Education reform is an unmitigated disaster. Years ago, before the advent of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I observed that the rapidly spreading inclination toward standards and accountability in public education was like measuring Hansel and Gretel more often and expecting them to gain weight. Since then, American educational policy has wandered deeper and deeper into the forest.
The latest crumbs tossed at the problem come in the form of the so-called Race to the Top (as though learning is a race and everyone can stand together on the summit) which, like all sound bite reforms, is over-hyped and under-funded. The relatively meager funds don't even come close to compensating for the deterioration of state and local funding because of the ongoing recession. And the test-driven pedagogical practices demanded as conditions of this funding are nearly certain to further diminish the quality of the learning experience in American schools.
While it is disturbing and ironic that federal policy and funding are driving poor educational practice, there is a significantly larger elephant wandering through this thicket. If one takes a few steps back from the trees and looks at the forest, it is clear that the symptoms of educational decline in America have nothing to do with schools, teachers, pedagogy, standards or accountability. Decades of research indicate strongly that the decline in student achievement can be accounted for entirely by the dramatic increase in wealth disparity and the persistence of racism in America.
One such study, from the Institute for Research on Poverty, reported a nearly straight-line correlation between growth in the wealth "gap" and the increase in educational inequality. Countless other studies confirm this basic relationship. Whether in terms of college matriculation, test scores or drop out rates, the problems driving current misguided policies can be traced to an increasingly inequitable society.
But educational policy makers and social commentators, including the President and Education Secretary, blindly operate on the opposite cause and effect premise: that the increase in wealth disparity is somehow caused by the erosion of educational standards and if we only demand more of poor children, particularly children of color, social injustice will be cured. It is an educational version of the mean spirited "pull yourself up by your boot straps" attitudes that have inhibited social justice for many decades. As has always been the case, one can't pull up on boot straps when owning no shoes.
The best predictor of academic success has always been financial and social capital. This is true in looking at school success by district or SAT score by individual. Everyone knows this but no one wants to talk about it. People and communities with more resources enjoy advantages such as more home stability, more books and oral language at home, more pre-school opportunities, better air quality, better educated parents, less stress and perhaps most powerfully, more cause for optimism and a higher sense of self-worth.
Particularly in the wake of Herrnstein and Murray's offensive (and bad science) book The Bell Curve, the debilitating effects of race and class on "intelligence" and learning have been broadly acknowledged. Herrnstein and Murray were guilty of an intellectual version of the faulty cause and effect premise that fuels current educational policy. They observed racial differences in IQ scores of roughly 15 percent. While their theory (and the general field of psychometry) is complex, the most wrong-headed notion emerging from their work was that this IQ disparity explained social inequity.
While this debate has not been entirely settled, research showing the opposite cause and effect relationship has soundly rebutted their work. Historically disadvantaged groups perform less well on intelligence tests because of their diminished status. Over many decades lower castes in India and Japan have shown similar deficits in IQ testing, but it was not being less intelligent that relegated them to the lowest class -- it was being relegated to the lowest class that suppressed performance on intelligence measures.
One fascinating study tracked members of a low Japanese caste with many members who moved to California. Their supposed intelligence deficit of 15 percent disappeared when they moved from social oppression to a more equitable society. This has been similarly confirmed in studies of European Jews, who had tested significantly below average in the World War I era and then radically changed in a mere generation after emigrating to the United States.
All the hot rhetoric over educational achievement is nonsense. The problem in America is a dangerous class divide, not a crisis in teaching and learning. Until we address deepening poverty, demoralizing unemployment and insidious racism, too many American children will fulfill the sad prophesy they inherit.
A previous iteration of this piece appeared in the Valley News
Follow Steve Nelson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snelson0248
The only hope for those in the endless cycle of poverty is to rise out of it. And this can't happen until our inner cities are as well-equipped with computers in schools and homes, and the children are able to utilize the same internet and its tools, as the rest of the citizens in this country.
While inner city schools crumble from lack of funds, and no computers in the homes, how can these children possibly compete with those who have their hands on keyboards as soon as they can reach out and touch them?
This is a topic that so infuriates me that I'll be quiet now and back out of the conversation.
The inequity in our urban schools compared to their suburban counterparts is sickening. It's criminal neglect.
We should all be mightily ashamed, and the d#@! politicians are the worst of the lot. Rise to the Top, indeed! Shame on you, President Obama, for falling for that barrel of nonsense.
Shame on our government.
Shame. On. Us.
Question: Has "No Child Left Behind" improved the overall quality of education in the United States?
Over 800 votes cast with 86% voting "NO". We've received many excellent comments from teachers from all over the country!
Just like Herrnstein and Murray. Denial is no more a solution than the Flat Earth or anti evolution models.What is needed is a solution of sorts
Test students at the beginning of the year. Test them frequently throughout the year. Use the results of the tests to drive instruction that attacks the problem and provides appropriate instruction. Students come to us, now, with a wide range of readiness. Some are years behind, some years ahead. How can one possibly provide appropriate instruction without testing and responding to testing results with appropriate data-driven instruction.
For children in school, poverty is small comfort as an explanation for why they are not succeeding. The job of schools is to educate the students who come to them. Odden's doubling books, I think, suggest the right approach
MORE TESTING?
You wrote, "How can one possibly provide appropriate instruction without testing and responding to testing results with appropriate data-driven instruction."
Extremely easily, sir. A good teacher can listen to a child read for 3 minutes and know more about her than all of the tests put out by each of the 50 states combined show, and good teachers and principals know it. That is why we are so appalled at the huge sums of money spent on TESTS, instead of extra reading teachers, extra computers, and extra _______ (whatever a given school might be missing).
