Short Course on Some Origins of Inequality
posted by Frank Pasquale
Recently my law school’s clinic “filed a class action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of all parents of children attending Newark Public Schools who are being denied their rights under the No Child Left Behind Act.” BlackProf regular Shavar Jeffries is lead counsel for the plaintiffs, who charge that the “Newark Public Schools district has systematically failed to meet even the Act’s minimum notification requirements.”
In honor of that effort, I’m highlighting a fascinating article from the NYT Magazine by Paul Tough on the challenges facing the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) effort. The article notes that NCLB aims to erase a persistent achievement gap between African American and white, and lower and middle/upper class, students (by 2014). It summarizes two bodies of literature on the subject:
The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.
The “causes” literature is fascinating. I’ve heard about studies like Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods for some time, but the quantifications provided in the article are compelling:
By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.
I’ve heard similar explanations of a new gender gap in academics; social critics claim that boys too often succumb to a “dude culture that demeans academic achievement” and discourages expression of ideas.
So what are the solutions? They involve massive effort, and will test whether NCLB is mere opportunistic “symbolic politics” or a real effort to address inequality.
Tough (the NYT reporter) draws three lessons from successful charter schools:
The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. . . . .Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. . . . . Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.
These all sound like reasonable steps to me, but very difficult to implement. A key question then arises: is the charter school form the only one that can implement them? Or can they be integrated into a public school framework? Jeffries raises doubts about the latter possibility. My own sense is that, whatever the institutional home of successful interventions, I hope that society more properly rewards and recognizes the committed teachers who are making a difference here. One of my cousins taught in a religiously-affiliated school in Watts, where part of her sacrifice entailed not having health insurance–and after a car accident she was stuck in an overcrowded ER in County Hospital for 14 hours before receiving care. Perhaps the Bush Administration should signal a commitment to charter schools by guaranteeing health care for all teachers in them.
Photo Credit: KFUPE. I believe they are standing in front of a Potemkin schoolhouse in front of the Department of Education.
November 30, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Education
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Responses (8)
Rachel Godsil - November 30, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Fabulous post, Frank. Thanks for drawing attention to this critically important issue.
Maryland Conservatarian - November 30, 2006 at 10:31 pm
“Perhaps the Bush Administration should signal a commitment to charter schools by guaranteeing health care for all teachers in them.”
yeah, that’s gonna fly with the teacher’s unions
Maryland Conservatarian - November 30, 2006 at 10:32 pm
“Perhaps the Bush Administration should signal a commitment to charter schools by guaranteeing health care for all teachers in them.”
yeah, that’s gonna fly with the teachers’ unions
Haninah - December 1, 2006 at 9:24 am
A great post, as always. Regarding the NYTimes article about the Hart and Risley study, though, it’s probably worth pointing out that that study was conducted with a sample size of only 6 families, and is apparently considered in the business to be a good preliminary study rather than a conclusive one. See a recent post at another very respected academic blog – UPenn’s Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003831.html, scroll down about halfway down.
By the way, for those interested in the gender-in-education issue, Language Log has also had a very interesting long-running series about popular myths concerning the science of gender differences in language and education.
Haninah
Rachel Godsil - December 1, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Just a clarification, charter schools are in fact public schools. They take different forms in different jurisdictions, but they differ from traditional public schools by being exempt from many of the regulations/obligations placed upon traditional public schools. Often people are confused about the difference between charter schools and “voucher” schools — the latter are purely private, sometimes religiously affiliated, schools that parents can use government “vouchers” to pay for.
Maryland Conservatarian - December 1, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Ms. Godsil is correct and one of the ways charters can differ is in not using union teachers. Hence my belief that anything that can possibly make teaching in a charter school more attractive will simply not fly with those unions…meaning it’ll never fly with Congressional Dems.
Joseph Slater - December 8, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Prof. Godsil did not mention “teachers unions” and in fact, despite right-wing rhetoric to the contrary, unionization of teachers is, if anything, good for student performance.
Indiana University’s Robert M. Carini analyzed 17 “prominent studies” that examined the link between teacher unions and student achievement. His conclusion? “Unionism raises achievement modestly for most students in public schools.”
Specifically, Carini reported that students with unionized teachers scored higher on standardized tests and were more likely to graduate from high school. See Steelman Powell and Carini, “Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? Lessons Learned from State SAT and ACT Scores. Harvard Education Review, Winter 2000.
Maryland Conservatarian - December 9, 2006 at 12:51 pm
…with all due respect to the Indy professor, it is nonsensical to imagine students responding better to a teacher simply because said teacher pays dues to an organization whose main purpose seems to be electing a Democratic hegemony. It strains the imagination to picture my local Baltimore City schools as being even worse off, save for the inspirational presence of union teachers.
Yes, I know Ms. Godsil didn’t mention “teacher’s unions”…neither did Mr. Pasquale…my point is simply that improvements to charter schools such as “guaranteeing health care for all teachers in them” will never get out of a Democratic Congress because the teachers’ unions simply will not allow it…unless we’re in a brave new world where Dems don’t march to the unions beat or the unions aren’t in it first and formost for themselves.
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