The Thernstroms go on the offense with an op-ed in the Boston Globe that identifies the "educational catastrophe" facing black and Hispanic students today as the "central civil rights issue of our time." Those who favor "the old solutions" - more emphasis on racial integration, requiring masters degrees in education, smaller classrooms - probably won't like what the Thernstroms have to say.
First, the horror stories:
The student body of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools, and a long-established black middle class. But in an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2001, there was not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in number 21 stands for 20, though, was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs.
Students in eighth grade had to be taught what the "2" in 20 stood for, and had to be taught how to identify verbs. In eighth grade.
Here in Massachusetts, where the high school class of 2005 has begun the MCAS testing process, the gap is crystal clear. On the first try, 82 percent of white 10th-graders passed, and the figure for Asians was almost as high (77 percent). But the success rate for Hispanics was 42 percent and for blacks 47 percent...
On the nation's most reliable tests, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), the typical black or Hispanic student at age 17 is scoring less well than at least 80 percent of his or her white classmates. On average, these non-Asian minority students are four years behind whites and Asians. They are, in effect, finishing high school with a junior-high education.
Emphasis mine. Those who claim that the score gap must be proof of test bias simply do not want to admit that black and Hispanic students simply might be that far behind, and I don't blame them for not wanting to believe that. I don't like being labeled racist or uncompassionate for insisting that the problem is not with the tests, but I understand why some of those who oppose testing reach for those disparaging labels and the deceptively easy answers. It is a tragedy, and far from being the result of racial inequality, the disparate education that the test scores reflect has become one of the sources, if not the main source, of those inequalities.
This sort of achievement gap cannot be wished away, nor legislated away. Real changes must be made to close the gap, and many educators and legislators are not ready to make those changes:
...improving test scores will require better teachers. How can we identify such teachers? The scholarly literature shows that neither graduate degrees in education nor years of experience in the classroom have a significant impact on student achievement. The best teachers are those with strong academic skills, as demonstrated by their performance on standardized tests...
Also suggested: Make the teaching jobs more attractive by allowing potential educators to skip education programs, and give better teachers higher pay and more responsibility. Back teachers up in the classroom by allowing them to discipline students and demand respect. Give principals the authority to fire bad teachers and promote good ones.
And drill, drill, drill. The schools that are succeeding in educating black and Hispanic students are ones that "focus relentlessly on the core academic subjects, insisting that their students learn the times tables, basic historical facts, spelling, punctuation, and rules of grammar." In other words, the opposite scenario suggested by most "progressive" educators who have a horror of facts, memorization, and rules.
The idea that students of a certain race, or background, or "culture" cannot benefit from the discipline and high educational standards that educated so many of our immigrants in the past is one of the most pernicious ideas in education today, and I'm grateful that the Thernstroms are speaking out against it.
Posted by kswygert at October 28, 2003 10:04 PM