Good reading today on Fordham’s Gadfly. Fordham and Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch take longtime friend and ally Checker Finn to task—nicely, politely, but firmly—over Finn’s dismissal of Randi Weingarten’s inaugural speech as AFT President, in which she called for schools to become community centers that offer a range of services.
Checker warns that this means that Weingarten and people like me are “abandoning hope for schools that significantly boost student achievement” just at the time that more states are reporting “stronger test scores” in reading and math. He labels ours a call for “schools that do everything but teach.”
I couldn’t disagree more. I care as much about academic achievement as Checker or anyone else in the world, but I don’t see any contradiction between caring about academic achievement and caring about children’s health and well-being….Checker argues that the “‘broader, bolder’ crowd” (me, Weingarten, Tom Payzant, Richard Rothstein, Marshall Smith, etc.) are making an awful mistake because schools can do only one thing at a time–and they must focus on academics first. To the extent that they worry about character, social development, and physical health, he says, they lose that focus and abandon their pursuit of academic achievement. Hmm. Checker, wasn’t it Secretary of Education Bill Bennett who said that “character, content, and choice” should be the three C’s of American education? Was he wrong then? Should he have stuck with the three R’s instead?
There’s more, lots more. And Finn replies that he’s convinced that many—Ravitch excepted—among the “broader, bolder” crowd that “really are trying to change the subject, diverting attention away from U.S. schools’ mostly-woeful academic performance while letting schools and educators off the hook for academic results by adopting the well-worn Rothstein story line about how we mustn’t really expect kids to learn more until this or that other social problem is solved.”
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Robert,
Where did your characterization of Rothstein come from? I’ve read him carefully, and I have never come across anything in his writings that implies what Finn and/or you are implying. In fact, I’m unaware of any signers of the Broader Bolder Challenge that fit Finn’s characterization.
I have the answer: Rather than have the schools do what WalMart does, provide food, clothing, and medical care, why don’t we just have WalMart do what the schools are supposed to do, and at a great price? Yes, I’m serious.
Not my characterization, John, but Checker Finn’s. You can read his post here: http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/#a4537
Rothstein’s current poverty meme started about 2 years ago. see here.
Robert,
You prompted a major change in my practice - wiping the dust off my computer screen allowed me to see the quotation mark I had missed.
KDR, thanks for the link that made my point that Rothstein was using precise language to counter Finn’s imprecision. Rothstein wrote:
“Mr. Finn asserts that good schools are ‘powerful enough instruments to boost kids’ achievement to an appreciably higher academic plane.’ Nobody … disagrees with this assertion.”
He did refute Bloomberg’s statement that “if his New York City school reform program succeeded, ‘a lot of what Dr. King wanted to accomplish in our society will take care of itself.’” (of course, if you define “a lot” as “a little,” then that statement is not absurd.)
Rothstein then showed how the Black White Achievement gap is about a standard deviation, and the most successful of school reforms generally only increase performance by 1/2 of a standard deviation. He reviewed the evidence that the successful schools described by Finn and others “requires that the more advantaged and able of all disadvantaged students be concentrated in special schools. and isolated from the destructive influences of more troubled peers” KDR, you don’t quarrel with that emprically documented fact do you?
He then explains that that selectivity means “students with less likelihood of success who remain in typical schools are also concentrated, and their lower aspirations also reinforced.”
Rothstein even explores Finn’s more fantastic assertions where we increase investments in those left behind schools by a “magnitude of four or five” and that some of the costs could be defrayed by “sweat equity from tireless teachers and relentless principals” thus reducing the increase in investments by 50% to 70% per student nationally. (he was not as uncharitable as I in asking where do you get “tireless” teachers? I work as hard as I can but even 30 years ago I wasn’t tireless)
The real problem says Rothstein is that the Finn, Bloomberg approach suggest that “we need not worry terribly much about serious social problems facing American society.” He then agreed with Pat Moynihan that the Coleman Report is not a pessimistic document because it identified the causes of low achievement and that “many (though not all) of these circumstances were remediable by well-designed social and economic policies.”
Actually, the best of school reforms achieve about a standard deviation of improvement in student achievement which is enough to substantial reduce or eliminate the gaps.
The best interventions can be implemented in any school with any composition of students.
Here’s a question for you, John.
The correlation between SES and student achievement is less than 0.40. This means that the variance attributable to SES is less than 20%. This means that, at best, we’ll only be able to improve student achievement for low SES students by 20% by implementing these social and economic programs you favor. (Assuming that causation actual exists, which has never been shown.) This leaves 80% of the gap still in place after you implement your expensive programs? How do you propose eliminating this 80% remainder?
