Rothstein: Facts "Reformers" Ignore

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

THE FACTS THAT SCHOOL REFORMERS IGNORE
Washington Post "The Answer Sheet" -- January 24, 2012

This was written by Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the 
Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden 
the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- 
and middle-income workers. From 1999 to 2002 he was the national 
education columnist of The New York Times, and he is the author of 
several books, including "Grading Education: Getting Accountability 
Right" and "Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational 
Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap." This appeared on the 
institute's website.

By Richard Rothstein

Education "reformers" have a common playbook. First, assert without 
evidence that regular public schools are "failing" and that large 
numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. 
Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score 
gap between minority and white children remains large. Then propose 
so-called reforms to address the unproven problem --- charter schools to 
escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on 
low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.

The mantra has been endlessly repeated by Secretary of Education Arne 
Duncan, and by "reform" leaders like Michelle Rhee, former Washington 
D.C. public schools chancellor, and Joel Klein, former New York schools 
chancellor. Bill Gates' foundation gives generous grants to school 
systems and private education advocates who adopt the analysis. In 
Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel makes the argument, and in New York, Mayor 
Michael Bloomberg has frequently sung the same tune.

And now, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has joined in. On Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr.'s birthday last week, the governor cast attacks on unionized 
teachers as a defense of minority students against the adult 
bureaucracy. "It's about the children," Mr. Cuomo said. Because of 
failing public schools, "the great equalizer that was supposed to be the 
public education system can now be the great discriminator."

But this applause line about school failure is an "urban myth." The 
governor, mayor and other policymakers have neglected to check facts 
they assume to be true. As a result, they may be obsessed with the wrong 
challenges, while exacerbating real, but overlooked problems.

Careful examination discloses that disadvantaged students have made 
spectacular progress in the last generation, in regular public schools, 
with ordinary teachers. Not only have regular public schools not been 
"the great discriminator" --- they continue to make remarkable gains for 
minority children at a time when our increasingly unequal social and 
economic systems seem determined to abandon them.

We have only one accurate performance measure. The government 
administers periodic reading and math tests to samples of fourth, eighth 
and 12th graders. Called the National Assessment of Educational Progress 
(NAEP, pronounced "nape"), it is less subject to corruption than 
standardized tests now legally required of all schoolchildren.

NAEP samples are only large enough to produce reliable national and (for 
fourth and eighth graders) state estimates, but not for classrooms or 
schools. Thus, principals or teachers suffer no consequences for poor 
NAEP scores, giving them no incentive to steal time from instruction to 
drill on NAEP-type questions.

Not every selected student gets identical NAEP questions. Scores 
aggregate answers from different students' booklets, covering different 
topics from the math and reading curriculums. In contrast, state and 
city standardized tests change little each year; teachers can predict 
which of many topics will likely appear, and focus instruction on those.

Here's what NAEP shows: Average black fourth graders' math performance 
in regular public schools has improved so much that it now exceeds 
average white performance as recently as 1992. The improvement has been 
greatest for the lowest achievers, those in the bottom 10 percent. 
Eighth graders show similar, though less dramatic trends. The 
black-white gap has narrowed little because whites have also improved.

These irrefutable facts characterize both the nation as a whole, and New 
York State specifically. In fact, New York State's black children made 
enormous gains in the 1990s, and much slower gains once the federal No 
Child Left Behind, and Mayor Bloomberg's and Chancellor Klein's 
test-based reforms kicked in. From 1992 to 2003, for example, black 
fourth graders' math performance jumped 22 scale points (about 
two-thirds of a standard deviation). From 2003 to 2011, the gain was 
only 5 scale points.

There is something perverse about using Dr. King's birthday as the 
occasion for an accusation that schools have been the "great 
discriminators" when those schools have been boosting the achievement of 
African Americans at a far more rapid rate than they've been able to 
boost the achievement of whites.

Overall, the national and New York State data are hard to reconcile with 
a story that schools are filled with teachers having low expectations, 
poor training, and complacency arising from excessive job security, and 
the way to fix public schools is more accountability for student test 
scores.

There are certainly ineffective teachers, and schools should do better 
at removing them. But data suggest that this problem, while real, is 
relatively small compared to others we ignore. Here are two: There has 
been substantial reading improvement at the fourth but not eighth grade; 
and no comparable improvement, even in math, for 12th graders.

Assuming systemic failure to justify a frenzy of ill-considered reforms, 
we've spent almost no time investigating what caused these trends. We 
can only speculate.

Plausibly, schools have more influence on math. Reading, especially for 
older children, results more from exposure to vocabulary and complex 
language at home, and to visiting museums, libraries, and zoos, to gain 
context for the written word.

We do know that the verbal gap between middle class and disadvantaged 
children is well established by age 3. We can improve reading scores for 
fourth graders by drilling basic skills, but not for older children 
whose reading depends more on relating text to the world beyond.

Popular reforms, holding schools and teachers accountable for test 
scores, are consistent with the facts only if we believe that most 
teachers work hard to teach math, but not reading. More plausible is 
that elementary schools do at least a passable job, and we should focus 
reform instead on establishing early childhood centers that give 
disadvantaged children greater verbal exposure and the breadth of 
experience that affluent children typically receive.

Rather than spending such energy imagining how schools have failed, so 
we can fix them, we might devote attention to investigating what schools 
have done well, so we can do more of it.

High schools' apparent lack of improvement for disadvantaged youth 
remains puzzling. Here, too, we should consider some factors outside of 
schools, where racially isolated communities with concentrated poverty 
and few jobs can demoralize adolescents. We might get greater academic 
success by creating more after-school and summer programs that provide 
enriching experiences, competing with adverse neighborhood influences.

Systems cannot improve if prescriptions rely on flawed diagnoses. The 
governor and mayor should now step back, take a deep breath, and try to 
follow facts rather than ignore them.

  full version with hyperlinks: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-facts-that-school-reformers-ignore/2012/01/23/gIQABWQRMQ_blog.html#pagebreak