Jay Mathews covers a new book, "Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good For All Kids," for the Washington Post. The book is written by one Eileen Gale Kugler, who is a communications specialist and has two kids who attended Annandale High School in Fairfax County, described as "one of the most successful diverse schools in the country."
Kugler's main point is that parents needn't flee diverse schools for "whiter" districts, but I found myself wondering about alternate interpretations for some of what she reports:
Myth 1: "The best school for my child is the one with the highest standardized test scores."
A recent Washington Post survey of Montgomery County, virtually a twin of Fairfax County in size and demographics, found that children from middle-class backgrounds consistently scored very high on reading and math tests, even if they went to schools with a high concentration of low-income students. Annandale High's average SAT score is lower than that of schools in homogeneous middle-class communities, but that is just an average.
What's this really saying here? I think it's saying that as long as your kids are middle-class, they'll do okay on tests regardless of where they attend school. Isn't this just a restatement of the old "SES is more important than school programs" criticism of tests? Granted, from Kugler's perspective this statement is a good thing; i.e., if you're middle-class, your kids will do okay even if the school test average is low. But this advice isn't real helpful for those who are struggling to reach the middle class, and it isn't helpful for parents who are middle-class but want to make sure their kids attend a school that is challenging.
Myth 3: "The best teachers prefer homogeneous middle-class schools."
Tom Pratuch, a national board certified chemistry teacher, sought out a job at Annandale High precisely because of the range of backgrounds of its students. He thinks many top-flight teachers share his taste in schools.
Is this myth really that popular? I wasn't aware the best teachers were choosing schools based on diversity, but rather on the quality of the students there. If it's a good, exciting, challenging school, I had assumed that the teacher would be interested, regardless of the diversity involved (and yes, a school can be exciting without being diverse).
Myth 4: "Diverse schools can't provide rigorous classes."
This is an especially irksome canard to me, and easy to discredit. Every year in the Washington area I measure the degree of participation in college-level courses of high schools in the Washington area...Annandale has an International Baccalaureate program that provides the most demanding academic experience available in America at that grade level.
Good for Annandale. But is this a unique school? Should parents assume that rigorous classes are the norm for diverse schools? I believe it's something to watch out for, but parents should no more assume that diverse schools are challenging than assume that they are poor.
Myth 5: "Diverse schools are not safe."
Kugler argues that in many ways they are safer, because educators in such schools are very sensitive to the problems of adolescents from different cultures and much better at dealing with them. There are studies showing that drug- and alcohol-abuse is much higher among non-Hispanic white than minority students, and white males are more likely to bring weapons to school than black males.
Again, I don't think that safety is something that can be presumed or dismissed in a diverse school. Any school can be a safe haven, just like any school can be a place in which administrators sweep problems under the rug and refuse to do what needs to be done to make schools a safe place.
Myth 6: "Family beliefs and values will be threatened if we expose our youth to people with different perspectives."
Perhaps this is a myth, but quite frankly, parents should be perfectly free to decide that there are perspectives in the world that their kids should not encounter during school-age years. A diverse school would be a boon to a parent who wants a more wordly child, and if a child can navigate a diverse system while still retaining core values learned from the parents, that's great. But religious schooling and homeschooling are no less valuable for being less diverse.
Myth 7: "Minority parents don't care about the education of their children."
Anyone who has spent any time at all with minority parents knows that this is nonsense, but sadly the notion is still widely held.
Yes, but one reason the notion is widely held is because bad schools use the parental non-involvement argument as a way to avoid blame and postpone making necessary changes. And struggling schools may not be doing the most effective action to get parents involved. Rather than debate whether this is a myth, let's just stipulate that parental involvement and school quality are inter-related, and let's get schools focused on improvement parental involvement, and parents involved by letting them feel more important in their interactions with schools.
Kugler, an adviser to school districts, has many suggestions for persuading parents to take a closer look at those neighborhood schools that seem to be full of slow learners, but are actually taking American public education to new levels of achievement. Read the book and then, instead of asking your neighbor what she thinks, go to talk to someone like Kugler who has actually had a child in one of those schools.
But what if your neighbor had a child in a diverse school, and had a bad experience with it? It's not obvious to me why the viewpoint of this hypothetical neighbor, who is perhaps not in love with diversity for diversity's sake, should be less valuable than Kugler's opinion. While Kugler's advice is useful in that parents should be considering each of these aspects of a school, the fact is that a book could be written from the opposite viewpoint that lists schools in which each of these myths are founded in truth. My advice to parents would be to dismiss the diversity issue entirely, and choose schools based on quality, safety, and good involvement with parents.
Posted by kswygert at August 3, 2004 10:56 AM