an unprecedented and, frankly, shocking level.
Currently, we have almost a 60-point difference in the achievement levels of white and black students. This is a larger gap than any I have ever seen in 15 years of working with school districts around the country. Worse than that, however, is the trend. While white students are holding steady at scores of between 90 and 95, black students are on a precipitous downward slide. And while it’s unlikely that either black or Hispanic student groups will ever hit rock bottom, a graph of test data from the April 23rd edition of The Daily Tar Heel makes it appear that these groups are possibly headed for zero over the next few years in this grade 3-8 reading and math testing.
In my opinion, we no longer have an achievement gap in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, we have an achievement chasm. This means that business as usual can no longer be tolerated. Specific efforts to improve the performance of black and Hispanic students must be put into place immediately. At the same time, the high performance of other students, of which we should be exceedingly proud, should not be compromised in any way.
So how do we pull off this educational sleight of hand? Surprisingly, it may not be that hard, as long as we start in the right place.
Literacy is the foundation of school success. And early literacy is the foundation of that foundation. By focusing our efforts on closing the gap in reading and writing at grades K-3, we can give low-performing kids a fair shot at being successful while at the same time supporting high-achieving kids. To accomplish this, there are significant changes we need to make in our classrooms. In particular, our teaching must become more efficient, more differentiated and more authentic.
Kids don’t enter school at the same level; gaps exist from the first day of kindergarten. In general, kids who come from less advantaged families, and those who don’t speak English very well, may be anywhere from six months to two years behind. This is time that must be made up in short order. For example, if it takes us six to eight months for kindergarteners to learn their letters and sounds, and to write their first sentences, we need to switch to methods that can accomplish this in six to eight weeks. Moving faster, with better strategies, and with more intensity toward key developmental goals, is absolutely essential.
To make sure that all kids, regardless of ability, receive a high-quality education that meets their needs, we need to do a better job of differentiating instruction. This usually comes down to two things: more and better individual conferencing so teachers can increase their one-on-one time with students, and improved classroom management to facilitate this. The more differentiated we can be, the better we can do at meeting the needs of individual students, regardless of differences in ability.
Finally, we need to make sure the reading and writing tasks we ask children to engage in are practical, useful, appropriate and meaningful. In other words, we must strive to make literacy instruction more authentic. It’s all well and good to engage kids in elaborate art projects around the books they read, but it doesn’t do a lot to improve their reading abilities.
And while acrostic poems are cute, they don’t help kids improve the grammar and sentence structure of their writing. The same might be said of worksheets, workbooks and test-prep activities. Higher volumes of authentic reading and writing are vital for low-performing students and, best of all, they’re good for high-performing kids too.
Closing the literacy gap by the end of third grade is essential for several reasons. First of all, the human brain is more receptive to language learning between the ages of 5 and 8 than it is thereafter. Second, at fourth grade and above teachers tend to have less literacy training than their K-3 peers. Finally, as kids head toward and into middle school the curriculum changes dramatically. At sixth grade, kids lose half their reading and writing time while the volume and difficulty of content-area work they are expected to do increases dramatically. In short, by sixth grade there’s little time to learn to read and write anymore. (We may need to change this too, but that’s another battle for another day.) Language Arts becomes more about literature and less about reading and writing, and a huge load of hard work descends from the social studies, math and science departments.
Closing the achievement chasm won’t be easy, especially when it has reached 50-60 points, as it has this year in our district. But addressing it is imperative, as we now risk the creation of a permanent educational underclass. A few more years of scores like these and no one will be questioning them. We will have reached a stage of educational determinism where the color of a student’s skin or the size of a family’s bank account accounts for the level of achievement kids attain.
This is a thoughtful post. However, the same “gap” can be observed without considering race as a criteria.
College Board (SAT) publishes the results of over 1.5 million test results each year which are broken into several cohorts. While African Americans perform at the bottom of the overall performance, sorting by other demographic profiles yields similar results. Children of families with low income, and children whose parents have not attained higher levels of education perform similarly.
These differences are not minor. Moving up the economic ladder, children of families whose incomes are higher, show increases at every single level. $60K outperforms $40K.
$80K scores better than 60. $100K beats 80. $120K tops 100. And so it continues. Children of families earning over $200,000 score significantly higher than children of families who earn “only” $160,000.
The same holds true as educational levels increase within a household. The more advanced the educational level of the parents, the higher the level of performance of the children. There is not a single inconsistency in any of the data.
Studies have also shown that children of two parent homes perform better, as a sample, than parents of single family homes.
Children are a product of Nature and Nurture. Children of highly educated, financially successful parents are most frequently concentrated in “White” households. But the Triangle has many highly educated and financially successful African American families. These children largely perform equally with Asians and Whites, with some exception. Too frequently, give in to peer pressure to “be Black” and not conform to White expectations.
Are we asking schools to do too much?
Children are in school, by law, just under half the number of days in the year (180 our of 365).
School hours occupy roughly half the hours that a child is awake and assorbing outside influences.
Therefore, children are in school for roughly 25% of the time that their character is being formed.
During that 25%, the primary obligation of schools is to present the material that students are expected to master at any given grade level.
Recent research has identified the “expectation of success” as a major factor in predicting academic performance. Children of financially successful, educated parents are expected to perform well, regardless of race.
And their children perform well. Due to “Nature” they begin life with IQ’s which are 20 or 30 points higher than their classmates.
Due to “Nurture” they are raised in homes where education is respected and emphasized. These children receive parental assistance with homework and establishing good work ethics.
Basically, they receive support over the 75% of the formulative hours that children are outside of school.