Firstly,
I’d begin with more modesty and placing numbers in context. I have no personal experience that allows me to judge your statement about the full standard deviation vs. Rothstein’s. I do have enough experience to be a consumer of research, and I have great confidence in the way Rothstein approaches problems, uses evidence, and points us in the right direction.
But getting back to your question, we need to address the “six degrees of separation” dynamic. I’ll say upfront that my understanding of that issue comes primarily from Malcolm Gladwell and the debate he prompted, and although I have a good idea of the methodological issues and the story line, I don’t have the math to judge. (although the evidence doesn’t seem to be too quatitative to me) Social service providers have largely failed in their full goals for the same reason as schools have — isolation. We need to bring poor families and children into networks. My students don’t have dads to teach them certain skills and to introduce them to jobs. This cuts them out of the mentoring that would come from the blue collar job world. I had one Black male last year who had two parents, and he transferred in froma magnet school. Without father, where do you get the uncles, the male neighbors, the coaches, and the rest of the village that helped raised working class kids of my generation. So kids raising kids means kids being initiated by kids and kids not having any way to hook up with the networks that provides jobs, and the skills and the hope that jobs provide.
So our goal must be a learning culture that brings adults of all types and personalities into schools. We must bring social agencies into the schools. And we must bring the students out of the classroom into the broader world. When I hike the Grand Canyon, I see dozens of middle class kids getting a great holistic education. When I’ve brought poor kids to the Canyon they also gained awarenesses of Nature and the world’s cultures that were completely beyond her imagination. They also got to test themselves, their endurance and their ability to challenge themselves.
Ten years ago, when I was encouraging a girl, who I now consider to be my daughter, she said, “Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody has ever encouraged me. My family has just been saying that I’ll can never make it out.” This spring when she took her students from Bed Stuy (special ed students who hadn’t been brought on school trips before she taught there, to Washington D.C. and she brought them into a motel room, she shocked a student by falling into the motel bed. He had never been in a motel before but he knew that you had to show “respect.” You don’t just jump into a motel bed like any other bed. He didn’t know how you are supposed to get into a motel bed, but he figured that there was something special to it.
Finally, like Rothstein I don’t claim to have answers to the toughest challenges except to assume:
a) we need multiple solutions and
b) we could reach solutions if we had effort people making enough effort in an eclectic manner.
The first step is to acknowledge the truth - I would say obvious truth — of Rothstein’s. Almost every success is predicated on choice, and creaming the most motivated poor children and families. That leaves behind a greater critical mass of at-risk kids in the neighborhood schools. I would add to Rothstein the dirty secret that is no secret to educators who are actually in the buildings. When the spotlight is on an experiment, and people have invested their credibility, they will empower school administrators and if they are smart they will empower teachers. But in our reality, that means the educators in neighborhood schools will be more disempowered. And the biggest example is discipline. If the system allows a choice school to enforce its code of conduct, then that just means that neighborhoods lose even more of their power. As my old principal used to say, “they (meaning chronically disruptive and violent students)have to be somewhere and they might as well be in your class.” Assault a KIPP teacher, and the very next day you will be out the door — either to the streets or to a neighborhood school. Assault a neighborhood school teacher, and the full power of the system comes down on the teacher, pressuring him or her to go along. I bet the great majority of secondary inner city school teachers have seen this over and over, and we have all heard the same soundbites. The same applies to grade inflation, social promotion, and efforts to raise classroom standards.
We’re not any different from the teachers in higher performing schools except that they do not have to fight for the right to teach. Put my faculty in the school down the road that is listed as one of the top fifty in the nation, and we wouldn’t miss a beat. After all, they recruit our best teachers every year after they are too exhausted to continue.
First of all, we need to establish what we are trying to do. Are we trying to narrow/eliminate the achievement gap? If so, achievement of what?
If we don’t know what the students are supposed to achieve, then who cares how well they achieve it?
Let’s say we agree on some knowledge, skills, and concepts that students should master. Then “achievement” makes sense. Even there, is “achievement” all that we’re after?
I try not to get all mushy, but I believe schools should have healthy if not warm environments. If students have fond memories of their schools, they will want to continue learning. I base this idea on personal experience, but it would be an interesting study: do school memories–and opportunities to return to the old school–foster continued learning? I suspect so. I have been concerned about the effect of multiple school closings on graduates’ morale. When they have no school to return to as alumni, when their school history has been effectively erased, how does this affect their education?
Large and small schools alike can be communities of a sort—in the style of a “university” or “family”–but to accomplish this, they need some way of countering the destruction in students’ lives.
It is ambitious and problematic for schools to try to become “second homes” for children–but to a modest degree we need to do this. Students need more of a fortress in their lives. They need better nutrition, counseling, tutoring, and opportunity to participate in activities. They need to learn how to build strength in themselves and resist pressure to conform.