The tests don't measure minds. They measure which children can read the test well and which can't.
But the MINDS of these children. They are as able, active and willing to learn as any other child.
The sooner the politicians and people with money and power stop playing games and listen to the people in the trenches—forward-thinking teachers who see the naked emperor and even know what to DO about it, as mentioned in the article above—when they stop counting coins and sitting in boardrooms—when they finally SEE it...
Then we can take our wounded children and teach them as they deserve to be taught, smart and slow, rich and poor, black and white. And the world will slowly but surely change, and very much for the better.
Internet is a great placed to get education and its is a whole lot more affordable than public school.
The children of the hoi polloi are increasingly to be educated on the cheap by non-unionized teacher temps who'll plug them into computer screens where they'll complete some form of narrow curriculum for which they will earn a meaningless high school degree. This, however, will produce higher graduation rates, and will trick the masses.
Once graduated, these offspring are funneled to some sort of college -- which, in many circumstances, they won't complete. But by then these young people will already be in varying degrees of massive debt, probably for their eternity.
The tier of people who devised this whole ed reform scheme are hanging out at parties with the ones who produced the global financial collapse. None of these people have a problem with the college tuition increases that will end up creating a new indentured servant class.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/top-ramen-for-life-the-student-loan-crisis/Content?oid=2186386
Things very, very bad, but TV serves as a great distraction.
So what role to the educational system have in this game? What is it that the educational system can do to help flatten to some degree the social/economic field? We vote for the leaders that tend to create the divide you refer to. Is there something in the educational process that could help the "population" make a better selection in elected leaders? I'll throw out one idea.
Students should be tested on how easily they can be fooled by popular political rhetoric.
we are a nation in steep moral and economic decline. this will have a profound impact on our educational insitutions and our children.
capitalism by its very design will create exactly what we have now. few americans understand this. in fact americans want a purer form of capitalism which will speed up the process of economic and moral decline.
is michael moore the only one out there that understands this???????
and most call him a flake. interesting isnt it when someone tells us like it is we call them a flake. interesting indeed.
Many posters on this site mistakenly believe that IQ and academic ability are mostly due to parental efforts to enrich the children's environment. This is not actually true. Instead science says: genes have the major influence.
Nelson is the headmaster of an expensive private school that caters to wealthy upper West Side New Yorkers. So although Nelson is well acquainted with rich high IQ White students, how much does he really know about poor low IQ Blacks? Here is a little thought experiment, what if you switched the student bodies from the worst performing schools in Harlem with Nelson's school? I predict that the Black and Hispanic Harlem students would still, on average, show very low academic performance despite having the benefit of the prime facility and prime teachers at Nelson's school. With populations that have mostly low IQs, it really does not matter how "outstanding" the teachers are, it is still impossible to get the lower IQ students to the intellectual level where they are capable of truly successful performance in high level math, science, and literature courses.
The Bell Curve is an interesting book. People say that minorities score lower because the tests are culturally biased toward white Americans. But the, why do Chinese, Japanese, and Indians perform higher than white Americans? My personal view (and I hope that it is not seen as "racial" in a intended or bigoted way) for why Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Jews tend as an average score higher on these types of measures is that education and literacy has been part of their cultures a lot longer than anyone else. Most cultures in the world have only had formal education and literacy as a significant part of their culture for a 100 years or less. For most of history, 99 percent of people were farmers, fighters, foragers, or homemakers and now suddenly, everyone is a scribe.
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does..."
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=347&invol=483
"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." 10
"Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. 11 Any language [347 U.S. 483, 495] in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.
"We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal..."
Apologies. Our auto system deleted it due to a flagged word in the quote. I have published your comment.
Best
Jan
Dr. Ruby Payne has done a lot of research on working with students from poverty, and very little of what she talks about has to do with motivating students with test scores. We are definitely missing the boat when it comes to educating all of our children.
The dirty little secret of American "anything" is that those with wealth and resources do quite well in everything (education, health care, recreation, mental health, encounters with the Justice system, employment and job success…) while the poor limp along marginalized and disenfranchised by a 19th century version of free spirited individualism supported by selfish capitalism. This social political and economic system works well as long as the quasi-poor (the middle class) has some hope of upward mobility while poor are isolated and can be kept to a relatively few. Any increase in the numbers of the poor or any attempt to integrate the poor into the middle or upper areas of the social economic structure for whatever reason will, first, be met with violent protest from those most impacted. If the government persists, as it did in education, the long term consequences will be that the problems brought into the system that had been marginalized and isolated will now affect the whole system. So if the talking heads are really and truly interested in solving the problems in the K-12 system they will first have to address the economic, cultural and social problems of those at the poverty level or below.
I would like to suggest the following:who are the best teachers?
1. The child him/herself considering that self-teaching begins with infancy when the young learner connects the cause effect of crying and rewarding with food.
2. The parent when the child is small, OR a nurturing adult if not the biological parents. They are with the child more hours of the day than anyone else unless the child is in a dysfunctional family setting.
3. The peers when the child begins playing and learning with others. They, better than any other people, know the way to communicate with each other.
4. The teachers to channel and focus the natural energies of the young learners to specific skills and tasks.
The more the natural learning curiousity of the child is thwarted by: meaningless tests, grades, excessive homework tasks, disconnection of what is taught and how children learn, the less interest many children will have in learning unless supported by parents, other influential figures, and peers.
5. Finally, the cultural values of the society help reinforce the "industrial model" school system to make it tolerable.
Actually, the way we are forced to teach makes the most resourceful young learners find ways to learn DESPITE the educational system rather than because of it.