The more performance is emphasized, the greater the gap will become, because those with greater access to an enhanced environment will develop at a faster rate than other children who are without the same advantages.
The problem is societal and cannot be solved by schools alone. America has a reputation for allowing anyone to make a better life for themselves, but in reality it’s a lot easier for someone who comes from means to make something of themselves than someone who does not.
Great post, Mr. Baron. Thanks for starting the dialog.
Are schools being asked to do too much? Current successes all over the country would seem to indicate “no”.
My own personal experience as a consultant confirms this as well.
For example, I’ve seen literally hundreds of classrooms around the country where all kinds of kids are successful. Then we have institutional models like the KIPP schools to look at. Finally, there are special schools like Nanci Atwell’s Center for Teaching and Learning where all kinds of kids reach extraordinary levels of success. So we now have many models — both of good teaching and of good schools.
Both nature and nurture can be overcome. It isn’t easy but it isn’t out of reach either. And the consequences of not reaching for it are simply too dire to bear.
You suggest in your final paragraph that the problem is societal. Of course it is! But school is an invention of society. So, by definition, society can change it.
Best practices in district, school, and classroom practice are well-known and thoroughly documented. That 95& of administrators and teachers refuse to use these practices is the true societal reason for our students’ poor performance.
While we fundamentally disagree over whether or not schools can be all things to all students [in developing the skills AND values which permit students to achieve], I am certainly not making blanket statements in defense of schools.
The North Carolina State Legislature continues to pass educational laws which are truly baffling. If their intent is not outright racism, then it is, at the minimum, the unintended consequence of their action.
I will describe three examples as briefly as possible.
1. The arbitrary increase in proficiency standards. Up until this year, approximately 80 percent of black students in the CHCCS high schools were reading at what the state termed proficient. This year due to a push to make standards more rigorous, that figure has dropped to below half. Moving the goalposts discriminates against students who are reclassified. Efforts to improve reading scores in high school should be accompanied with curriculum changes starting in elementary school and hold the products of that bacground accountable, rather than just relabeling last year’s successes as this year’s failures.
2. Our arbitrary, statewide seven point grading scale (93 or above for an A; 85 for a B, etc) denies many students scholarships and college admissions. The overwhelmingly accepted scale is 10 points, according to the US Dept of Education. Across the nation, scores of districts have switched from more restrictive scales to the more standard 10 point scale — no school districts have moved the other direction. The impact is particularly egregious in CHCCS, since grades are norm referenced, unquantified measurements and the extremely high performing sample skews the curve. The result is that our students who perform at comparable levels on criterion referenced performance measure (i.e. SAT) show significantly lower GPA’s. In spite of claims to the contrary, colleges do not adjust GPA’s in any meaningful way to compensate for “harder grading” school districts, and many scholarships have minimum GPA qualifications which are sometimes stated to three significant digits. This regressive policy impacts students of all color, except those at the very top few percent.
3. The High School Diploma of last resort, the GED, has a state mandated artificial threshold which prevents students who could pass the test from even taking the test. In order to receive certification to even take the test, students must pass a pre-test with significantly higher performance requirements than the test itself. This arbitrarily imposed threshold seves as a defacto gatekeeper over who is allowed to take the test. It is similar, in many ways to an unconstitutional poll tax or reading test requirement for voting.
Institutional racism is alive and well in North Carolina, yet I cannot completely hold the institutions responsible for the success or failure of every student. As previously mentioned, students are in school for only 25% of their active, impressionable hours — in other words, not including sleep. Positive values, such as desire to succeed, expectation of success and appreciation of the value of education, must be reinforced during some of the 75% of the time that students are available to receive counter-messages and negative influences. It’s a numbers game. Yes, schools are a product of society, but they are not society in its entirety.
Great post from Elliot.
In noting how school performance increases with each level of income, such that a “chasm” is created between those at the top of the ladder and those at the bottom, one exceedingly simple solution has been overlooked:
Getting rid of the ladder.
In Northern European countries (and German, France, Belgium, etc. to a lesser degree) as well as Japan, there is a much greater emphasis on income equalization between those at the top and bottom of the income ladder. Not surprisingly, they also have far less crime, higher GDPs per capita, and better standards of living than we do.
Of course, as Americans we insist on claiming to be the best at everything (while Europeans are individually more wealthy, the Chinese win more gold medals, and nearly the entire industrialized world does a better job of educating their children) when all we really have now is the biggest Gun.
I would kindly suggest that there is no real solution to the education gaps referenced in the article without tackling the larger social issue of income inequality. We also need to find a way to financially discourage bad parenting (teen pregnancy, having 8 kids with no job, etc.) and reward good parents (U.S. mothers would be jealous to see how responsible parenthood is financially rewarded in France, Italy, etc.).
Messrs. Bing an Eliot,
Interesting thinking all around. But I really want to promote a much simpler solution: good teaching.
Not great teaching. Not amazing teaching. Not make-a-TV-movie-of-the-week teaching. Just good teaching.
It turns out, we could narrow the “gap” to almost nothing if we:
1. Got rid of our worst 10% of teachers.
2. Increased the proficiency of our middle 80% of teachers by 10% (takes about one-two days training with our company to achieve this.)
3. Completely left the top 10% of teachers ALONE so that they could serve as true models of practice rather than having to shoehorn their great work into today’s bad government policies.
This is all very doable. Even getting rid of the lowest 10% is doable in the most unionized districts. Most of this will happen by attrition anyway.
So while there are sweeping reorganizations of our system and society which could solve the problem. Something very simple could solve it, too: a modest improvement in teaching quality.
Cheers!
Steve Peha