It’s hard to see how something like “Broader, Bolder” wouldn’t improve student achievement, be it over the short or long term. But even if it didn’t narrow the gap–but just made children’s lives a little healthier and happier–I would support it. Yes, schools are for learning first and foremost, and should have a strong curriculum to make this possible. But they should be joyous places as well. (I don’t mean “fun” places; I agree with KDeRosa et al. that learning is not, cannot be and should not be always fun. I mean places that give meaning to students’ lives.)
Joy can come from the learning itself–but not when children have their parents’ fights or gang pressures on their minds, or have been eating so much sugar they can’t sit still. Not when the school shuttles kids in and out the door instead of making them welcome. Not when everything is geared toward the test–the results of which many not be available in the same school year! Not when the students wish more than anything to learn an instrument, join a sports team, participate in a math competition, or be in a play, but have no chance to do so, and no support at home.
No critique–not even Finn’s–necessarily undermines the initiative itself. We need to be clear about our goals and conscious of the difficulties and complications. Yes, there are likely some who would use “Broader, Bolder” to escape “accountability.” And there are others who will shamelessly cheat on high-stakes tests. Any plan can be perverted and abused, and we need to be forthright and vigilant.
In this light, I find encouragement in the Ravitch/Finn exchange. Perhaps it is a “schism” of sorts (or, as Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun puts it, a “Clash of the Titans”); perhaps they represent two camps with different sets of goals. But must that necessarily be so? Is it not possible to believe in this initiative, while raising and addressing concerns? Is it not possible to adopt excellent curricula and help students address, overcome, maybe even transcend the overwhelming problems in their lives?
Is this your opinion, John, or do you have some evidence, preferably in the form of a controlled experiment, that shows that providing social and educational services together is more effective than providing them apart? I know of no research that supports this statement.
This has little to do with student achievement. Rather it affects opportunities for those who have failed to achieve.
Again, is this your opinion or do you have some support for this statement?
What’s your basis for making such an assumption? Why do we “need” multiple solutions. What if one solution worked? Would we then still need another solution?
The history of education is a history of people making effort in an eclectic manner. Look where that’s got us. What basis do you have for thinking this will work being that it hasn’t worked in the past?
And if you put the faculty of that school in your school, performance would likely be the same as it is now. This is because neither school knows how to effectively educated the kind of kid found in your school. That is the problem — the teaching. The problem is not the students.
KDR,
Have you ever taught?
No, which is why I base my opinions off of those educators who have successfully taught.
Are you a successful educator, John? Have you ever successfully taught a classroom of typical title I students such that at the end of your teaching the students were performing at levels comparable to their mainstream peers?
If you haven’t successfully taught, why is your opinion any more valid than any one else’s. Any fool can be a failure and express an opinion based on that failure.
KDeRosa — Have I got it right that your claim is that Direct Instruction (or is it “direction instruction”?) will consistently eliminate the achievement gap between low-SES students and their higher SES peers, but that for some reason the education community, despite the mandates of NCLB, is refusing to acknowledge this?
rachel, it’s this Direct Instruction not this direct instruction.
My claim is that there is ample large scale research that indicates that the performance of students can be raised by a standard deviation in language, reading, math, and spelling at the k-3 level by the whole school DU intervention. This would be sufficient to substantially close the achievement gap as defined under NCLB and bring the typical Title 1 school up to the national norm.
There is also also evidence that the increase can be sustained to the fifth grade level.
There is not a failure of acknowledgement, there is a failure of implementation.
Frankly, the problems that Randi and Diane purport to address with Broader, Bolder are much more difficult and intrangible than could possibly addressed in a school setting. The mental health issues facing some of our disadvantaged students are for the most part beyond the comprehension and addressiblity of comfortable, well educated professionals.
And yet, schools can make a difference. Even if they can not overcome all the complex issues facing our students from impoverished families and neighborhoods.
The “schism” between Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch is largely a construct of our ed reform misconceptions and mostly a distraction from the common goal of both Checker and Diane: enabling our children to learn well.
There is no disconnect between quality health care and quality learning. There is no disconnect between supporting families and learning well. There is no disconnect between social services and education.
But there is a large disconnect in assuming that the failure of our schools is due in most part to the failure of our social programs. It is not.
Internationally, quality school systems ARE able to enable children of low SES to learn well. (In great contrast to our schools.) They do not do this with “social services” alone but with a school system focused on student learning.
Should we allow schools to provide social services to those student in need? Of course. It would be cruel to do otherwise. But to assume that these social services will bridge the gap in academic learning is mistaken at best.
Currently, our students are ill served by our schools. Improving social services will not change this. What our *schools* need is a better way to educate our students, not one more reason that they can not do so.