Union Trib--Parents are Difference in Test Scores

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/editorial1/20070819-9999-lz1ed19top.html

Parents are the difference in test scores

UNION-TRIBUNE

August 19, 2007

The long-noted achievement gap in academic test 
scores of black and Latino students and the 
scores of white and Asian students persists. So 
does research to explain the gap in hopes of 
whittling it. Research also shows what doesn't 
explain the gap. Yet most educators persistently 
champion programs that don't work.

Ten years ago, two Harvard political scientists, 
Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, found 
that the achievement gap, although significantly 
narrowed since 1970, can't be laid to the usual 
suspects: ?poverty, racial segregation or 
inadequate funding of black schools.? Good public 
charter schools have more recently, and repeatedly, reinforced that.

Last week, researchers acquitted another suspect: 
neighborhoods. Under a federal program begun in 
1994 in five major cities, several thousand poor 
families, most in public housing, moved to less 
poor neighborhoods. For all but a few families in 
Baltimore, the years of data show, the moves did 
not affect student achievement.

Also last week, the California Department of 
Education released the scores of students on a 
test measuring their proficiency in English and 
math. The gap is disheartening.

Proficiency in these basic subjects between black 
and Hispanic students and Asian and white 
students has changed very little. The scores for 
San Diego Unified School District 
middle-schoolers are no less disheartening ? and 
an indication why middle school is prime dropout time.

Again, poverty is not the culprit. As state 
school Superintendent John O'Connell noted, poor 
whites' math scores beat those of 
African-American and Hispanic students who aren't poor.

Other research disputes that class size or 
teachers' qualifications and experience, or 
school readiness, explain the gap. If poverty, 
racial segregation, per-pupil spending, 
neighborhoods, class size, teachers and access to 
preschool do not explain the underperformance of 
most minority students compared with white and Asian students, what's left?

Of all the factors involved, all students share 
only one: a parent or someone serving that role. 
As Jencks and Phillips concluded, the source of 
the achievement gap is the factor government can 
least control: the way family members interact 
and how parents react to academic failure or success.

Parents who value education see that their 
children go to school, listen at school, behave 
at school, do their homework, understand the 
importance of education to their future and 
believe they can succeed. It helps, apparently, 
if parents have had at least a high school 
education. But parents' own education level doesn't dictate their children's.

What does are parents' clear expectations of 
achievement, their demand of it, their conveying 
without doubt and in whatever language or actions 
available to them that their children can and 
will take all possible advantage of the one 
activity that will determine their future: school.